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The Greek Dark Ages is the period
of Greek history from the end of the Mycenaean palatial civilization around
1100 to the beginning of Archaic age around 750. The archaeological evidence
shows a widespread collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the Eastern
Mediterranean world at the outset of the period, as the great palaces and
cities of the Mycenaeans were destroyed or abandoned. At about the same time,
the Hittite civilization suffered serious disruption and cities from Troy to
Gaza were destroyed and in Egypt the New Kingdom fell into disarray that led to
the Third Intermediate Period. Following the collapse, fewer and smaller
settlements suggest famine and depopulation. In Greece, the Linear B writing of
the Greek language used by Mycenaean bureaucrats ceased and the Greek alphabet
would not develop until the beginning of the Archaic Period. The decoration on
Greek pottery after about 1100 lacks the figurative decoration of Mycenaean
ware and is restricted to simpler, generally geometric styles (1000–700 ).
It was previously thought[by whom?] that all contact was lost between mainland
Hellenes and foreign powers during this period, yielding little cultural
progress or growth, but artifacts from excavations at Lefkandi on the Lelantine
Plain in Euboea show that significant cultural and trade links with the east,
particularly the Levant coast, developed from c. 900 onwards. Additionally,
evidence has emerged of the new presence of Hellenes in sub-Mycenaean Cyprus
and on the Syrian coast at Al-Mina.
Fall of Mycenaeans:
The Mycenaean civilization started to collapse from 1200 . Archaeology suggests
that, around 1100 , the palace centres and outlying settlements of the
Mycenaeans' highly organized culture began to be abandoned or destroyed, and by
1050 , the recognizable features of Mycenaean culture had disappeared, and the
population had decreased significantly. Many explanations attribute the fall of
the Mycenaean civilization and the Bronze Age collapse to climatic or
environmental catastrophe, combined with an invasion by Dorians or by the Sea
Peoples, or to the widespread availability of edged weapons of iron, but no
single explanation fits the available archaeological evidence.
Mediterranean warfare and Sea Peoples:
A map of the Bronze Age collapse:
Around this time large-scale revolts took place in several parts of the eastern
Mediterranean, and attempts to overthrow existing kingdoms were made as a
result of economic and political instability by surrounding people, who were
already plagued with famine and hardship. Part of the Hittite kingdom was
invaded and conquered by the so-called Sea Peoples, whose origins, perhaps from
different parts of the Mediterranean such as the Black Sea, the Aegean and
Anatolian regions, remain obscured. The 13th- and 12th-century inscriptions and
carvings at Karnak and Luxor are the only sources for "Sea Peoples",
a term invented by the Egyptians themselves and recorded in boastful accounts
of Egyptian military successes.
For these so-called "Sea Peoples", there is little more evidence than
these inscriptions. The foreign countries ... made a conspiracy in their
islands. All at once the lands were on the move, scattered in war. No country
could stand before their arms ... Their league was Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh,
Denyen and Weshesh. A similar assemblage of peoples may have attempted to
invade Egypt twice, once during the reign of Merneptah, about 1208 , and again
during the reign of Ramesses III, about 1178 .
Culture:
From early geometric cremation burial of a pregnant wealthy woman, 850 . With
the collapse of the palatial centres, no more monumental stone buildings were
built and the practice of wall painting may have ceased; writing in the Linear
B script ceased, vital trade links were lost, and towns and villages were
abandoned. Writing in the Linear B script ceased particularly because the
redistributive economy had crashed, and there was no longer a need to keep
records about commerce. The population of Greece was reduced, and the world of
organized state armies, kings, officials, and redistributive systems
disappeared. Most of the information about the period comes from burial sites
and the grave goods contained within them. The fragmented, localized, and
autonomous cultures lacked cultural and aesthetic cohesion and are noted for
their diversity of material cultures in pottery styles (e.g. conservative in
Athens, eclectic in Knossos), burial practices, and settlement structures. The
Protogeometric style of pottery was stylistically simpler than earlier designs,
characterized by lines and curves. Generalizations about the "Dark Age
Society" are considered simplifications, because the range of cultures
throughout Greece at the time cannot be grouped into a single "Dark Age
Society" category. Tholos tombs are found in early Iron Age Thessaly and
in Crete but not in general elsewhere, and cremation was the dominant rite in
Attica but nearby in the Argolid, it was inhumation. Some former sites of
Mycenaean palaces, such as Argos or Knossos, continued to be occupied; the fact
that other sites experienced an expansive "boom time" of a generation
or two before they were abandoned has been associated by James Whitley with the
"big-man social organization", which is based on personal charisma
and is inherently unstable: he interprets Lefkandi in this light. Some regions
in Greece, such as Attica, Euboea and central Crete, recovered economically
from these events faster than others, but life for the poorest Greeks would
have remained relatively unchanged as it had done for centuries. There was
still farming, weaving, metalworking and pottery but at a lower level of output
and for local use in local styles. Some technical innovations were introduced
around 1050 with the start of the Protogeometric style (1050–900 ), such
as the superior pottery technology that included a faster potter's wheel for
superior vase shapes and the use of a compass to draw perfect circles and
semicircles for decoration. Better glazes were achieved by higher temperature
firing of clay. However, the overall trend was toward simpler, less intricate
pieces and fewer resources being devoted to the creation of beautiful art. The
smelting of iron was learned from Cyprus and the Levant and was exploited and
improved upon by using local deposits of iron ore previously ignored by the
Mycenaeans: edged weapons were now within reach of less elite warriors. Though
the universal use of iron was one shared feature among Dark Age settlements, it
is still uncertain when the forged iron weapons and armour achieved superior
strength to those that had been previously cast and hammered from bronze. From
1050, many small local iron industries appeared, and by 900, almost all weapons
in grave goods were made of iron. The distribution of the Ionic Greek dialect
in historic times indicates early movement from the mainland of Greece to the
Anatolian coast to such sites as Miletus, Ephesus, and Colophon, perhaps as
early as 1000, but the contemporaneous evidence is scant. In Cyprus, some
archaeological sites begin to show identifiably Greek ceramics, a colony of
Euboean Greeks was established at Al Mina on the Syrian coast, and a reviving
Aegean Greek network of exchange can be detected from 10th-century Attic
Protogeometric pottery found in Crete and at Samos, off the coast of Asia
Minor.
Post-Mycenaean Cyprus:
Cyprus was inhabited by a mix of "Pelasgians" and Phoenicians, joined
during this period by the first Greek settlements. Potters in Cyprus initiated
the most elegant new pottery style of the 10th and 9th centuries, the
"Cypro-Phoenician" "black on red" style of small flasks and
jugs that held precious contents, probably scented oil. Together with
distinctively Greek Euboean ceramic wares, it was widely exported and is found
in Levantine sites, including Tyre and far inland in the late 11th and 10th
centuries. Cypriot metalwork was exchanged in Crete.
Society:
It is likely that Greece during this period was divided into independent
regions organized by kinship groups and the oikoi or households, the origins of
the later poleis. Excavations of Dark Age communities such as Nichoria in the
Peloponnese have shown how a Bronze Age town was abandoned in 1150 but then
reemerged as a small village cluster by 1075 . At this time there were only
around forty families living there with plenty of good farming land and grazing
for cattle. The remains of a 10th century building, including a megaron, on the
top of the ridge have led to speculation that this was the chieftain's house.
This was a larger structure than those surrounding it but it was still made
from the same materials (mud brick and thatched roof). It was perhaps also a
place of religious significance and of communal storage of food. High status
individuals did in fact exist in the Dark Age, but their standard of living was
not significantly higher than others of their village. Most Greeks did not live
in isolated farmsteads but in small settlements. It is likely that, as at the
dawn of the historical period two or three hundred years later, the main
economic resource for each family was the ancestral plot of land of the oikos,
the kleros or allotment; without this a man could not marry.
Lefkandi burial:
Lefkandi on the island of Euboea was a prosperous settlement in the Late Bronze
Age, possibly to be identified with old Eretria. It recovered quickly from the
collapse of Mycenaean culture, and in 1981 excavators of a burial ground found
the largest 10th-century building yet known from Greece. Sometimes called
"the heroon", this long narrow building, 50 metres by 10 metres, or
about 150 feet by 30 feet, contained two burial shafts. In one were placed four
horses and the other contained a cremated male buried with his iron weapons and
an inhumed woman, heavily adorned with gold jewellery. The man's bones were
placed in a bronze jar from Cyprus, with hunting scenes on the cast rim. The
woman was clad with gold coils in her hair, rings, gold breast plates, an
heirloom necklace (an elaborate Cypriot or Near Eastern necklace made some 200
to 300 years before her burial) and an ivory-handled dagger at her head. The
horses appeared to have been sacrificed, some appearing to have iron bits in
their mouths. No evidence survives to show whether the building was erected to
house the burial, or whether the "hero" or local chieftain in the
grave was cremated and then buried in his grand house; whichever is true, the
house was soon demolished and the debris used to form a roughly circular mound
over the wall stumps. Between this period and approximately 820 , rich members
of the community were cremated and buried close to the eastern end of the
building, in much the same way Christians might seek to be buried close to a
saint's grave; the presence of imported objects, notable throughout more than
eighty further burials, contrast with other nearby cemeteries at Lefkandi and
attest to a lasting elite tradition.
End:
The archaeological record of many sites demonstrates that the economic recovery
of Greece was well underway by the beginning of the 8th century . Cemeteries,
such as the Kerameikos in Athens or Lefkandi, and sanctuaries, such as Olympia,
recently founded in Delphi or the Heraion of Samos, first of the colossal
free-standing temples, were richly provided with offerings - including items
from the Near East, Egypt, and Italy made of exotic materials including amber
and ivory. Exports of Greek pottery demonstrate contact with the Levant coast
at sites such as Al-Mina and with the region of the Villanovan culture to the
north of Rome. The decoration of pottery became more elaborate and included
figured scenes that parallel the stories of Homeric Epic. Iron tools and
weapons improved; renewed Mediterranean trade brought new supplies of copper
and tin to make a wide range of elaborate bronze objects, such as tripod stands
like those offered as prizes in the funeral games celebrated by Achilles for
Patroclus.
Other coastal regions of Greece besides Euboea were once again full
participants in the commercial and cultural exchanges of the eastern and
central Mediterranen and communities developed governance by an elite group of
aristocrats rather than by the single basileus or chieftain of earlier periods.
New writing system:
By the mid- to late-8th century , a new Greek alphabet system was adopted from
the Phoenician alphabet by a Greek with first-hand experience of it. The Greeks
adapted the abjad used to write Phoenician (a Semitic language used by the
Phoenicians), notably introducing characters for vowel sounds and thereby
creating the first truly alphabetic writing system. The new alphabet quickly
spread throughout the Mediterranean and was used to write not only the Greek
language, but also Phrygian and other languages in the eastern Mediterranean.
As Greece sent out colonies west towards Sicily and Italy (Pithekoussae,
Cumae), the influence of their new alphabet extended further. The ceramic
Euboean artifact inscribed with a few lines written in the Greek alphabet
referring to "Nestor's Cup", discovered in a grave at Pithekoussae
(Ischia), dates from c. 730 ; it seems to be the oldest written reference to
the Iliad. The Etruscans benefited from the innovation: Old Italic variants
spread throughout Italy from the 8th century. Other variants of the alphabet
appear on the Lemnos Stele and in the alphabets of Asia Minor. The previous
Linear scripts were not completely abandoned: the Cypriot syllabary, descended
from Linear A, remained in use on Cyprus in Arcadocypriot Greek and Eteocypriot
inscriptions until the Hellenistic era.
Continuity thesis:
Some scholars have argued against the concept of a Greek Dark Age, on grounds
that the former lack of archaeological evidence in a period that was mute in
its lack of inscriptions (thus "dark") has been shown to be an
accident of discovery rather than a fact of history.
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Chew, Sing C., World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbanization and
Deforestation 3000 ? AD 2000, 2001, ISBN 0-7591-0031-4 Chapter 3, The
second-millennium Bronze Age: Crete and Mycenaean Greece 1700 – 1200 .
Desborough, V.R.d'A. (1972). The Greek Dark Ages.
Faucounau, Jean, Les Peuples de la Mer et leur histoire, Paris : L'Harmattan,
2003.
Hurwitt, Jeffrey M., The Art and Culture of Early Greece 1100–480 ,
Cornell University Press, 1985, Chapters 1–3.
Langdon, Susan, Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece, 1100–700 , Cambridge
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Latacz, J. '"Between Troy and Homer : The so-called Dark Ages in
Greece", in: Storia, Poesia e Pensiero nel Mondo antico. Studi in Onore di
M. Gigante, Rome, 1994.
Snodgrass, Anthony M. (c. 2000). The dark age of Greece : an archaeological
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