The Eighth-Century ‘Renaissance’

As more archaeological evidence emerges for activity between 1100 and 800, the traditional account that a ‘Renaissance’ in the eighth century was sudden and unexpected may be challenged. Yet there remains compelling evidence that mainland Greece now went through a period of rapid social, economic, and cultural change. It appears that the climate became wetter and colder in the southern Mediterranean between 850 and 750 making farming more productive. At one level the change is seen in a large rise of population, recorded in Attica, for instance, by an increase in the number of graves (although this may have been due to allowing formal burial

For a greater proportion of the community). Athens may have had 1,500 inhabitants in 1000 bc; by 700 an estimate is 5,000. Land that had been uncultivated since the twelfth century was now being reoccupied. With rising prosperity came a revival in metalworking. An increase in shipbuilding reflects renewed and growing links with the outside world. Greek pottery from the ninth century is seldom found outside Greece. By the eighth century it is widespread in the Mediterranean. Examples have been found at over eighty sites.

In the early Dark Age there had been few resources with which to sustain fine craftsmanship. Weaving may have been important but all traces of cloth have vanished. Pottery, however, has survived. The finest of the period comes from Athens and the surrounding plains of Attica. In the so-called Protogeometric age, 1050-900 bc, the lingering influence of Mycenaean models disappears as Athenian pots suddenly become grander. The diameter of the typical vase increases and decoration becomes ordered and less makeshift. The neck of the vase is decorated with semicircles drawn with compasses to ensure uniformity. This style spread to some but not to all parts of Greece. In the Geometric age, from around 900, and again initiated by Athens, rectilinear decoration becomes dominant (possibly borrowing from textile designs). The painter becomes obsessed with the ordering of space to such an extent that by the middle of the ninth century many pots are covered with geometrical designs, zigzags, swastikas, and borders in an endless variety of motifs. Again the style spreads to regional workshops, but many areas of the Aegean, including Euboea and the Cyclades, are largely untouched by it. What is almost completely missing, however, is any representation of figures. An exception is, typically, from Lefkandi. Here a centaur from the tenth or ninth century has been found, an astonishingly early representation of the man-horse beast that is so common in later Greek art.

It is only in the mid-eighth century that figures appear again on pottery, and then only in one context, the large funerary pots found in the Dipylon Gate cemetery at Athens. In the works of the so-called Dipylon master, who may have been working as early as 770, figures are crammed in between the decorative motifs. There may be as many as a hundred on a single pot. They appear only in scenes connected with death. There are mourners surrounding a body on a bier or warriors fighting in battles on land or sea. The pots themselves are large, over a metre and a half tall. They are funerary memorials in which aristocratic families are using the only monumental art form locally available to glorify their exploits. Although the work of the Dipylon master is still set within the conventions of the Geometric period (the figures are stylized and arranged symmetrically), a crucial step forward had been taken and the inspiration seems to have been the cultures of the east where friezes of figures and animals are found in a variety of contexts, including metalwork. Here is the birth of one of the major art forms of Greece, the dynamic narrative of real or mythical events on fine pottery. The Dipylon master remained a pioneer and his style vanished in about 725. However, human forms reappear on pottery, and this time remain there, from about 700 onwards. (The link between this art and the social rituals of the period has now been made by

Susan Langdon in Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece, 1100-700 B. C.E., Cambridge and New York, 2008.)

Equally important in this period was the arrival of literacy in Greece. Linear B, used for the first written Greek texts, had been written in syllables. Over eighty different ones were needed. In the eastern Mediterranean in the fifteenth century, on the other hand, alphabets had begun emerging within the Semitic cultures of the Levant (see p. 32). Somewhere in the eighth century a Greek community picked up the Phoenician alphabet and sponsored the rebirth of Greek literacy. This may have been at Al-Mina or another mainland site, Rhodes, Cyprus, or Crete in the eastern Mediterranean, or the Euboean trading centre at Pithecoussai on the island of Ischia where Greeks and Phoenicians were mingling with Etruscans and Sardinians. (I was shown an early eighth-century Greek graffito on a shard of pottery when I visited the site in 1966!) There is also the new evidence from Methone, see below, p. 155.

Some uses of literacy are obvious, especially for a society that is becoming increasingly mobile: the marking of possessions with a personal name, the recording of commercial transactions, or the listing of goods. For all these needs a consonantal alphabet is sufficient. The range of words used is limited and fluency of speech is not required. However, in a transformation of crucial significance, the Greeks adopted some of the Phoenician consonants for which they had no use to serve as vowels. ‘Ld’ might now become ‘lad, led, ‘lid, ‘lod, or ‘lud’ The range of sounds that could be represented in writing expanded enormously and could represent any pattern of speech. The examples of seventh-century writing that survive (over 150 examples have been found in Athens alone) show that very soon writing was being used in a variety of contexts, as a mark of ownership, for public inscriptions, in dedications at shrines (overall the most common use), and as ‘captions’ on painted pots. At some shrines writing seems to have been added to pieces of pottery offered to the gods, as if it was seen to have some sacred quality in itself. It also seems that writing, when inscribed on a gravestone, for instance, was used as a means of perpetuating the memory of an individual.

Yet one of the most important uses of writing was to record poetry and for this the added vowels were essential. One of the very earliest inscriptions in Greek, found on a vase originating from Rhodes at the Greek trading-post at Pithekoussai, consists of three lines of verse describing the vase as belonging to Nestor and promising sexual desire to whoever drinks from it. It dates from about 720. Nestor is a Homeric hero, and it is possible that the two great epic poems ascribed to the poet Homer, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were by this time known to the inscriber. Whether they had been actually written down by this date is unknown although it has been argued by Barry Powell (Homer and the Origins of the Greek Alphabet, Cambridge, 1991) that the alphabet was adopted specifically for this task. Powell’s thesis has been much debated but the Greek communities of the eighth century certainly wished to record these great epics in permanent form. It is one of the great moments in world literature.