Week 3 - The Dark Ages

• The Mycenaeans abandoned their civilization between 1200 and 1100 BC.
• Most of the cities eventually destroyed.
• Decline of craftsmen (society could no longer support them).
• Lost of writing (reason unknown).
• Without writing, they left us no history: five centuries of mystery.

The Dorians

• Migrations and invasions of a people speaking a dialect of Greek, the Dorians.
• In Greek history and legend, a barbaric northern tribe of Greeks.
• Hard to believe that a nomadic group could so easily overcome the Mycenaeans, an efficient warlike people.
• Combination of economic decline and migrations of northern peoples?

The tradition of Herodotus (5^th century BC)

• Dorians mentioned in passing by many authors. Two main sources: Herodotus and Pausanias.
• According to him: from Thessaly; immigrants to the Peloponnesus.
• Among them: the Lacedaemonians (king Dōrieus).

The tradition of Pausanias (2^nd century AD)

• Achaeans of the Peloponnesus driven from their lands by Dorians coming from Oeta, in a mountainous region bordering on Thessaly.
• Led by Hyllus, a son of Hercules, but defeated by the Achaeans.
• Later, they managed to defeat the Achaeans and remain in the Peloponnese (“the return of the Heracleidae").
• Return of families ruling in Aetolia to a land in which they had once had a share?
• Conquest and resettlement of Laconia, Messenia, Argos and elsewhere.
• Emigration from there to Crete and the coast of Asia Minor.

Modern point of view

• Doric dialect spoken along the coast of the Peloponnese, in Crete and southwest Asia Minor.
• Close relationship between Doric, North-Western Greek and ancient Macedonian.
• Thus, a Doric-speaking population entered the Peloponnesus and displaced some of the previous population there, bringing their own dialect.
• Mycenaean civilization perished in a series of fiery destructions.
• Changes in material culture (iron, new weapons, changes in burial practices: individual burials and cremation) associated with the culture of the Dorians.
• But: no traces of any Dorians anywhere before 1050 BC.
• Then, Mycenaean civilization probably went into decline, and the Dorians moved south more gradually into the power vacuum this created.
• Colonization of islands in the Aegean sea and the west coast of Asia Minor.

Greek Dark Ages

• From 1200-1100 to 750 : sedentary, non-urbanized, agricultural life.
• Many villages abandoned, return to a nomadic life in small tribal groups.
• Migration to the Aegean islands.
• End of writing, most crafts, and of large commercial network.
• None of the great powers interested in Europe.
• This allowed a slow reurbanization over the Dark Ages.

Differences between Mycenaean and Later Greece

• A new world, completely different from the previous one.
• In Mycenaean times: cultural unity.
• Now, major intrusions of Dorians.
• Classical Greece extremely parochial.
• Government:  kings (basileus instead of wanax).
• In a few areas kings survived into the historical period (e.g, Sparta, Athens).

Slow urbanization

• Greeks began to slowly urbanize in the latter part of the Dark Ages.
• This would produce, at the very close of the Greek Dark Ages, the poetry of Homer.
• The action of his two epic poems takes place in the Mycenaean era, but elements of the Dark Ages.
• These poems also define the Greeks culturally, politically, and historically.
• Homer also our almost single literary source which can inform us about the Dark Ages civilization.
• But a contested source.

Homer

• Iliad (siege of Troy) and Odyssey (Odysseus's attempt to return home).
• We know nothing for certain about Homer.
• Poems composed in an oral tradition.
• Not the spontaneous creations of a single man, these poems stood at the end of a long tradition of oral composition.
• They are generally thought to have reached their present form in about 750.
• Based on the date after which scenes from them appear on works of art (fragile).
• What society is portrayed in them?
• Modeled on the Dark Age period that immediately precedes the one in which Homer lived?
• Or does it preserve memories of the Mycenaean world?
• Mixture of both.

Credibility of Homer’s works

• The poems do preserve Mycenaean features.
• Description of helmet made of boar's tusks (archaeologically unknown in Homer's time).
• Only weapons made of bronze instead of iron like in Homer’s time.

Dark ages elements in Homer

• But no knowledge of the palaces, their bureaucracy and economic system.
• Chariots are mentioned, but are not properly used.
• No knowledge in the poems of writing.
• The society portrayed is different from Mycenaean times: no powerful king, only weak leaders challenged by warriors under their command (assemblies of warriors).
• Seems to be a reflection of what the kings in the early Dark Ages were like.
• From wanax to basileus.

Aristocratic Rule

• Around 800, most kings had ousted in favor of rule by aristocracy.
• Wealthy landowners.
• Land, only form of investment, generally passed on to sons.
• Rise of a hereditary aristocracy.
• Over time, concentration of land in the possession of a limited number of families.
• Landowners provided the military force, and eventually threw out the kings.
• They then monopolized political power.
• Increase in wealth and trade.
• Growth of the characteristic form of Greek community, the polis.

The site of Lefkandi

• Archaeological site and cemetery on the island of Euboea (c. 1500-331 BC).
• Seems to have kept its former Mycenaean social structure.
• 1980: discovery of a large mound: remains of a man and a woman within a large structure.
• A heroön ("hero's grave")?
• The grave of a couple who were locally important?
• Approximately 50 meters long.
• Elements in common with later monumental temple architecture.

Evolution of Pottery during the Dark Ages

Protogeometric Style (c. 1050-900 BC)

• Represents the return of craft production.
• One of the few modes of artistic expression besides jewelry in this period.
• By 1050 BC life seems to have become sufficiently settled.
• Resurgence in pottery production, especially in Athens.
• New technologies (fast potter's wheel, multiple brush, compass).
• Style confined to the rendering of circles, triangle, wavy lines and arcs.
• Attic production: the first to resume and influence the rest of Greece (Boeotia, Corinth, the Cyclades, and the Ionian colonies).

Geometric Style (c. 900-700 BC)

• Characterized by new motifs (meanders, triangles and other geometrical decoration).
• Distinct from the predominantly circular figures of the previous style.
• The best examples were grave goods (produced in a batch and more representative).
• Our chronology comes from exported wares found in datable contexts overseas.
• Early geometrical style (c. 900-850 BC): only abstract motifs (“Black Dipylon” style, characterized by an extensive use of black varnish).
• Middle Geometrical (c. 850-770 BC): figurative decoration makes its appearance.
• Initially identical bands of animals.
• The decoration becomes complicated and increasingly ornate (“horror vacui”, “fear of empty spaces”).
• The first human figures appear around 770 BC (abstract style).
• Best known representations: on the vases found in Dipylon (cemetery of Athens):
• Processions of chariots or warriors or of the funerary scenes:
  • πρόθεσις / prothesis (exposure and lamentation of dead)
  • ἐκφορά / ekphorá (transport of the coffin to the cemetery).
• Late Geometric (c. 770-700 BC): Apparition of mythological scenes.
• Moment when Homer codifies the traditions of Trojan cycle in the Iliad and the Odyssey?
• Lastly, local schools appear in Greece, which part from the Attic style.
• End of the Geometric period in Athens (c.700BC): Orientalizing period known as Protoattic.