"We
shall return to the place where we began... and know it for the first
time." – T S Eliot
When
it was mostly over, the people who were still alive were huddled on hilltops.
What
had happened? The clues found in one place seem belied by the lack of clues in
another, and taken together, what has been dug up, drawn, categorized, photographed,
measured, preserved, inspected and reported from that time - after more than a
century of digging - only perpetuates argument.
Archaeologists
examine structures and inventories. Historians survey the evidence, peer into
the words written centuries later for any vestige of an explanation because
there are no words written from that time to settle the quandary. No one wrote
anything down. They couldn't.
There
had been those long ago who could read and write, but they were gone. The
memory of them, the memory of writing itself, was gone.
It
was not as if all their forebears could read and write. There had been scribes
for that who had served the palaces that were now empty or completely
destroyed. But it is from that discovered and (in 1952) deciphered writing that
we know something of what was lost and what was not. When the palaces
disappeared what was left were the traditions and stories, gods and goddesses,
some of which survived and some of which did not, but all of which were
completely reliant on word of mouth around fires in these lonely places shut
off from one another. This was a time when centuries of progress suddenly had
halted. Ahead lay centuries of rebuilding. And it was not only this rocky
mountainous place that had suffered.
The
clues cluster around the decades before and after 1200 BC with the collapse of
Mycenae, the seat of kings; the burning of Thebes and the sudden disappearance
of Greek trade across the seas that had been expanding since the Neolithic Age 3,000
years before. By this time the Great Pyramid was already 1,800 years old.
Around
the eastern Mediterranean there are similar signs of collapse. The Hittite
Empire, challenger to Egypt itself; the palaces of Minoan Crete; the expanding
web of Phoenecian merchants across the waters as far as the Black Sea and North
Africa; all of it was simply gone or so stunted as to present a picture based
not on evidence but on its sudden disappearance. It seems as if the only
kingdom left standing at all was Egypt and Egypt itself was weakened, near
mortally wounded.
The
Bronze Age was over and in its place the Iron Age was hardly a shadow of what
had once been. But in this place where mountains and the sea confined and
divided these last outposts of survivors, the devastation was especially
severe.
This
was the beginning of the Dark Age of Greece.
But
it is a focus of so much curiosity because of what happened afterwards.
Classical Greece, the Age of Pericles and Socrates and Plato, Aristotle, the
Battles of Marathon and Salamis, Thermopylae and Plataea, and the rise of
Alexander the Great, all of these did not spring like Athena fully developed
from the head of Zeus. So we must begin here.
If we cannot know yet what happened around
1200 BC, we can begin to piece together what it was about this dark devastated
land afterwards that it was able to rise from the ashes and not only that: but
to generate a sunburst of civilized light from a time of utter darkness - to
transform itself from a backwater edge of the Ancient civilizations to found a New
one; to become the father of Western Civilization itself.
This is the implied question for the Autodidacts in
his taking up Thomas and Conant's book
FROM CITADEL
TO CITY STATE.
Which takes us back to the beginning of the Greek
Dark Age. Thence, using 6 archaeological sites, both famous and obscure, they
take us through what can be known about the 500 years that proceeded through the
illiterate darkness to the beginning of the literate which they define as the
real end of the Dark Age. Each site illustrates a period from the mysterious
collapse of the patient to its waking from coma, and then through slow recovery,
as if from near total amnesia, to create a new/old identity.
These sites are, in order, Mycenae,
Nichoria, Athens, Lefkandi, Corinth and Ascra.
At first blush it might seem as though
they are somewhat in the wrong order; beginning with Mycenae, of course, but
Athens is not at the logical end?
And what was Nichoria? Today it is a
hilltop south of the site of Corinth and west from Mycenae. Ascra? Today it is
only a place of farms near a town in Boeotia (north from Athens). Lefkandi, on
the island of Euboea (east from Athens), is an ancient site situated between
two less ancient cities – themselves now mere dig sites - who fought a very famous war over the plain
between them; the plain where the Lefkandi site was, by then, already
abandoned. Well, The Autodidact is game, or at least willing to see what this
is all about and so, on to Mycenae:
The palace at Mycenae must be a
magical place and i should like to see it. The Lions Gate; Perseus, Agamemnon
and Iphigenia, Menelaus and Helen; the Trojan War, Clytemnestra and Elektra; a
horror story of wars, regicide, infanticide and struggles for power, with the
great overseas expedition of war against Troy, a war over which even the gods
became divided. With all this bad karma, Mycenae itself fell into decline. These
stories are what drove men in the 19th Century to seek it out and dig it up and
the world was astonished to find that the stories had some basis in reality.
Mycenae was real.
Around 1200 BC - the authors dwell
only on what can be known, what can be handled and observed -
Mycenae went into steep decline, its fortifications were strengthened
but ultimately proved insufficient - against whom? And Mycenae was reduced
within less than century to just another hilltop enclave of shepherds, hunters
and gatherers eking out a living in a place whose archaic stories would,
nevertheless, continue to be told even after more than 3,000 years.
The collapse of Mycenae is evident but
it is also here a metaphor of what happened in the rest of Greece. For quite a
while it was generally supposed that there had been an invasion called the
Dorian Invasion; peoples from what is now the Balkans or even from beyond
there, who swept down burning and looting in a maelstrom of havoc and
destruction, but the evidence from across Greece does not seem to bear this up
completely. If it was an invasion, it took awhile. Not everything was burned to
the ground, some places were left standing. But it is still agreed that,
whatever it was, it affected all of Greece in a general collapse that left the
survivors on their hilltops without organization except what they could build
for themselves; with each place left to redevelop its own brand of politics –
the word sprung from the Greek polis
which connotes a locality unto itself with its own structure and its own way of
doing things. And one of these places was Nichoria.
Nichoria was such a hilltop. The digs
there have uncovered a slowly reorganizing community that may have devolved with
the fall of Mycenae into just a seasonally occupied place between 1100 and 1000
BC. It was a gathering of a few families or groups of families. The site
illustrates that in the early Dark Age community was not necessarily formed
from trade or agriculture, but from defensible positions with available water
and woods and fields where people could scrounge food during the day and
retreat back uphill at night.
What is interesting is what it tells
us about the origins of such Greek poleis
after the fall of the great Bronze Age kingdoms. There were huts, then there
were some wooden buildings larger than one would need for a single family
unless that family was predominant, and there are signs of religious rituals:
animal bones and hearths suggesting more than just your basic diningroom.
Nichoria is the bridge of survival between Mycenae and the other sites; a place
where the nadir of the Dark Age was lived out by wandering groups looking for a
safe place after their traditional "digs" had been destroyed. But
there were other places that do not show signs of destruction, though they do
show signs of severe depopulation.
Such a place was Athens. The story
here picks up in the years around 1000 BC. The archaeological finds show
continued settlement right through from before the collapse of the Mycenaean
kingdoms. It isn't hard to see why. One need only look at the Acropolis which
predominates the skyline even of the modern sprawl surrounding it. For invaders
looking for loot and some vicious fun, there would have been a whole lot of
easier places to overrun.
By the late 11th and into the 10th
century BC Athens was in fact attracting population. There is evidence of trade
from across the sea in the direction of Phoenecia and Anatolia (present day
western Turkey). But Athens was hardly immune notwithstanding its favorable
position for defense and its access to the sea. Its 10th Century waxing
devolved into its own long waning, though it was never completely abandoned. Why?
By the 9th Century it was suffering the rigors of decline, hardly able even to
control the countryside around it. Things had changed again.
Meanwhile, in other places, there were
opportunities. Populations that had shrunk in some places from the 13th Century
into the 11th, swelled in others, such as Athens, but this may have been simply
through flight from danger. There was no single thread of continued growth in
the Dark Age, but fluctuations that, overall, show slow resurgence, however
sporadic in the short term and in specific locations. These short term
fluctuations are quite evident in the archaeological site at Lefkandi.
It is a site about midway along the
west coast of the long island of Euboea, across the narrow straights from the
Greek mainland and Attica where Athens stands. Lefkandi was burned like so many
other settlements in the 13th Century down into the 11th BC, and its history
after that is spotty. For one thing, there is quite a bit of modern settlement
now which makes digging problematic, but digging began in the 1960's and
continued into the 1980's to reveal a place that rose and fell and rose and
fell many times, and was across the 11th and into the 10th Centuries BC a place
where landowning families held sway. When the landowners were in the ascendant,
the community seems turned in upon itself. Then things change. Instead of a
dull farming settlement, Lefkandi has transformed to a place of seafaring and
trade. Its history is beset because of where it is: on a fertile plain where
other communities wanted a piece of the action; a place of contention and
repeated destruction. But it is not the rises and falls of Lefkandi that make
it interesting. There are plenty of examples of that elsewhere and, even by
Archaic standards, Lefkandi seems never to have been much more than a hamlet by
the sea, but it was from time to time quite a precocious hamlet. Its
precociousness lies in what seems to have happened there.
In the 10th Century there was brief
blaze of trading out of proportion to what had been before. Artifacts
discovered show an amazing increase in foreign-made wares and, more
interestingly, pottery, and bronze and iron wares made in Lefkandi appear
elsewhere, from Syria to Italy. But even that is not the most interesting bit.
For with this trade there was an
evident exchange of something else through Lefkandi at which you are staring
right now. It came from Phoenecia. It was not a warmed over version of the old "Linear
B" language of the Mycenean Bronze Age. That was long gone. It was not original
to the Greeks. They learned it from Phoenecian seafaring merchantmen. But it
didn't require that the Greeks speak or write Phoenecian, instead it was used
to make Greek sounds and then Greek additions were added to that alphabet to
help make more Greek sounds. Originally a means of recording transactions and
inventories, much as the old "Linear B" had been used, and as the
Phoenecians seem to have used it, the Lefkandians and their fellow Euboeans
made a different use of it.
And because of that, it became the
beginning of a new way of transmitting not only records of trade, but the old
stories and the old mythology in poetic form which, in turn, would transform
into something entirely new in times to come. It would be carried across the
sea with the men who traded and, as populations in Greece expanded, with
emigrants to new places. And as they carried it from place to place, so it
carried them across succeeding generations in an expansion of Greekness; Greek
ideas, Greek curiosity, Greek influence.
This expansion could not have happened
had things not got better and, with it, recovery of populations which in turn led
to pressures upon the old poleis
whose agricultural production eventually could not sustain all the people, nor
bear the political pressures of the old established order who owned the land
against the burgeoning pressures of the new who didn't. Something had to give
and it appears that those pressures were first felt and dealt with in Corinth
as it grew into the 9th and 8th Centuries BC.
The site of Corinth occupies an area
that was geographically blessed. Where other cities had to contend with a
shortage of tillable ground, Corinth occupied a hilltop surrounded by it. The polis is situated on the southeast shore
of the Corinthian Gulf which opens into the Adriatic Sea to the west. The
Corinthian Gulf is bordered east of Corinth by the Isthmus of Corinth, the land
bridge between mainland Greece and the Pelopponese, and east of that lies the Saronic
Gulf which opens on the Aegean Sea. In the 8th Century Corinth, like much of
the rest of Greece, underwent a population explosion with the improving
continuity of life through increased agricultural production and the reduction
in disruptive wars. Where Lefkandi's tiny seafaring population may have led the
way in the Greeks regaining their sea legs, Corinth took advantage of its
geography and growing population to trade abroad to both east and west – to
Italy and Sicily, to Anatolia, Syria, the Black Sea, Crete, Cyprus and
Phoenecia in the east – and to export its own people.
Syracuse in Sicily, as well as other
cities both in Sicily and on the Italian mainland date from this period. What
sorts of people were driven to leave by the population growth? Favorite sons,
who might complicate another sibling's inheritance forced to embark for new
horizons; small landholders driven off their land by debt; sailors, craftsmen,
and adventurers with nothing to lose all set out across the water, each for his
own reason, but all driven by the same hand of hope in face of circumstance.
This was not colonization, however, by
any modern standard. These voyages were ventures into marketing, with settlements
to be established where food could be grown near to good anchorages. So, not
only was Corinth relieving population pressures, it was building its own
markets. Goods flowed back and forth. They were also transported from the Levant
and Egypt, and Corinth itself developed an export trade, especially pottery
that seems to have been all the rage around the Eastern and Central Mediterranean
for about a century. It turns up in archaeological digs as far away as northern
Italy in Etruscan ruins, in Egypt, Syria, and along the southern Black Sea
coast. This business was a successful pattern nor was it uniquely Greek.
The Phoenecians had been doing the
same thing already for a long time. The difference, however, was this: the
Greeks were not simply setting up shop here and there. They were carrying their
culture with them and expanding, predominating over the locals among whom they
settled, having babies and raising families, building Greek temples and Greek
cities, holding Greek games, writing and reading poetry in the new Greek
language. It wasn't just for contracts anymore. It is not as if Greekness was a
nation or in any way thought of as united a the time, but culturally Greekness
was congealing. Without the development of written Greek it is arguable there
could not have been a Greece to defeat the Persian Empire (and Greece was not even
united in that war).
There had been Greeks sailing the
Aegean for centuries. Even in the Dark Age, there were Greeks – Ionians – who had
migrated back and forth between Anatolia and the mainland. But now the old
lines of travel across the Aegean were full of ships, and Greek ships were
sailing further afield both east and west. It was, according to Thomas and
Conant, the End of the Greek Dark Age as the 8th Century exploded with commerce
and people. So, why do they not stop with the examination of 8th Century
Corinth? Why do they go to Ascra?
Ascra is, like Lefkandi, nothing more
than a hamlet, but it is not by the sea. It is well west of Athens and north of
the Corinthian Gulf. In the 8th century BC it is just a small farming
community, conservative, home to few seafarers, and that profession is frowned
upon even in the 8th Century, by the stodgy landholders. It is described as a
"hole of a place." Hardly inviting. There is nothing remarkable about
it, no great structures, it was not a polis,
and likely just another small, dull village within the orbit of a polis:
"a miserable hamlet, bad in winter, sultry in summer,
good at no time."
Its location was only verified
recently when someone bothered to go looking for it and there is nothing left
except the ruins of a tower that was built centuries later, but the title of
the chapter about Ascra is "The End Product of the Dark Age."
By the description of the place, it
could as well have represented the Beginning of the Greek Dark Age, except for
someone who lived there, a man named Hesiod.
Hesiod was a farmer, but he was also a
writer. Without him no one would care where Ascra is, nor would this book have
mentioned it. Take it into account, however, that is because he lived there,
and wrote the Theogony and Works and Days, that it is not only
included, but the authors use it as the defining End of the Greek Dark Age.
Though the authors end here, there is
plenty of Pre-Classical Greek time left to 479 BC and the defeat of the
Persians, but that is not a criticism of this book. Its point is to cover a
period that is difficult by its very nature to explain, but they perform an
admirable task in opening doors onto the darkness. They do not overload the
reader with minutiae and hopefully the Autodidact has not given too much away
to satisfy any reader's ongoing curiosity. It is a good read and of proper
length with few words wasted.
And its virtue is this: if you are
curious, they will point you to further questions, but they will not phrase
them for you or give you anything more than what others have postulated and
what others have found.
Which is why The Autodidact recommends
it as he sets it down and gleefully proceeds into the 6th century BC, hell bent
to find out what happens next.
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