In any general survey of a specific geographical area during a particular time period, there is always the risk that perceptible commonalities will be privileged over internal differences. This is especially true of approaches that are limited to an examination of only literary evidence because the scarcity and uneven distribution of our written documentation results in a sample size that is too constrained to reveal much in the way of meaningful variation while the conventions of literary genre may serve further to flatten out local peculiarities. When we accept that Archaic Greece was politically fragmented but subject to more universal trends in terms of sociopolitical organization, tyranny, or hoplite warfare, we are really only rehearsing a level of analysis that was pioneered by Herodotus and Thucydides and perfected by Aristotle. It is not that this analytical procedure of wanting to see the forest rather than the trees is necessarily flawed, but we do need to take account of the fact that non-literary evidence, which is more plentiful and more evenly distributed, speaks to marked regional variations.
Epigraphy, for example, reveals local variations in both dialect and alphabet - that is, the use or neglect of certain letters and the precise graphic forms that such letters take. Thus, on the basis of similarities in phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary, linguists have identified regional dialects such as Attic, Argolic, East Ionic, and so on. With regard to alphabets, the letter gamma in Corinthian inscriptions ca. 600 was represented in “lunate” form, akin to our Latin “c,” while in Attic and Cretan scripts it resembles rather the letter that
A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE, Second Edition. Jonathan M. Hall. © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
We are more accustomed to call lambda. And Crete and the southern Cycladic islands of Melos and Thera had no single sign for the sound rendered elsewhere by the letters xi, phi, chi, and psi. There were also, however, slight variations within these regional groupings. At Mantinea in Arcadia, original Indo-European labiovelars were pronounced and written as a sigma (s), whereas at neighboring Tegea the same sound was represented by a zeta (z) or by tau-zeta (tz). At Mycenae, sibilants (s) were rendered by the letter sigma, but at Argos - only twelve kilometers away - the letter san was preferred.
A similar picture is presented by archaeological material - especially painted pottery, due to its ubiquity and highly diagnostic character. From the Protogeometric period in the tenth century, regional “schools” of pottery such as Attic, Argive, or West Greek can be identified, and such regional variations become ever more accentuated in the course of the eighth century, especially with the Late Geometric style of pottery. Consider, for example, a Late Geometric pyxis, found at Argos, which was used as an inhumation vessel for an adult female burial (Figure 2.3). Many of the motifs that decorate the pot are common to a repertoire of Geometric symbols that can be found throughout Greece in the second half of the eighth century, but their undisciplined - almost haphazard - juxtaposition on the Argive example marks just one of a series of distinctions from the more focalized designs on contemporary Attic pottery. Again, however, slight variations may also be distinguished within regional schools. A multivariate statistical analysis of 947 Protogeometric and Geometric vessels from sites in the Argive Plain revealed modest, but measurable, stylistic differences between the pottery manufactured at Argos, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Asine.
Many of the illustrative examples adduced in this book derive from what has been termed the “central” region - an area that includes the northeast Pelopon-nese, Attica, Euboea, the Cyclades, and Ionia, along with areas that are supposed to have been colonized by settlers from this region in the northern Aegean, Italy, and Sicily. There are certainly material differences between localities within the central region - in the seventh century, primary cremation was the favored funerary rite for adults in Attica, inhumation in sarcophagi at Corinth, and inhumation in large storage vessels called pithoi at Argos - but in other aspects of burial practices, or in terms of sanctuary dedications and temple building, or settlement plans and house layouts, there are certain commonalities within the region. That is not the case in other areas of Greece. We have already noted (pp. 194-8) some of the peculiarities of Crete in this period. In northern Greece (Thessaly, Macedonia, Epirus, and Thrace), the eighth-century shift in burial practices which characterizes the central region is far less dramatic; the practice of burying the dead in very wealthy tombs, often surmounted by large funerary mounds, continues; warrior burials remain a feature of the archaeological record with no marked shift of wealth from graves to sanctuaries ca. 700; and material cultural styles remain essentially conservative down to the sixth century. In western Greece (much of the Peloponnese, Boeotia, Locris, Phocis, Aetolia, and the Ionian islands), there is a gradual shift of wealth from funerary to cultic contexts but warrior burials become, if anything, more prominent; and, in contrast to both central and northern Greece, there is surprisingly early evidence for cultic activity and investment in monumental temples.
Two points are of interest. Firstly, these archaeological culture areas do not coincide with the ethnic divisions (Dorian; Ionian; Aeolian) that were already in formation throughout the Archaic period. This would seem to validate the view that, while material culture may be employed actively and diacritically for identity claims, it does not serve as a direct, passive footprint of an ethnic group, which goes a long way in explaining why attempts to identify the Dorians in the archaeological record have proved so elusive (pp. 48-9). Secondly, with the exception of Crete, which remained relatively isolated down to the fifth and fourth centuries, the last decades of the sixth century see a visible convergence in material behavior between these culture areas. By ca. 500, there is a greater stylistic homogeneity in pottery repertoires, sculpture, monumental architecture, burial practices, and house design. How might we explain this phenomenon?
One recent approach appeals to “network theory,” a model that has been developed with great success in disciplines such as biology, mathematics, sociology, and information technology. Based on the assumption - proposed most vociferously by Fernand Braudel (1972) and developed further by Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell (2000) - that the entire Mediterranean basin constitutes a tissue of connectivity, a network approach seeks to identify connections between “nodes” to build up a picture of a multidirectional and decentralized network across which goods and information flowed. In such a model, every node is connected, directly or indirectly, to another node, although the intensity of certain flows gives rise to “clustered bundles” or regional networks, while “short cuts” might be forged by episodic random ties, such as the voyages of an itinerant professional. In the Greek case, such networks could be reconstructed along the lines of colonial ties between metropolis and apoikia, transferals of cult and customs or treaties and alliances between cities, and circulation patterns of ceramics, metal items, and coinage. These channels of connectivity, it is suggested, prompted the Greeks to reflect upon the ties that bound them and created a “matrix that formed the basis for collective Greek identity and civilization” (Malkin 2011 : 209).
One potential problem with this sort of network approach to the Greek world is that it may privilege nodes or ties that are already predetermined to be “Greek”; in other words, the results are already assumed in the analysis. Were we, for example, to track connections based on more ethnically neutral criteria such as cremation or sympotic culture, the matrix would look messier and less “Greek.” Nevertheless, a network approach does offer one satisfying explanation for why a more homogeneous culture and identity crystallized in precisely the period when Greek-speakers were settling in ever more distant locales. The question that remains to be asked concerns the pace at which information flows across the network contributed to a collective sense of Greekness. Despite the claim that an identifiable Greek identity was constructed as early as the eighth century in the colonial orbit, a deeper engagement with the evidence seems to suggest a picture more in line with the above observations about archaeological culture areas in Greece - namely, that a full-blown sense of Greek identity was a work in progress throughout much of the Archaic period.
World History
