The term Archaic period (750-500 BC) was borrowed from a period in the history of Greek art that art historians in the 18th century called “archaic,” that is, pristine and not yet at the height of its potential, which once attained was called the classical stage of art. The term has been adopted by general historians for the period in which the Greek world for the first time becomes clearly recognizable and in which the beginnings can be discerned of many traits that would come to full fruition in the following centuries. From around 800 BC, the contacts that had been made with harbors in the Near East, especially by Greeks from Euboea and other islands in the Aegean Sea, resulted in a series of innovations in the Greek world: improvements in the technique of bronze and iron working; a new style of pottery painting, where already in the 8th century small figures of men and animals had made their appearance between the geometric patterns and where not long before 700 BC images of plants and trees, animals and humans, derived from or inspired by Near Eastern examples, became common; free-standing cult statues and open air altars for burnt sacrifices; mythological stories, religious customs, and ideas; folk stories and epic motifs; and, perhaps the most important innovation, the adoption of the art of writing in the new alphabetic script taken over from the Phoenicians.
It is unknown when exactly the Greeks developed their own alphabetic scripts, but the oldest inscriptions known thus far date from the first half of the 8th century BC. It is certain that knowledge of the new art was disseminated rapidly and that several local varieties of the Greek alphabet arose. It was shortly before 700 BC that somewhere in Ionia, whether on the island of Chios or on the mainland, an unknown poet (traditionally known as Homer), using as raw material the orally transmitted poetry about the legendary war of Greek heroes and basileis against the city of Troy in Asia Minor, composed his magisterial epic the Iliad. It is possible that he used the new art of writing to record his creation, although this is still debated by modern experts. In any case, soon after its composition, the Iliad must certainly have been put into writing, which, in fact, marked the birth of Greek literature. Homer’s Iliad as well as the Odyssey—also attributed to him but perhaps the work of a slightly later poet—are next to the archaeological record the most important sources for our knowledge of Greek society and civilization in the later Dark Age and early Archaic period. For although these epics as a result of oral transmission over a long period do contain some very old elements reflecting the Mycenaean world, most of the speeches and descriptions in them refer indirectly to the world of Sth-century and sometimes even early 7th-century Greece.
World History
