Greece: The Dark Ages

lecture/dwG1T/the-dark-ages-ca-1150-800-bce

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• • Mycenaean Civilization (ca. 1500-1150 BCE)

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  • The Dark Ages (ca. 1150-800 BCE)

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The Dark Ages (ca. 1150-800 BCE)

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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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