CHAPTER 3: INTO THE IRON AGE Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bics/article/36/Supplement_53/116/5682337 by guest on 28 September 2021 Chapter 3 brings the investigations of Chapters 1 and 2 to a conclusion in the Early Iron Age. Its purpose being largely comparative and retrospective, it will deal somewhat more economically with the material under review than the preceding two chapters. It will highlight elements of continuity and change in some aspects of the religious symbolism of the Early Iron Age. As in Chapter 2, elements of continuity will be discussed first, followed by a review of some of the evidence for change. For the time span considered in this part of the study, see the Introduction. We are not concerned here to enter into the discussion about the causes of the collapse of the ‘Mycenaean’ civilization which had flowered in the Aegean area during the latter half of the second millennium B.C. It is, however, relevant to review briefly some of the features of social life during the ‘dark age’ and of the civilization which emerged from that ‘dark age’ during the first centuries of the first millennium B.C. A mention of these features is necessary to provide a background to the observable changes in religious symbolism and to provide an insight as to how these changes may have related to the new social structures and economic realities of the Early Iron Age. It will also be necessary in this context to outline possible channels through which we might believe the apparent elements of continuity in symbolism to have survived from the Bronze Age to the Geometric period over the intervening ‘dark age’. 3.1 ECONOMY AND SOCIETY Continuity through the ‘dark age’? Due to the paucity of surviving material goods or enduring buildings, the ‘dark age’ appears to us as a period of slumber in Aegean culture. The evidence of depopulation, the decline in standards of building, the loss in many areas of technical skills and the apparent loss of the art of writing and of geographical knowledge all suggest a deep hiatus after the ‘Mycenaean’ civilization. The sense of discontinuity can, however, be tempered. Snodgrass (1971, 383-5) points out parallels between the ‘dark age’ and MH periods and suggests that certain elements of Mycenaean society (for example Cyclopean walls, palace bureaucracies and large-scale painting) were intrusive features to Greece which came and went: ‘Beneath all this there lay a substratum which we may now recognize as essentially Greek’. There are also other factors INTO THE IRON AGE 117 which suggest channels through which cultural traditions of the Bronze Age could have been preserved during this period. The appearance of the Dorian dialect is problematic for historians of this period, although Chadwick’s (1976b) controversial suggestion that the Dorians might have been an indigenous and previously subdued population whose ‘substandard’ Greek had previously coexisted with the ‘standard’ Greek of upper-class Mycenaeans would, if it were accepted, affirm one channel Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bics/article/36/Supplement_53/116/5682337 by guest on 28 September 2021 through which traditions from the Aegean culture of the second millennium B.C. could have survived into the first millennium B.C. Snodgrass also prefers to see the ‘Dorians’ as intruders belonging to the same cultural milieu, perhaps from the outer fringes of the Mycenaean world (1971, 385-6). The refertilization of, for example, Athenian pottery by a Cypriot influence reflecting elements carried there by ‘Mycenaean’ refugees has also been proposed. We may also imagine that clan structures survived and preserved traditions. The problem of establishing the possibility of continuity in religious practice is a vexed one. The building of later shrines over secular Bronze Age buildings may reflect little more than the visibility of Bronze Age ruins. However, there are several sites where Mycenaean religious activity was followed by intermittent offerings throughout the ‘dark age’ (see Coldstream, 1979, 329-331); and the existence of other sites where continuity must be assumed from the survival of a pre-hellenic deity, indicates that even the absence of ‘dark age’ evidence does not necessarily mean a discontinuity of religious tradition (such as at the sanctuaries of Aphaia on Aegina, of Zeus in the Dictaean cave and of Demeter at Eleusis). The survival of the names of many Olympian deities from the Bronze Age also speaks of continuity of religious tradition, and at an exceptional site like Kato Symi in Crete we can find archaeological continuity from the MM period into the historical period with virtually no interruption. All in all, the picture suggests that channels existed through which some memories of the Bronze Age were able to survive. Snodgrass points to the significance of surviving traditions of festivals which were an important and ancient part of Greek religion, originally not linked with official worship; he suggests that the religious revival in the eighth century B.C. drew not only on Homer but on ‘faint recollections’ of Bronze Age religion ‘kept alive but not on the whole practised’ during the intervening period (197 1, 399). Surviving artefacts also evidently played a role. Benson (1970, 114-118) lists Mycenaean objects found in Geometric sanctuaries and graves with which the Early Iron Age population were evidently familiar. The appearance of contemporary seals in graves and sanctuaries or in use as amulets in this later period reflects a perpetuation of Bronze Age usage, and a long- standing tradition of wooden seals throughout the Geometric era is perhaps a possibility (Boardman, 1970, 108). A continuity of format (for example, the three-sided prism seal) and of graphic motifs (for example, severed limbs and the principle of torsion) can be found to link Early Iron Age seals with those of the Bronze Age. The survival of some Bronze Age motifs (such as the double axe and the antithetical panel) on pottery decoration of the Geometric period is also significant. The identification of Linear B as an early form of Greek indicates a continuity of language and suggests that other cultural features could also have survived. We can fairly safely assume the existence throughout the ‘dark age’ of a textile tradition which may have preserved and perpetuated some motifs and symbols from the earlier periods. Innovations, such as the partial introduction of cremation, were few, and this, as well as the shift from multiple burials and chamber tombs to individual burial in cist tombs or earth-cut graves, was partly anticipated in Mycenaean times. The use of jars to contain the remains of the dead was, of course, not new. All in all, the evidence suggests that there were plenty of channels open through which certain I18 DEATH, WOMEN AND THE SUN elements of religious symbolism could have been preserved during the ‘dark age’. As Renfrew has pointed out, we need no longer see only ‘a few fragile strands of continuity across a great divide ... The process now seems one of transformation rather than of substitution’ (1985, 441). Finley points out that we can assume the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces and fortresses Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bics/article/36/Supplement_53/116/5682337 by guest on 28 September 2021 meant the disappearance of the particular pyramidal social structure which had created them (1981, 61). What was left? Of the structure of ‘dark age’ society itself we can gain only the sketchiest of pictures. Desborough points out that potters were professional craftsmen in this period and suggests that in the absence of money they were paid by barter. Referring also to the existence of metalsmiths, he proposes that there must have been a few communities which we might describe as ‘urban’ containing artisans. After the ‘dark age’ It is hard to draw any clear conclusions about the prevailing forms of social organization in the ‘dark age’. Of the society which emerged after the ‘dark age’ we are slightly better informed. Again here there will be no attempt to present new evidence or new interpretation of evidence but simply to summarize the picture generally painted by historians of the period. From a monarchical society we now have a predominantly aristocratic one. The generally accepted picture is of small independent communities with a small urban centre containing a town square and, eventually, a temple. The archaeological evidence of the eighth century settlement at Emporio on Chios reveals two types of house ‘belonging to two different social classes’ (Coldstream, 1979, 308). The larger megaru are thought to have housed the aristocracy, while the largest is understood to belong to the local chieftain, ‘a concrete illustration of the kind of social system which we would infer from literary and historical evidence’ (Snodgrass, 197 1, 424). The chieftain’s house shared the acropolis at Emporio with an altar and sanctuary of Athena, suggesting that the performance of centralized priestly functions was the prerogative of those in political power, as was the administration of justice. In the absence of written law-codes, this situation left much in the hands of individual discretion, and we have Hesiod’s much-quoted attack on the ‘gift-devouring’ judges of his time. Hesiod gives a vivid account of the farmer’s year in his part of Greece, telling us about the warm smithy where people crowd in winter and the swollen feet of the improvident man, about the 40-year-old ploughhand who concentrates better than a young man, and the problematic sailing trips to sell corn which might be part of the year’s work. He provides less information about the organization of land ownership in Boeotia, although it was evidently privately owned and a man who got into debt could apparently eventually lose his land and become reduced to a dependent status on the new owner.