Roots in the Cellar: The Dark Ages of Greece Marshall High School Mr. Cline Western Civilization I: Ancient Foundations Unit Three DA * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • By the year 1000 B.C., the complete isolation of Greece was ending, thanks in large part to the venturing of the Phoenicians, who brought a great deal of near eastern culture back to Greece. • As a result, Greek society was becoming more complex. Pottery became more sophisticated reflecting an upswing in the material culture and prosperity of the Greek mainland, and provided Greek traders with a valuable commodity to exchange for luxury goods from abroad. • Increased trade led to wealth and greater social stratification as a small group of aristocrats began to emerge, who justified their preeminence as a reflection of their own superior qualities as the “best men.” • Their wealth derived from a shifting combination of trade, plunder and piracy. But in dark age Greece, wealth alone was not sufficient to establish one’s aristocratic standing. A great man had also to be a singer of songs, a doer of deeds, a winner of battles, and above all favored by the gods. In short he had to be a hero. * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • As contact between the Greeks and Phoenicians intensified, the Greeks began to adopt a lot of Phoenician technology and adapting it to their needs. This included such things as the; • Phoenician alphabet (the Greeks improved upon this by converting unneeded consonantal symbols to vowels. Homer’s rolling melodies could now be read and recorded as well as heard.) • Artistic and literary traditions such as the epic poem • Designs for merchant trading vessels • As commercial activity increased, significant numbers of Greeks began to move among the homeland, the islands, and Anatolia, foreshadowing a great colonial expansion in the 8th and 7th centuries B.C. • Greek population almost quadrupled during the 9th and early 8th centuries, and this rapid population growth placed heavy demands on the resources of Greece, a mountainous country with little agricultural land. * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • As smaller villages grew into towns, inhabitants of these rival communities came into more frequent contact with one another. Some degree of economic, political, and social cooperation amongst the inhabitants of these towns soon became necessary. However, the heroic values of dark age Greece did not make this easy. • Each local community treasured its traditional autonomy and independence, celebrated its own religious cults, and honored its own aristocratic wise men. • The Greek solution to this problem was the polis, a unique blend of institutional and informal structures of organization. Although polis is the root word for our word politics, many Greeks thought of the polis as less a state than as a social collectivity. • Poleis (the plural of polis) differed widely in size and organization. Structurally, however, most poleis were organized around a political and social center known as the asty, where markets and important meetings were held and where the basic business of the polis was conducted in open air. * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • Surrounding the urbanized asty was the khora, or the “land.” The khora of a larger polis might support several other towns besides the asty, as well as numerous villages, for example all of the residents of the entire territory of Attica were considered to be citizens of Athens. • The majority of Athenians then were farmers, who might come to the asty to participate in the affairs of their polis, but did not themselves reside in the urban center. • Synoikismos (“the bringing together of dwellings”), or synoecism, was how Greeks described the process of early polis formation. It could come about through conquest, or absorption of smaller areas by larger ones, and/or through the slow process of neighboring communities working together to accommodate one another. • What spurred synoikismos is a matter of debate, but some poleis took shape around defensible hilltop forts, such as the Acropolis in Athens, while others may have borrowed the Phoenician tradition of centering urban areas around temple complexes. * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • Greek City States and Government • Comparing Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece • Greek civilization, like Greek religion, was a decentralized affair. • For most of ancient Greek history the largest political unit was the city-state, which they called a polis (plural poleis). • From this word we derive many English words: politics, for the running of a polis; police, a man who serves the polis; and even polite, meaning you have the manners of a civilized person. • But the Greeks did not invent the polis. • You may recall that both Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations started out as competing city-states. • What makes the Greeks unique was that they stuck with the polis long after their neighbors had created kingdoms and empires. • This raises an important question: why? * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • Greek City States and Government • Comparing Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece • Why didn't the Greek polis behave like the other city-states of the period, unite all of Greece into a single kingdom and expand to form a Greek empire? • The answer lies not in political ideals, but geography. • Let us compare the geography of Greece to that of Mesopotamia and Egypt. • Mesopotamia is open on all sides, it is broad and it is flat. • It is unified by the Tigris and Euphrates. • It is fully accessible from all sides. • It is easily unified and easily invaded. • By contrast, Egypt in closed in by deserts. * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • Greek City States and Government • Comparing Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece • It is narrow, it is flat, it is unified by the Nile and it is fully accessible from within but not from without. • This made Egypt easily unified but hard to invade. • Now let's look at Greece. • Greece is closed in by mountains and the sea. • Greek civilization is scattered over this mountainous terrain. • This terrain is inaccessible from within and from without; this made Greece effectively impossible to unify and impossible to invade. • The effect of geography on Greek politics can be seen rather clearly. * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • Greek City States and Government • Comparing Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece • When Hammurabi decided to expand his city-state of Babylon into a Kingdom (and then to an Empire), he encountered no real geographical barriers. • In fact, geography helped Hammurabi. • The network of rivers between the Tigris and Euphrates and the uninterrupted plains of the region allowed Hammurabi to move his troops in any direction. • Yet the same lack of barriers that made Mesopotamia so easy to unite also made it vulnerable to invasion. • Hammurabi's Babylonian empire was very short lived. • The Pharaohs of Egypt did not have to worry so much about invasion, as Egypt is protected by deserts on three sides. * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • Greek City States and Government • Comparing Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece • Yet within its borders, Egypt was very easy to unify and maintain, since the entire civilization clustered along a single river. • Thus, the city-states of Egypt were consolidated into a single kingdom with relative ease. • The kingdom was protected from the outside by deserts, but the same deserts made it difficult to expand the kingdom of Egypt into an empire. • Where the Sumerians built their empires on an open plain, the Greeks were restricted by mountains on all sides. • Where the Egyptians united their kingdom along a single river, the Greeks were scattered in mountain valleys and islands. • This isolation made unifying the Greeks into a single kingdom all but impossible. * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • Greek City States and Government • Comparing Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece • It took too long to move soldiers across the mountainous terrain of Greece, and the seasonal storms along the Mediterranean made naval empires difficult to maintain. • Even the Mycenaean kings, who dominated the eastern Mediterranean for a couple centuries, never reached the level of power exercised by a Babylonian emperor, let alone the absolute authority of an Egyptian pharaoh. • We can see this clearly in The Iliad. • Agamemnon might be king of Mycenae, but Achilles is King of the Myrmidons and Odysseus the King of Ithaka. • Agamemnon is, at best, first among equals - and barely qualifies for that title, being neither as mighty as Achilles, nor as clever as Odysseus. * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • Greek City States and Government • Comparing Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece • Agamemnon may have led the invasion of Troy, but it was Achilles and Odysseus who won it. • Compare the depiction of Agamemnon in The Iliad to accounts of pharaohs and emperors who could freely claim 'I conquered so-and-so' as if they had done so single handedly. • Comparing the Greek City-States • Thus we can see how the mountainous geography of Greece prevented the consolidation of a unified Greek kingdom and maintained the independence of the Greek polis. • Each polis was fiercely independent, with its own customs, its own myths and its own festivals. • With such variety, it is difficult to make generalizations about them. * The Dark Age of Greece (1150-800 B.C.) • Greek City States and Government • Comparing the Greek City-States • Yet there are some things that the Greek poleis shared in common. • For one, they all spoke Greek. • This may seem a given, but many a Mesopotamian empire had subjects speaking half a dozen different languages.