It was the fifth-century Greek historian Herodotus who defined the Greeks as united by their common culture, religion, language, and customs. He was writing at a time when the Persian invasions had highlighted a shared sense of identity against the outsiders and he may have given the impression of Greek culture as more uniform than it was. In fact, it was within its shared characteristics that the Greeks were able to sustain and even encourage diversity. This was already clear as early as the eighth century. The Greeks had none of the wealth of the civilizations of the Near East but they proved opportunistic and flexible at a time when most of these civilizations were in disarray, with the result that they created one of the more original, robust, and intellectually vital cultures that the world has known. (Two excellent survey books covering this period up to 479 bc, and so the contents of Chapters 9 to 12, are Jonathan Hall, A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca.1200-479 B. C.E., Malden, Mass., and Oxford, 2007, and Robin Osborne, Greece in the Making, 1200-479 bc, 2nd edition, London and New York, 2009.)
The collapse of Mycenaean civilization led to a scattering of peoples across Greece and the Aegean. There are legends of widespread migrations of Greeks from the mainland eastwards, and maps of the different but mutually intelligible Greek dialects spoken in a later age help to reconstruct what may have happened. In remote areas, the mountains of Arcadia and Cyprus, the dialect known to scholars as Arcado-Cypriot appears to be the survival of Mycenaean Greek. In Cyprus the dialect must have been brought there by refugees from the turmoil of the twelfth century. In the Peloponnese generally, the old centre of the Mycenaean world, the Doric dialect is supreme. The legends that the Dorians came from the north to overthrow the citadels of Mycenaean Greece were deeply rooted in later Greek mythology, and the sense that the Dorians were different lingered for centuries. There is little archaeological evidence to explain their appearance and their origins in the Peloponnese remain obscure. The Doric dialect is later found in Crete and across the southern Aegean from there as far as Rhodes and the south-western tip of Asia Minor.
Another distinct dialect is the Ionic. It appears first north-east of the Pelopon-nese in Attica and the adjoining island of Euboea. The Athenians’ own tradition was that the area remained largely unscathed by the chaos of the twelfth century, but,
Even if there is no sign of widespread destruction, there is archaeological evidence of cultural change, in burial customs, with cremation rather than inhumation, and styles of pottery. Iron makes its appearance. In the tenth century there appears to have been a migration of Ionic speakers to Asia Minor, where they colonized the central part of the coast, a region later known as Ionia. From the plains of Boeotia and Thessaly another dialect, Aeolic, appears to have spread to the northern coastline of Asia Minor. The end result of these migrations was an Aegean surrounded by Greek settlements whose relationships with each other must have been maintained by the criss-crossing of the sea by traders, craftsmen, and wandering poets.
One of the most important developments was the emergence of weapons in iron rather than bronze, so marking, for historians, the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. This may have been because the sources of tin were cut off or because the collapse of trading networks saw the end of those ruling elites who had controlled trade in tin. (Copper, the other ingredient in bronze, remained available to the Greeks from Cyprus.) If trade in tin had broken down, then it would have been comparatively easy for the Greeks to have found iron ore in Greece itself but it involved a technological breakthrough to smelt it and so create what proved to be a tougher and more versatile metal than bronze. Iron eventually replaced bronze for weapons and everyday implements as it had already done further east. (The earliest iron technology is to be found in Anatolia and then developed in the twelfth and eleventh centuries in northern Syria and ‘was used to full advantage by the Assyrians, see earlier, p. 94.)
The conventional view of a ‘Dark Age’ that was comparatively stagnant has been challenged in recent years by more sophisticated excavation of sites. The most prominent is Lefkandi, a Greek settlement that flourished on the coast of Euboea, so overlooking the Greek mainland. It is an ancient site with remains going back to 2000 BC. For a brief period in the twelfth century it was deserted, but by 1100 it was reoccupied, and the community remained until about 825 BC when the settlement went into decline. Lefkandi’s wealth, seen in the gold of its burials, came from trade with the east, with Cyprus and the Phoenicians on the Levantine coast.
One of the most unexpected finds at Lefkandi has been the burial of a ‘hero, a local leader, cremated, as was now common, alongside his wife, who was bedecked in gold. They were enclosed in a large apsidal building that was later covered by a mound. The burial is dated to between 1000 and 950 BC and is remarkable for including the skeletons of a team of four horses. Such teams (they are known as quadrigae (singular quadriga)) were always a status symbol as the horses ran alongside each other but the outer two were always trace horses with no pulling power. In effect they were there to show off the opulence of their owners.
The quadriga persisted as a status symbol throughout classical history. When Greek gods, heroes, including those of Homer, or aristocrats are portrayed in chariots these normally have four horses. The Greek games, which, as we shall see, were essentially an aristocratic enterprise, had four-horse chariot races and these were transferred, through the Etruscans, to Rome, where they became a major entertainment in the Circus. Victorious Roman generals celebrated their
Triumphs in Rome in quadrigae and emperors presented themselves in the same way in bronze quadrigae on triumphal arches. Only one full-scale team survives, that now on show in St Mark’s Basilica, Venice. It probably dates from the second or third century ad.
Lefkandi remains almost unique, perhaps a rare settlement where the earlier age of Mycenaean war chieftains lingered on, but other sites are being discovered. The German Archaeological Institute’s excavations at Kalapodi, in Phocis in central Greece, have uncovered a Mycenaean sanctuary that continued to flourish through these ‘Dark Age’ centuries as the centre of a festival dedicated to the consumption of meat, both domestic and wild, and plants. A new terrace of c.950 appears to have acted as an arena for worshippers and a display area for votive offerings. Here the votives were usually in metal, a sign that metalworking was becoming commonplace. On Crete a number of new settlements in the countryside flourished. Typically they used well-protected positions from which to exploit the fertile land but maintained access to the sea so, while mainland Greece was still isolated, they helped stimulate trading networks.
Trade was also stimulated by the expansion of the Phoenicians, who, as was suggested in Chapter 6, may have needed to trade to accumulate tribute for their Assyrian overlords. Their presence in the west is found from the late tenth century. From about 850 onwards Greek traders from the island of Euboea are found joining in. By 825 there is permanent Greek influence (whether from a Greek community living there, or from Levantine traders with Greek contacts, is disputed) at the trading port of al-Mina at the mouth of the Orontes river on the northern coast of the Levant. The east provided luxury goods, textiles, carved objects in ivory, or cast ones in precious metals, as well as iron ore and other metals. The revival in trade can only be explained by a growth in prosperity in Greece and the Aegean itself as conditions stabilized and a surplus of agricultural wealth once again became available. The Greeks may have shipped slaves, captured from the north, to the east in return for their imported luxuries. The most important import of all, picked up probably from the Phoenicians themselves in their homeland in the ninth or early eighth century, was the alphabet (see earlier, p. 32, and below, for the development of the alphabet).
World History
