Today We Are Going to Turn Away from the Near East for the First Time and Begin to Look at Europe. the First Civiliza- Tion of E
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WESTERN CIV. I C Greece: From Oikos to The Greek Art of War Sparta Polis and The Polis Page 4 Page 9 Page 13 Today we are going to turn away from the Near East for the first time and begin to look at Europe. The first civiliza- tion of Europe that we are to study is that of Greece; but before turning to history, we must look briefly at the geog- raphy of the Greek lands. In ancient times, the center of the Greek world was not the modern country of Greece at all, but the body of water called the Aegean Sea. The Greeks settled along the coasts of this sea, including the eastern fringe which is now a part of Turkey. In general, the most important Greek areas were those close to the sea. There was also considerable settlement in the islands of the Aegean. The Aegean area where the Greeks lived was very different from the Near Eastern regions which we have discussed so far. There are no large rivers in the Greek world, so that Greek development was not dominated by rivers as in Egypt and Mesopotamia. Fortunately, rainfall in Greece was heavier than in the East so that desert conditions Mycenaean Civilization did not appear. The country is generally broken up by mountains which form many Mycenae was a citadel small valleys but few large plains. Because of the mountains it was difficult for Greeks palace that included exten- to travel from one place to another by land. This is why from very earliest times, the sive fortifications, granaries, Greeks relied on the sea as a means of getting from place to place. They were sailors guardrooms, shrines and a and traders. few private dwellings situ- This Aegean region was inhabited by civilized peoples from about 1950 B.C. on- ated around the palace ward. The civilization in this early period differed in many respects from the civiliza- tion of later Greece, and I want to consider it as a separate phase of Aegean history. complex. It is among the Bronze Age civilization in Greece is called by historians the Mycenaean Civilization, best examples of Bronze or sometimes, the Helladic. It lasted from about 1600 to 1200 B. C. The name Myce- Age Aegean architecture. naean was given to the period by archaeologists who read their Homer and believed that the first Greek site that they discovered was the city of Mycenae in the Iliad. P a g e 1 o f 16 Until relatively recently, modern scholars had very little information as to what this Mycenaean Civilization was like. The Greeks of later times had many myths and legends about great heroes who lived in Greece in the Bronze Age, but most of these stories were long regarded as fictitious. Then, in 1876, a German archeologist named Heinrich Schliemann decided to go to Greece to look for traces of the Bronze-Age inhabitants. He conducted archeological work at a place called Mycenae in southern Greece. As a re- sult, he found the first important remains of the Bronze Age peoples. For this reason, the civilization is called Mycenaean. Since Schliemann’s time, there have been many finds at other sites. Most of the discoveries have consisted merely of buildings and artifacts, but in 1938, an American expedition found a series of 600 clay tablets which were preserved in a build- ing that had burned down at Pylos. The tab- lets are written in a kind of syllabic picture writing, which archeologists called Linear B script. In 1953, an Englishman named Mi- Bronze Age Aegean Civilization chael Ventris succeeded in deciphering this script, thus making it possible to read the tab- Three distinct Bronze Age Civilizations grew up in the Aegean lets and to identify the language in which they area. The Minoan culture (in an earlier lecture) grew up on the were written. The discovery was important island of Crete. The Cycladic culture grew up on the Aegean because it showed that the language was not islands in the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age, and the only a member of the Indo-European family, Mycenaean culture (see map but an ancestor of later classical Greek. So above). Mycenaean culture the Mycenaeans were evidently one group of was a Late Bronze Age ancestors of later Greeks who migrated into Culture that employed the Aegean world before the other Greeks chariot warfare and fell arrived. during the Catastrophe of On the basis of this evidence, it is now 1200 to be replace with a possible to draw some tentative conclusions new Iron Age Culture in about the organization of the Mycenaean Greece after about 1100 Civilization. There were many different cen- ters of Mycenaean settlement, and they are B.C.. all very similar. Each is dominated by a large fort set on a high hill. Inside the fort is a pal- ace, residences for a few officials, and large storerooms for grain, wine and other prod- Right: A Mycenaean ucts. The fort itself was reserved for the ruler and his aides. Most of the population lived in amphora, ca. 1350 B.C. small crude villages scattered in the farmlands surrounding the fort. P a g e 2 o f 16 Mycenaean Society This suggests that there was a clearly dominant class of rulers who were set apart from everyone else. The graves seem to bear this out. A few Mycenaean families were buried in elaborate tombs dug out of the ground and lined with blocks of stone. They were often buried with gold and other precious items. But most people were buried simply in the ground with a few pots. The 600 clay tablets are all economic records, lists of goods deposited in the forts. But they do give us some idea of what the government was like. There was no central government in Greece extending over the whole civilization. Each fort was the residence of an independent ruler called a wanax. The word wanax, which means lord, is significant in itself. The later classical Greeks used this world only in referring to gods. We also know from the tablets that the wanax was con- nected in some way with various fertility gods of the Mycenaeans. From this evidence, modern scholars have concluded that the wanax was either considered to be a god or appointed by gods. The very fact that the tablets are economic records suggests that the wanax controlled economic life in the region he ruled. The wanax at Pylos, where the records were found, collected tribute from a large area in southwestern Greece – an area greater than any ruled by a single state in classical Greek times. He apparently had a number of lesser administrative and military officials to help him maintain his government. Now all of this ought to sound familiar to you because it is similar to what we saw earlier in the ancient Near Eastern civilizations. The Mycenaeans had a divine or semi-divine ruler, they had a highly centralized government and economy, and a small ruling class. Why it is so similar to the Near East is not hard to figure out, because the Mycenaeans had a lot of contact with the East. They were good sailors, and it was easy for them to trade with the more advanced peoples of the Near East. We know from pottery and other objects that they did trade with the Hittites, the Canaanites, and especially with Egypt. They seem to have gotten their ideas of what government should be like from the Near East. They were far enough away so that there was some differences in organization, art, and religion. But basically they were not too different from the Near Easterners. Collapse of Mycenaean Civilization The Mycenaean culture flourished until about 1200 B.C. At this time, new settlements and burial patterns became established all over the Aegean – especially in Greece. Somewhat later, Bronze Age tools began to be replaced with iron technology. The Mycenaean culture that had dominated Greece vanished altogether. In fact, archaeological evidence indi- cates that around 1200 B.C. civilizations all over the eastern Med. were either destroyed or aversely effected by something, and scholars have come to call that something the catastrophe of the 1200s B.C. Various scholars have come up with a number of interpretations to try to explain the catastrophe. So, we should review the main interpretations briefly. Whatever the cause, the collapse was complete. All of the traits which we associate with the civilization disappeared. Linear B writing disappeared, and it was not found again. Writing does not start again until about 750 B. C., and it is a completely different kind of writing introduced from Phoenicia. The forts were abandoned, and no large buildings or elaborate tombs are found again for about 400 years. Metal did not disappear completely, but bronze tended to be re- placed by a very inferior, at first, kind of iron. Written records vanished along with Bronze Age technology. The period of Greek history from the collapse of the Bronze Age to about 800 B.C. is often called the Greek Dark Age because so little written evidence of the period exists. We will look at this period in a bit, but first, let’s take a look at the geography of the Aegean and Greece because the geography of the area will have a great deal of influence on Greek civilization. P a g e 3 o f 16 Greece: From Oikos to Polis Location and Climate: The Greek world consists of the Mediterranean basin.