Introduction

The scholarly view of archaic Attica has changed greatly within the last hundred years or so.1 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, French and German handbooks on Greek art liked to indulge in vivid descriptions of oriental influences on archaic Greece and Attic art. Max Collignon stated that Homeric culture was half oriental, and that the prototype for the buildings described in the Odyssey could be found in Assyria rather than Greece. He visualized the seventh century bc as a melting pot of “Asiatic” influences and “Hellenism” resulting in new pottery styles and works of art (1881: 29-33). Similarly, Ernst Buschor painted a positive and colorful picture of early archaic Greece in which oriental influences reached and changed Greece via two main routes, “via the Greek East (Rhodes, Samos, Miletus) and above all via Crete” (1913: 43).

During the following decades research increasingly toned down external influences as explanations of cultural change. Cultural relations were seen as far more complex and the “recipient” as a far more autonomous agent, actively selecting among foreign values. This line of thinking also influenced approaches to Attica. Explanations for profound changes in social structure - such as those leading to the formation of the Athenian city state - or for the characteristic development of Athenian religion were sought exclusively within Attica2 without looking at the contemporary Mediterranean cultural context. Typically, maps show the Attic peninsula in complete isolation from surrounding islands and regions, never mind the Aegean and Mediterranean.3 Some important recent studies do stress Oriental influences on Greece, but Attica is not their main object of investigation (S. Morris 1992).

The intention of this chapter is not to evaluate the degree of orientalism in early Attica,4 but to remind readers that stressing cultural autonomy runs counter to recent studies in ethnicity which emphasize hybridization and multiculturalism. The older open-mindedness towards “orientalism,” which saw that Attica was almost like an island in the Mediterranean, exposed to foreign cultures from all sides, was in this respect more in tune with the latest research.

For several thousand years, Attica was inhabited by people who lived mainly on its very fringes, in the coastal zones, and interacted so closely with neighbors on the shores of Euboea, the Cyclades, the islands and other coasts of the Saronic Gulf that in the early archaic period the cultural and political “border” of Attica was still a grey zone, difficult to outline. Interaction with neighboring regions also drew Attica into the larger traffic between the eastern and western Mediterranean. In general, this chapter will show the difficulty of defining the region of Attica and ask whether it is meaningful to study the cultural history of the Attic peninsula in isolation. Many major features of archaic Attica - apart from imports and influences in pottery and art - are best understood when Attica is viewed from the sea.