This is a survey of ancient Greek history from the Bronze Age to the death of Socrates in 399 BCE. Along with studying the most important events and personalities, we will consider broader issues such as political and cultural values and methods of historical interpretation.
The Dark Ages (ca. 1150-800 BCE)
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From the course by Wesleyan University
The Ancient Greeks
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From the lesson
Prehistory to Homer
We will start our first module with an overview of the physical and geographical setting for our class – “the Greek world.” Then we will move rapidly across many centuries, beginning with two Bronze Age civilizations: Minoan on the island of Crete, and Mycenaean on the mainland. Our evidence for both of these is almost purely archaeological, and so you can consider the ways scholars have interpreted material remains to build a picture of how the societies were structured. After the collapse of Mycenaean civilization, there followed the so-called Dark Ages. These four centuries pose for us the challenge of reconstructing what happened during a long period that has left relatively little evidence. We will conclude this module with an all too brief consideration of the two magnificent Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, whose stories and heroes became essential elements in Greek cultural identity.
Meet the Instructors
Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, PhDProfessor
Classical Studies
As we were saying at the end of last lecture, Mycenaean civilization collapsed
rapidly and systemically. One site after another on the mainland
show signs of pillaging and burning. Who did it?
What caused this collapse? They're any number of theories.
We're now back to our site at Mycenae, we will look at this for a little bit.
But scholars have suggested any number of possibilities as to what might have
happened and what, what created this drastic change.
One possibility is climatic, that there was an enormous drought.
So, what we have to do is we have to explain why this happened over a
relatively broad area at about the same time.
You have to find an explanation that is, that goes beyond just simply one place
that might have been knocked over by a neighbor.
So, one possibility is drought. Another possibility, and we talked about
this a little bit in connection with the Minoans as well, is internal revolt.
But that seems a little less likely just because, how would you have this in one
sight after another? You don't have a sort of unified
proletariat at this time. Another possibility is economic
disruption. This period, around 1200 BCE, is a time of
tremendous stress in the entire eastern Mediterranean.
There are records from the Levant and elsewhere that talk about the arrival of
the sea people, and that clearly they're making trouble.
Economic disruption would have taken the form of a break in those systems of trade
among the elite that we were talking about a little bit.
And some scholars have said that the economy was so fragile, so to speak, that
when those networks were disrupted, everything else went smash.
Another possibility is invasion. It's been shown that when people of a
somewhat less developed culture invade people of a more developed culture, the
invaders don't tend to leave many traces of their presence, except for the
destruction that they cause. It's another possibility or it might be
some combination of all of these. There used to be a theory called the
Dorian Invasion, that is, that people swept in from the north, wrecked the
Mycenaean sides. This is based largely on one passage in
the historian Thucydides, and it has only one big problem with it.
There's no evidence. It's been abandoned.
There's a wonderful theory, it was so neat.
It worked perfectly as a story. Nobody really much believes it anymore.
So, you have to figure out for yourselves, we'll have to figure out for ourselves,
why this collapse occurred. But, we can be absolutely certain of one
thing. And that is that it did occur.
There's another question, kind of connected with that, which is, why did it
last so long? If you think of the collapse of the
Mycenaean society as occurring at around 1150, it stays depressed.
Stays dark for almost 300 years. That's a very long time.
One explanation that's been offered is that Mycenae, of course, was dependent on
it's agriculture. You've seen what the site is like and what
many of these sites are like, that is on the top of fairly steep hills.
In order to do agriculture in such an area, you have to do terracing.
You have to cut into the side of the hills and create flat places where olives,
grapes and grain, vegetables, etc., can be grown.
This is an image from modern, modern day Italy, giving you some idea of what this
might have looked like. But terraces require an enourmous amount
of labour to construct and they require constant maintenance.
Once the society had been, so to speak, beheaded and the inhabitants either killed
or dispersed, if animals got loose as they certainly did on the terraces, they would
quickly wear them down. Even though there's not a great deal of
rainfall, that would have contributed to the erosion as well.
So that it would have become very, very difficult, indeed impossible, to do the
kind of intensive agriculture that you needed to support a community, as in one
of those citadels. Another explanation is societal, and that
is control of fertility. We have to think now of what life might
have been like at this time, small groups moving from place to place.
I'll come back with, come back to this in a moment or two.
But for groups like that, relatively small populations are actually beneficial.
They help with survival, fewer mouths to feed.
And so, the control of female fertility, for example, by waiting for girls to get
somewhat older before they can be married off and start having children of their
own. This may be another reason that this that
the Dark Ages lasted so long. What we know is that the effects were
devastating. There was a tremendous drop in population.
We can tell this from the number of graves.
Gravesites become fewer and much farther between.
We'll come back to this as well in a little while.
You remember all that beautiful gold work that we saw in the extraordinary metal
work as in the inlaid dagger and the like? It stops.
There's no support for this anymore. The craftsmen who had been working for the
elite, those folks who had themselves buried in the great beehive tombs, had no
one to work for anymore. And the technology simply dropped away, as
did international trade. It used to be that Mycenaean artifacts
were found all over the eastern Mediterranean, it stopped.
Not even much pottery. Pottery continues to be made, of course,
but not even much pottery is found. Those trade networks that had grown up
collapsed, disentgrated. This one other thing that goes missing as
well, although it's suprising, and that is literacy.
The Mycenaean linear B had been, it's a fairly clumsy form.
It's 87 characters. It takes a while to memorize.
It had been used almost exclusively, as I have said, to record the contents of the
storehouses and warehouses of the citadels.
When those were emptied, the technology that was used to record their contents
vanished. It had been restricted to a very small
number of scribes and they simply had no work anymore.
It's always a little bit tough to talk about culture decline.
Makes one a little bit uneasy. But in this instance, I think it is
unmistakable that we are seeing a massive systemic decline, and I've used the word
several times now, collapse. So, what was life like after this?
Well, it continued certainly. You might have had small groups of
squatters in the once great citadel. But the image that we have is largely of
small groups living a kind of semi-nomadic existence.
Perhaps, staying in a place just long enough to grow a few crops maybe for one
or two planting seasons, and then moving on.
Subsistence agriculture, and life in the ruins.
It's not to say, again, that activity stopped completely.
It's at this time, around 1000 BCE, that the Greeks start to shift population from
the mainland across the islands to the coast of Asia Minor, modern day Turkey,
which was then called Ionia, we've mentioned this before.
And that theory that I was talking about a couple of minutes ago about the Dorian
invasion, see this is, it was so tidy. The Dorians sweep in from the north.
They boot the Ionians out. The Ionians go eastward.
It's lovely. No evidence.
There must have been some displacement of populations, but we cannot think of this
as an organized invasion and migration. Instead, small groups, one by one, made
their way across this chain of islands and established their communities here.
Another thing that happens is, surprisingly, an advance in technology and
that is we're going to, what we're seeing is the shift from the bronze age to the
iron age. Iron is much harder in every sense of the
term. It's physically more durable, It's harder
to find, it's harder to work. I put this map up because one of the most
important iron age sites is way over in the east Mediterranean on the island of
Cyprus. The Greeks made this long voyage over here
to get iron. One sign of, that's still relatively
recent, we can see in Homer, about whom we'll be talking much more in the next
couple of lectures. When Achilles offers prizes at the games
for the funeral of his beloved companion Patroclus, one of the prizes he offers is
a lump of gleaming pig iron that will last a man for five years.
And this was clearly thought to be a kind of treasure.
Life, as I said, for most of the people at this time, to use Thomas Hobbe's famous
expression, was probably solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
But then, somehow there always seems to be an outlier.
In 1981, archaeologists working on the island of Euboea, which is just off the
northeast coast of Attica, here's Athens right here, in a place called Lefkandi,
made an extraordinary find. This is what it looks like now.
Not too impressive, is it? But you have to use a kind of
archaeological imagination to reconstruct it.
In fact, it was a massive burial place. Shaped sort of like this.
It's about 150 feet long, that is about 45 meters, and about 40 feet side to side.
This is huge. Moreover, its construction is very
unusual. There's a base stone course, then mud
brick, and then wood pilings on top of that.
And within this place were found two burial pits.
One of them containing the cremated body of a male with an iron spear, along with
the buried body of a female, who had lavish gold ornamentation.
In the other pit were buried four horses, two of which had iron bits in their
mouths. And then, to complete this extraordinary
picture, this was not a palace. This was a tomb, which was constructed.
The inhabitants were buried. And then, it was deliberately covered up
again. It's been suggested that it might have
become a kind of hero shrine for this nobleman and perhaps his wife, who knows,
who had once died. There's nothing like this anywhere else on
Euboea or on the Greek mainland. As one scholar has said, it was some
noble's last hurrah. An enormous, extraordinary expression of
disposal wealth and material wealth material power, domination.
Because as with so much else that we've seen, there were a whole of people without
names who worked on this. Also found there was one of the most
wonderful little pieces of ancient sculpture, a centaur, decorated in
geometric motif. One of the great things about it is that
he has a deliberate wound on his left knee, something the original potter did.
This was incidentally, in antiquity, broken in two and put in two different
places, and archaeologists found it and reconstructed it.
One of the famous centaurs of antiquity is Chiron, who was the tutor for many of the
great heroes. And with that mention of heroes, I'm going
to stop. Because for the next couple of lecture,
we're going to be talking about the heroic world of Homer.
Because the other thing that happened during the period of the Dark Ages was
that there grew a tradition of tales, of stories, told and retold in the form of
poems. And they come down to us as the epics that
we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey.
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