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.