Greece’s cultural and economic fascination with the more complex cultures of the Near East and Egypt, manifested in the widespread adoption of the alphabet, commercial links, a remarkable amount of mythology, and the revival of large-scale artworks, is so marked that the Archaic seventh century BC is termed “Orientalizing.” Unsurprisingly the most active center is the commercial city of Corinth. It produced a colorful, richly-decorated ceramic style in this phase, “Proto-Corinthian” (Figure 10.2). Responding to the many Oriental trade and gift items which came to Greece during the “Late Geometric Renaissance” and the early Archaic, Corinth’s pottery was traded back all over the Levant and also into the West Mediterranean, especially forms such as the aryballos for scented olive oil (Figure 10.2). Nonetheless Proto-Corinthian vases are covered with images largely derived from the Near East (especially an obsession with plant and animal motifs, notably monsters), even if the bands of design reflect local Geometric traditions.
Analyzing the iconography of Proto-Corinthian vases, Shanks (1993, 1999) found a selective concern for certain images and the neglect of others. Women are very rare, whilst scenes of aggression are remarkably common: predator animals hunt other animals, heroes fight dangerous animals or monsters, and men fight other men. The ethos represented reflects a male-centered polis society where citizen aggression is encouraged, brutalizing young men to form their bodies and minds as killing-machines, ready to take their place in the aristocratic raiding party and later the hoplite phalanx, whenever their clan, or later their polis, demands.
Till recently Oriental influences on the formation of Greek culture were downplayed as opportune interventions, serving merely to stimulate the far richer culture of Classical Greece. Martin Bernal, however, in his influential Black Athena volumes (1987, 1991), argued that Classical scholars had systematically suppressed the degree to which Archaic Greece arose from intellectual, cultural, technical, and even ethnic inputs from Egypt and the Near East. They did this to promote the Western ideal that modern civilization
Figure 10.2 Proto-Corinthian ceramic, fine ware from the final eighth to seventh centuries BC.
© Trustees of the British Museum.
Developed in Europe out of Greek and then Roman culture, owing nothing significant to the stagnant backwaters of Middle Eastern traditions. Eighteenth-to early twentieth-century AD imperial and colonial agendas favored the view that Africa and the Middle East were from time immemorial the homes of peoples destined to be ruled by despots and lacking the spirit of technical and intellectual progress. Such concepts as democracy, independent thought, and innovation could only arise in the advanced city-state world of Athens. Bernal’s ideas echo Edward Said’s analysis of the West’s negative views of the “eternal stagnation of the East” in his classic study Orientalism (1980), a widely accepted critique ofWestern scholarship regarding the Near and Far East since the eighteenth century AD.
Before Black Athena, Burkert’s The Orientalizing Revolution (1992: first published in German in 1984) had anticipated this view. Subsequent to it, several major figures have reacted positively to the reorientation of Classical culture (Morris 2004), to show how many of Bernal’s views are well-founded, and how many cannot be sustained, or are just downright wrong (such as his confusion between Sub-Saharan populations and the people of ancient Egypt, hence the “Black Athena,” cf. Ray 1997). In particular, (Sarah) Morris (1992) and West (1997) have focused on the great debt that early historic Greece owed in religion, myth, and artistic production to the Near East. Archaic elites emulated more complex societies and lifestyles to the East, also including the neighboring non-Greek kingdom of Lydia, partly to dissociate themselves from the culture of their own clients and peasantry.
As for the context of Orientalizing influence, EIA settlements in the Aegean, as we have seen in Chapter 8, were in touch with commercial and probably diplomatic initiatives from the Levant and Cyprus by the tenth century BC. It is argued that Aegean trade partners were a peripheral market for Phoenician and other Near Eastern merchants and colonizers till the end of Geometric times, with Greeks in a relatively passive role. Eastern products were often obtained through diplomatic gift exchange, in which prestige objects from the East were often “antiques” valued for their exoticism in the Aegean. However, as these links grew and diversified, we have more evidence for proactive Greek colonial and merchant activities beyond the Aegean, especially in the LG phase. By the early Archaic, Greeks abroad were regularly encountering major architectural and sculptural complexes in the East Mediterranean and undergoing other forms of cultural absorption. Did the revival of stone monuments, large-scale art forms, and literature represent enthusiastic emulation of these inspiring contacts? Or did such encounters bring the desire to bring into more permanent form lost local Aegean Dark Age achievements in wood or ivory, in the same way as the ground plan of the Greek Classical stone temple is fundamentally a metamorphosis of its Lefkandi-class ancestor in purely organic materials? At the very least, awareness of Phoenician trading systems and colonies throughout the Mediterranean surely acted as a model for the adventurous expansion of Aegean ships and settlers in the final Geometric-Archaic centuries, inevitably bringing the potential for competition and conflict over trading opportunities and colonial territory, although this was to become highly visible only in the sixth to fifth centuries.
World History
