Ancient Greece
SECOND EDITION
Ancient
Greece
From Prehistoric to
Hellenistic Times
T h o m a s R . M a rt i n
New Haven & London
Published with assistance from the Mary
Cady Tew Memorial Fund.
Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data
First edition 1996. Updated in 2000
with new suggested readings and illustrations. Second edition 2013.
Martin, Thomas R., 1947–
Ancient Greece : from prehistoric to
Hellenistic times / Thomas R. Martin.—
Second Edition.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical refences and
index.
ISBN 978-0-300-16005-5 (pbk. : alk.
paper) 1. Greece—History—To 146
B.C. I. Title.
DF77.M3 2013
938—dc23
2012043154
Copyright © 1996, 2013 by Yale University.
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This book is dedicated to the students who have over the years asked
questions that continually kept me thinking anew about the history of
ancient Greece, to the colleagues who have so often helped me work
through the challenges of presenting that history in the classroom, to
the readers who have sent me comments and suggestions, and to
the people of Greece, past and present, whose xenia has always
inspired and humbled me, in good times and bad.
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CONTENTS
Timelines appear on pages 15, 26, 47, 66, 92, 123, 159, 187, 222, 254
List of Maps, Plans, Tables, and Figures
ix
Preface
xi
Acknowledgments
xii
List of Abbreviations
xiii
Note on Citations, Sources, and Dates
xiv
Chapter 1: Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
1
Chapter 2: From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
23
Chapter 3: The Dark Age
46
Chapter 4: The Archaic Age
65
Chapter 5: Oligarchy, Tyranny, and Democracy
91
Chapter 6: From Persian Wars to Athenian Empire
121
Chapter 7: Culture and Society in Classical Athens
158
Chapter 8: The Peloponnesian War and Its Aftermath at Athens
186
Chapter 9: From the Peloponnesian War to Alexander the Great
221
Chapter 10: The Hellenistic Age
253
vii
viii
Contents
Epilogue
281
Suggested Readings
283
Index
297
MAPS , PLANS , TABLES , AND FIGURES
Maps
1. Neolithic, Minoan, and Mycenaean periods
11
2. Areas of Indo-European language groups
25
3. Phoenician and Greek colonization, c. 800–c. 500 b.c.
71
4. Magna Graecia, Greece, and Anatolia
95
5. The Persian Wars
130
6. The Peloponnesian War
189
7. Alexander’s route of conquest, 334–323 b.c.
244
8. The Hellenistic world, c. 240 b.c.
257
Plans
1. Attica showing Battle of Marathon (490 b.c.) and
Battle of Salamis (480 b.c.)
132
2. Athens near the end of the fifth century b.c.
150
Tables
1. Examples of words in Linear B script
38
2. Examples of letters from early alphabets
55
ix
x
List of Illustrations
Figures
1.1 Fifth-century b.c. Athenian inscription
6
1.2 Mount Olympus
12
1.3 Neolithic sculpture of a man
18
2.1 Minoan palace at Knossos
35
2.2 Gold “Death Mask” of Agamemnon from Mycenae
36
2.3 Fortification wall and gate at Mycenae
44
3.1 Sculpted metal bands from Nimrud, showing trade
goods and timber
48
3.2 Dark Age model of grain storage containers
53
3.3 Dark Age figurine of a centaur
61
4.1 Theater and temple of Apollo at Delphi
76
4.2 Metal hoplite helmet
80
4.3 Archaic Age marble statue of an unmarried girl wearing finery 88
5.1 Vase painting of trade at Cyrene
93
5.2 Temple of Apollo at Corinth
105
5.3 Vase painting of a wedding procession
117
6.1 Vase painting of warriors
125
6.2 The Parthenon temple on the Acropolis at Athens
152
6.3 Bronze statue of a god
156
7.1 Painting of preparations for an animal sacrifice
162
7.2 Theater at Epidaurus
167
7.3 Vase painting of a symposium, including a hetaira
177
8.1 Both sides of a silver coin (an “owl”) of Athens
193
8.2 Vase painting of a comic actor
209
8.3 Statuette of Socrates
215
9.1 Mosaic scene of Plato’s Academy
229
9.2 Reconstructed head of Philip II of Macedonia
241
9.3 Gold medallion with portrait of Alexander the Great
251
10.1 Sculpture of a queen or goddess from Hellenistic Egypt
261
10.2 Hellenistic statue of veiled female dancer
269
10.3 Statuette of goddess Isis in Greek dress
279
PREFACE
The first edition of this book came out in 1996, as a companion and a
supplement to the overview of ancient Greek history included in the Perseus Project. At that time, before the explosion of the Internet, Perseus was
released on CD-ROM, which was the only medium then available that allowed the integration of narrative, illustrations, and access to the full texts
in translation and the original languages of ancient sources. That original
overview has now been online for more than a decade as part of the Perseus Digital Library (www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/) under the title An
Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander (www.perseus.tufts.
edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0009). As best as can be estimated, it has been viewed online more than a million times from all
around the world. I take heart from that figure that the history of ancient
Greece retains its fascination for many, many people, myself included.
As a policy decision taken for multiple reasons, the overview in Perseus
has remained unchanged over the years. This printed book has now been
updated twice (though with the same coverage and arrangement of topics). It can no longer be said to be a companion to the Perseus overview,
but its inspiration remains the spirit and dedication to the goal of the
wide dissemination of knowledge that has motivated the Perseus team
throughout the history of that groundbreaking project. For this and more,
the world of those interested in ancient Greece in particular and digital
libraries in general owe a boundless debt of gratitude to and admiration
for Gregory Crane, Professor of Classics and Winnick Family Chair of
Technology and Entrepreneurship at Tufts University and Alexander von
Humboldt Professor at the University of Leipzig, scholar and friend and
fellow Red Sox fan through thick and thin.
xi
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Again, I want to express in the first place my abiding appreciation for the
patience, encouragement, and guidance that Jennifer Banks (senior editor,
Yale University Press) has repeatedly given me; her many contributions
have been invaluable. Piyali Bhattacharya and Heather Gold (editorial assistants) were unstinting in their attention to the project, as was Suzie
Tibor in her art research in locating the new images for this edition. Kate
Davis (copy editor) earns warm thanks for her prompt and meticulous
editing to improve the text, as does Margaret Otzel (senior editor, Yale
University Press) for her unfailingly responsive and encouraging work
to turn the manuscript into a book. The honest criticisms and thorough
analysis of the anonymous reviewers aided me greatly in improving the
narrative from beginning to end. My wife and fellow philhellene, Ivy Suiyuen Sun, has supported me from the very beginning forty years ago,
when we began our marriage and our love of things Hellenic during our
first sojourn in Greece.
xii
ABBREVIATIONS
CAF
Theodorus Kock. Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta (Leipzig, Germany:
Teubner, 1880–1888; reprint, Utrecht, Netherlands: HES, 1976).
D.-K.
Hermann Diels. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Ed. Walther Kranz.
11th ed. (Zurich: Weidmann, 1964).
FGrH
Felix Jacoby. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1954–1964).
GHI
Russell Meiggs and David Lewis, eds. A Selection of Greek Historical
Inscriptions to the End of the Fifth Century b.c. (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1988).
IG
Inscriptiones Graecae. Vol. 4, 2nd ed.; vol. 1, 3rd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1929–; 1981–).
OGIS
Wilhelm Dittenberger. Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae (Leipzig,
Germany: S. Hirzel, 1903–1905; reprint, Hildesheim, Germany:
Olms, 1970).
xiii
NOTE ON CITATIONS ,
SOURCES , AND DATES
The term primary sources, as used here (and commonly in classical studies), refers to ancient texts, whether literary, documentary, epigraphic, or
numismatic. To help readers find the passages in primary sources that are
embedded in the text of this book, citations will be presented wherever
possible using the standard internal reference systems of those sources that
are conventional in modern scholarly editions and that are used in many,
but not all, modern translations. So, for example, the citation “Pausanias,
Guide to Greece 4.2.3” means that the passage is book 4, section 2, subsection
3 of that work by Pausanias. This will enable readers to find the passage in
question in any modern edition or translation that includes the internal
reference system.
Secondary sources accordingly refers to postclassical or modern scholarship
about these ancient sources and the history that they describe. The embedded citations of secondary sources contain the name of the author or a
short title, with the relevant page numbers or, in the case of catalogued
objects such as inscriptions or coins, the reference number of the object.
Full bibliographic information on modern translations of primary
sources and on secondary sources can be found in the Suggested Readings
at the end of this book.
Dates not marked as b.c. or a.d. should be assumed to be b.c. Dates
given in parentheses following the name of a person indicate birth and
death dates, respectively, unless preceded by “ruled,” which indicates regnal dates.
xiv
ONE
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
“Most things in the history of Greece have become a subject
of dispute” is how Pausanias, the second-century a.d. author
of a famous guide to sites throughout Greece, summed up
the challenge and the fascination of thinking about the significance of ancient Greek history (Guide to Greece 4.2.3). The
subject was disputed then because Pausanias, a Greek, lived
and wrote under the Roman Empire, when Greeks as subjects
of the emperor in Rome no longer enjoyed the independence
on which they once had prided themselves and had fought
fiercely to protect. One dispute he focused on was why Greeks
had lost their liberty and what it meant to live as the descendants of more-glorious ancestors. Today, the study of ancient
Greek history still remains filled with disputes over how to
evaluate the accomplishments and the failures that its story so
dramatically presents. On the one hand, the accomplishments
of the Greeks in innovative political organization, including
democracy, history writing, literature, drama, philosophy, art,
and architecture, deserve the description that the fifth-century
b.c. historian Herodotus used to explain why he included the
events and people that he did in his groundbreaking work:
They were “wonders.” On the other hand, the shortcomings
of the ancient Greeks, including their perpetuation of slavery, the exclusion of women from politics, and their failure
to unite to preserve their independence, seem equally striking and strongly disturbing. For me, after nearly forty years
of studying, teaching, and writing about ancient Greece, the
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Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
subject in all its diversity remains fascinating—and often perplexing—
because it is awe inspiring. Awe, a word in English derived from the ancient
Greek noun achos, meaning “mental or physical pain,” can, of course, have
two opposite meanings: “wonder and approval” or “dread and rejection.”
I have both those reactions when thinking about ancient Greece and the
disputes that its history continues to stimulate.
Ancient Greece is a vast subject, and this overview, written to be a
concise introduction, necessarily compresses and even omits topics that
others would emphasize. Whenever possible it tries to signal to readers
when interesting disputes lie behind the presentation and interpretation
of events or persons, but it cannot offer anything like a full treatment and
still achieve the goal of brevity. My hope is that readers will be inspired,
or at least provoked, to investigate the evidence for themselves, starting
with the ancient sources. For this reason, those sources will be cited in the
text from time to time to give a glimpse of the knowledge and delight to
be gained from studying them. An extensive list of English translations of
those sources is provided in the Suggested Readings, along with modern
scholarly works that present fuller accounts and sometimes dueling interpretations of important topics, especially those that give rise to dispute.
The narrative of the overview covers the period from prehistory (so
called because no written records exist to document those times) to the
Hellenistic Age (the modern term for the centuries following the death
of Alexander the Great in 323 b.c.). Geographically, it covers, as much
as space allows in a book meant to be very brief, the locations in and
around the Mediterranean Sea where Greeks lived. The majority of the
narrative concerns the Archaic and Classical Ages (the modern terms for
the spans of time from 750 to 500 and 500 to 323 b.c., respectively)
and the settlements in the territory of mainland Greece, especially Athens.
This coverage admittedly reflects a traditional emphasis on what remain
the most famous events, personalities, writings, art, and architecture of
ancient Greece. It also reflects the inescapable fact that the surviving ancient sources for this four-hundred-year span are more copious and have
been studied in greater depth by scholars than the sources for the earlier
and later spans of Greek history, although that imbalance is being reduced
by discoveries and modern scholarly work. Finally, that this book focuses
above all on the Classical Age reflects my interest in the awe-inspiring
(in both positive and negative senses) deeds and thoughts of Greeks over
those few centuries.
Relatively small in population, endowed with only a limited amount
of flat and fertile agricultural land, and never united as a single nation,
ancient Greece eagerly adopted and adapted many ideas and technologies
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
3
from its more-numerous, prosperous, and less-factional neighbors in the
Near East (the southwestern edge of Asia at the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea). Building on these inspirations from others, Greeks incubated
their own ideas and practices, some of which still resonate today, thousands of years later. It is also true that ancient Greeks, like other ancient
peoples, believed and did things that many people today would regard as
“awesome” in the sense of morally repugnant. In this context, I agree with
those who regard the past as a conceptual “foreign country” largely populated by people who can seem strikingly “other” from what most people
today believe, or at least proclaim that they believe, about what sort of
persons they are and what moral standards they live by. I also think that admirers of modernity sometimes express a supercilious moral superiority
in their judgments regarding antiquity, which recent history scarcely merits. In any case, writing history inevitably involves rendering judgments, if
only in what the historian chooses to include and exclude, and I hope that
my skepticism about the assertion that the present is far “better” than the
past will not seem inconsistent or hypocritical when I occasionally offer
critical evaluations in this history. These judgments are made with a deep
sense of humility and a keen awareness of how they certainly may miss
the mark. Those are the sentiments, along with awe, that studying ancient
history constantly renews in me.
The Greek achievements that strike me as the most impressive, and the
failures that seem the saddest, took place beginning in the eighth century
b.c., when Greece gradually began to recover from its Dark Age—the centuries of economic devastation, population decline, and political vacuum
from about 1000 to 750 b.c. Earlier, in the Bronze Age of the second
millennium b.c., life had been stable and, relatively speaking, prosperous
throughout Greece in tightly organized, independent communities ruled
by powerful families through “top-down” political, social, and economic
institutions. Spurred by growing trade and cultural interaction with especially the peoples in the lands bordering the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea, Greeks slowly rebuilt their civilization, but in doing so they
diverged both from their previous ways of life and also from those of
everyone else in their world: Organizing themselves into city-states, they
almost universally rejected the rule of royalty as the “default value” for
structuring human society and politics. For them, the new normal became
widespread participation in decision making by male citizens who earned
that privilege by helping to defend the community. Most astonishing of
all, some Greeks implemented this principle by establishing democracies,
the first the world had ever seen (some scholars see roots of democracy in
earlier communities in the eastern Mediterranean, but the evidence is un-
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Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
convincing because, for one thing, it shows no concept of citizenship). At
Athens, the guiding principle of democratic government became “equality before the law” and “equality of speech,” regardless of a male citizen’s
wealth, birth, or social status. These concepts of equality represented a
radical departure from the usual expectations and norms of politics in the
ancient world.
It is necessary to emphasize that Greeks stopped short of fully putting
the principle of participation into practice: They did not extend it to female citizens or slaves. As their literature dramatically reveals, they were
clearly aware of logical arguments refuting the assertions that women and
the enslaved of both genders were by nature characterized by cognitive
inferiority and ethical deficiencies, rendering them incapable of participating in the community alongside men. This failure to accept and live by
the full implications of their reasoning about politics and law seems to me
an inescapable demerit to ancient Greek society. As the nineteenth-century
English historian known as Lord Acton remarked in commenting on the
ruthless actions of popes and kings, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely” (Historical Essays and Studies, p. 504). Men held
the majority of power in ancient Greece, and it corrupted them, as it eventually does everyone in every era who exercises it.
That ancient Greeks recognized the existence of ideas contradicting
their practices is not as surprising as it might seem, because their philosophers, scientists, and literary authors displayed relentless insight in
conducting what we might call “thought experiments” on the nature of
the world and of human beings. The Greeks’ expressions of their ideas in
poetry, prose, and drama are deservedly famous for their brilliance—and
their sometimes troubling implications. Other ancient civilizations, from
the Near East to India to China, also developed impressively insightful
scientific and philosophic theories, and the Greeks certainly belong to the
first rank of this distinguished company. The same evaluation is justified
for Greek literature, drama, history writing, art, and architecture. It is more
difficult to evaluate ancient Greek values and practices concerning those
two most controversial areas of human experience and belief—religion
and sex. As will become clear from the discussions of those topics later
in this book, significant differences exist between ancient Greek religious
and sexual traditions and what the majority of people today believe and do.
For all these reasons, and more that form part of the narrative to follow,
the history of ancient Greece offers fascinating insights into the possibilities
and limitations of human existence and presents numerous opportunities
for discovery and reflection about the past and the present; not only is it
intrinsically interesting (it seems to me), it is also good to think with, as
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
5
the renowned French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss said in interpreting why human beings have identified animal species as totems, meaning
legendary ancestors whose characteristics their descendants were thought
to have inherited and needed to keep in mind in defining their lives (Totemism, p. 89).
SOURCES AND EVIDENCE
The best way to learn about ancient Greek history and form one’s own
judgments is to study the ancient evidence first and then follow up on particular topics by consulting specialized works of modern scholarship. It is
conventional to refer to ancient literature, inscriptions, documents written
on papyrus, coins, and archaeological remains as “primary” sources, even
when they were not contemporary with the history to which they refer.
In fact, sources that scholars treat as primary can be considerably later in
date than the events or persons for which they provide evidence, such as
the inscription from Cyrene cited in the discussion of the founding of
colonies in chapter 4. Other primary sources, such as fifth-century b.c.
inscriptions about the finances of the so-called Athenian Empire (fig. 1.1),
provide direct evidence about history at the time when they were produced. In any case, the surviving ancient sources are the first place to
which we should turn to try to understand the past, and in that sense they
are always primary.They can be hard to understand. Ancient documents were
written for people who knew the full context to which they applied, not
for us, who do not. Authors of literary works, including historians, were
not aiming to present neutral, objective accounts of events and persons.
Rather, they wanted to support a particular view of things and persuade
their audiences to accept their interpretations of events and people’s motives. Of course, modern writers often take this same approach, too, but
those of us studying ancient Greece today must always stay on the lookout
not only for what the ancient source was saying but why it was saying that.
The works of modern scholars are usually referred to as “secondary”
sources, even when they prove essential in understanding, or even in correcting, the evidence derived from the primary sources. To try to help
readers in consulting ancient sources, the citations to them in this overview will use, whenever possible, the internal reference systems that allow
a passage to be located regardless of the translation being used (if that
translation includes the reference system, which not all do, unfortunately).
So, for example, a citation of Herodotus, The Histories 7.205, cited as evidence for the three hundred Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae in 480
b.c., means the passage is in book 7, section 205. (For poems, citations
Fig. 1.1: Inscriptions on stone, like this one from the fifth century b.c., which
concerns the finances of the naval alliance led by Athens, are “primary sources”
for our reconstruction of ancient Greek history. In this period, Greeks wrote such
documents with all capital letters and no separation between words. Marie-Lan
Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons.
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
7
are to line numbers, preceded, if needed, by book number.) For secondary sources, the citations are to page numbers or catalogue item numbers.
The majority of the literary and documentary texts from Greek antiquity have not survived, but those that have are significant and provocative.
The epics of Homer, The Iliad and The Odyssey, represent the most primary
of the surviving primary sources from literature for the history of ancient
Greece, for the Greeks then and for us today. Scholars debate how these
long poems reached the form in which they have survived to this day.
Some argue that they emerged from centuries and centuries of fluid and
flexible oral performances by many bards, finally put down in a written
version in the Archaic Age. Others believe that a single poet created the
poems using the technology of writing in the eighth century b.c. However they came into existence, the stories in The Iliad and The Odyssey looked
back to the Bronze Age while also reflecting the history of the Dark Age.
Every ancient Greek valued these works for their artistic beauty and their
life lessons. Above all, the Homeric epics encoded enduring values and traditions about the nature of the gods and human courage, self-control, loyalty, love, and sorrow. A thousand years later, people were still memorizing
Homeric poetry. The (much-shorter) epic poems of Hesiod, The Theogony
(Birth of the Gods) and Works and Days, composed arguably in the eighth century b.c., were meant to teach lessons about the role of the gods in human
life, the nature of justice, and the problems created by the inequalities of
power that arose as the Greeks slowly developed new forms of political
and social life in their city-states. Seventh-century lyric and elegiac poets,
such as Alcaeus, Alcman, Archilochus, Sappho, and Tyrtaeus, composed
shorter works for choruses and for single voices that introduced communal and individual themes relevant to an era of social and political change.
Bacchylides, Pindar, and Simonides in the late sixth century and the fifth
century became famous for their elaborately artful poems intertwining
mythology with current events, often composed in praise of victors in
athletic competitions or battles and powerful rulers. The so-called “first
philosophers”—who could just as well be called “scientific thinkers”—in
the sixth century also wrote poems describing the underlying and invisible nature of reality as they reasoned it must be.
Soon after, Greeks began to write in prose, focusing on ethnography,
geography, and myth (a Greek word, mythos, that means stories about the
distant past that offered competing versions of the consequences of the
often-difficult relationship between gods and human beings). The earliest
of these works have not survived except in quotations and paraphrases by
later authors. From the later fifth century b.c., however, we do have The
Histories of Herodotus. Telling the complex story of the background and
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Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
events of the extended war between a coalition of Greek city-states and
the powerful Persian Empire in the opening decades of the fifth century,
Herodotus’s unprecedented history generates a sense of wonder through
its enormous length (50 percent longer than The Iliad), diverse reporting
on a dizzying array of Greeks and non-Greeks alike, and its thematic complexity on human motivation. Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War, composed
(though not finished) during that long conflict (431–404 b.c.), created
the genre of contemporary history written by an eyewitness participant.
His biting observations about the human desire for power and the unintended consequences of the violence of war also point to the beginnings
of what today is called political science. In the next generation, Xenophon
continued Thucydides’ history by narrating events in Greece but also made
a reputation by producing works about his exciting service as a mercenary
soldier in a Persian civil war, the unique characteristics of society at Sparta,
the idiosyncratic ideas and behavior of the famous philosopher Socrates
(469–399 b.c.), and many other topics.
The fifth century also saw the creation of the primary sources that are
perhaps best known today: the plays of the Athenian dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. These tragedies sometimes dealt with recent history, but mostly they based their plots on imaginative retellings
of myths whose themes connected to life in contemporary Greek society.
The characters and emotional conflicts portrayed in these dramas have a
universality that keeps them fresh even for performance today. The comic
plays of Aristophanes provide another fascinating, if sometimes perplexing, primary source for fifth-century b.c. Athenian society. Skewering his
contemporaries with fantastic plots, merciless mockery, and vivid profanity, Aristophanes offers a revealing glimpse of what Greeks said about one
another when they were unconcerned with being polite.
From the fourth century come the famous works of the philosophers
Plato and Aristotle. Plato’s philosophic dialogues, written as the scripts of
imaginary conversations between Socrates and his contemporaries, have
inspired and provoked thinkers ever since with their implications that the
truth of reality is hidden, that the soul is the only worthwhile part of a
human being, and that justice requires people to be stratified socially in
layers of differing responsibilities and privileges. Aristotle, a student of
Plato who argued for a more-practical approach to knowledge and conduct than his teacher did, astounded the world, then and later, with his
encyclopedic interests and writings covering more topics in natural science, politics, and ethics than can be easily summarized. From this same
century we have numerous surviving speeches from Athens concerning
law cases and political crises, works that reveal many details of private and
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
9
public life. The orations of Demosthenes are especially vivid in portraying
the military danger to Athens posed by the growing power of the kingdom of Macedonia under Philip II (382–336 b.c.) and his son Alexander
the Great (356–323 b.c.), and the political split among Athens’s citizens
concerning whether to collaborate or to go to war to defend their political independence. The surviving primary sources for the world-changing
career of Alexander as he fought his way to India and back are not contemporary, but their Roman-era authors (Diodorus, Curtius, Plutarch, Arrian,
Justin) preserve vivid portrayals and interpretations of this conflict-filled
era when monarchy began to return as the dominant political system of
control in the Greek world. Plutarch’s biographies of ancient Greeks are,
for us, crucially important historical sources, even though he explicitly
wrote them to explore individual character by pairing them with lives of
Romans. He explicitly said that he was not writing history, but we have
to use his biographies in that context to try to fill in the gaps left by our
surviving primary sources. Reading Plutarch, therefore, is one of the most
interesting challenges in constructing and interpreting ancient Greek history. The same is true of the amazing number of quotations from Greek
sources of the Classical Age that are preserved in the long and discursive
work called The Learned Banqueters (Deipnosophistae), composed by Athenaeus in
the second century a.d.; the variety of topics ranges widely, from food to
sex to jokes. Equally challenging to interpret and place in the right historical context are the quotations found in later sources from the writings,
which have not survived on their own, of the early historians who wrote
about Athens (the so-called Atthidographers).
The comedies of Menander of Athens reveal that, in the new world that
was emerging at the time of Alexander in which the city-states of Greece
were losing their political independence, audiences preferred soap-opera
situation comedies about mistaken identities and romance in place of the
biting political satire that had characterized comic plays in the earlier days
of Greece’s freedom from foreign domination. In studying the centuries
following Alexander’s death (the Hellenistic Age), it is difficult to reconstruct the story of Greek history with chronological precision because
very few narrative sources have survived. The evidence of inscriptions,
coins, and archaeological remains is of course crucially important in every
period, but for the centuries of Greek history after Alexander these sorts
of sources provide the overwhelming majority of what we know. Physical
objects, like ancient texts, can of course be challenging to understand and
interpret, especially when they were not created with the goal of directly
communicating with people who would know nothing about them. Still,
they help us puzzle out the significance of the changes in politics, soci-
10
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
ety, art, philosophy, and religion that took place in Greek culture as, first,
Macedonian rulers constructed kingdoms in Greece, Egypt, and the Near
East and, then, the Romans conquered these monarchies to become the
dominant power in the Mediterranean world. Greek history and the Greek
language lived on even after Rome had absorbed Greeks into its territorial
empire, of course, but for the purposes of this book the story will end
with a brief overview of Hellenistic Greek history.
THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT OF GREECE
The deepest background of the history of ancient Greece lies in the
physical environment and its effects on the opportunities and the constraints of life in this part of the Mediterranean region. The homeland of
the ancient Greeks was located in the southern portion of the mountainous Balkan Peninsula (today the territory of the modern nation of Greece)
and the hundreds and hundreds of islands in the Aegean Sea to the east
and the Ionian Sea to the west. The islands in these sections of the Mediterranean Sea varied in size from large territories, such as Lesbos (630
square miles in area) and Corcyra (227 square miles), to small ones, such
as Delos (1.3 square miles). Greeks also lived up and down the western
coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey), far to the south on the very large island
of Crete (3,219 square miles), on even larger Cyprus (3,572 square miles)
far to the east, on the coast of North Africa, and in southern Italy and on
Sicily (an area referred to by the Latin name “Magna Graecia”). Almost all
the places where Greeks lived were subject to devastating earthquakes.
Chains of rugged mountains dominate the landscape of mainland
Greece, fencing off plains and valleys in which communities could keep
themselves politically separate from one another while still maintaining contacts for trade and diplomacy. These mountains mainly run from
northwest to southeast along the Balkan Peninsula, with narrow passes
connecting Greek territory to Macedonia in the north. The highest was
Mount Olympus, at almost 10,000 feet high (fig. 1.2). The terrain of the
many islands of the Aegean was also craggy. Only about 20 to 30 percent
of the mainland was arable, but some islands, western Anatolia, Magna
Graecia, and a few fortunate mainland regions, especially Thessaly in the
northeast and Messenia in the southwest, included plains spacious enough
to support bounteous crops and large grazing animals. The scarcity of level
terrain ruled out the raising of cattle and horses on any large scale in many
areas. When Greeks first domesticated animals in the late Stone Age, pigs,
sheep, and goats became the most common livestock. By the seventh cen-
B LACK S E A
B ALKANS PE NI NS U LA
MACEDONIA
ITALY
Plains in
Thessaly
N
Hattusas
PHRYGIA
Troy
Dhimini
AEGEAN
Sesklo
SEA
CORCYRA
ANATOLIA
BOEOTIA
IONIAN SEA
SICILY
Plains of
Elis
Mycenae
Lerna
Francthi
Cave
Pylos
MALTA
PELOPONNESE
Çatal Hüyük
IONIA
Lefkandi
LESBOS
Athens
Gla
Ugarit
THERA
Tiryns
DELOS
Knossos
CYPRUS
Byblos
CRETE
MEDITERRANEAN SEA
NORTH
AFRICA
0
100
200
200
300
300 mi
400
500 km
Nile
0
100
R.
Map 1. Neolithic, Minoan, and Mycenaean Periods
12
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
Fig. 1.2: This view through a gorge looks toward Mount Olympus, the highest
mountain in Greece at nearly 10,000 feet / 3000 meters high. Greeks believed
the gods made their home atop its peak. Mountainous terrain occupied much of
the landscape of Greece. Wikimedia Commons.
tury b.c. the domestic chicken had been introduced into Greece from the
Near East.
Once Greeks learned to farm, they grew mostly barley, which formed
the staple of the Greek diet. The generally poor land supported crops of
this grain far better than of wheat, which made tastier food but needed
richer land to flourish. Root vegetables and some varieties of cereal grains
could be grown even during the cooler winter months. Other major crops
were wine grapes and olives. Wine diluted with water was the favorite
beverage drunk by Greeks, while olive oil provided a principal source of
dietary fat and also served, among many other uses, as a cleaning agent
for bathing and a base for perfumes. Meat, which was expensive, appeared
more rarely in Greek meals than in those of modern Western cultures. Fish
was a popular food but could also be scarce.
So jagged was the Greek coastline that most settlements lay within
forty miles of the sea, providing easy access for fishermen and seagoing
merchants, though harbors large enough to protect ships during storms,
such as the port of Piraeus at Athens, were rare. The ports of Egypt and
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
13
the eastern Mediterranean coast were favorite destinations. Going to sea
with the limited marine technology of the time made bad weather a serious threat to life and limb, and prevailing winds and fierce gales greatly
limited sailing during winter. Even in calm conditions sailors hugged the
coast whenever possible and aimed to land every night for safety. Pirates
were a menace, too. Nevertheless, driven by the desire for the profits to be
made from international trade, Greek entrepreneurs risked the dangers of
the sea to sail all over the Mediterranean. Summing up the situation, Hesiod remarked that merchants took to the sea “because an income means
life to wretched mortals, but it is a terrible fate to die among the waves”
(Works and Days, lines 686–687).
Most Greeks, even if they lived near the sea, never traveled very far
from home. Commercial sea travel, however, played a central role in the
development of Greek culture because traders and entrepreneurs voyaging
between the Near East, Egypt, and Greece put Greeks into contact with the
older civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean region, from which they
learned new technologies; ideas about religion, philosophy, and science;
and styles in art. Transporting people and goods overland instead of by
sea was slow and expensive because rudimentary dirt paths were Greece’s
only roads. The rivers were practically useless for trade and communication because most of them, though perhaps not as many as today, slowed
to a trickle during the many months each year when little or no rain
fell. Timber for building houses and ships was the most plentiful natural
resource of the mountainous terrain of the mainland, but deforestation
had probably already affected many regions by the fifth century b.c. By
that time mainland Greeks were importing lumber from northward regions and paying stiff prices for it. Some deposits of metal ore, especially
iron, were scattered throughout Greek territory, as were clays useful for
making pots and other containers. Quarries of fine stone, such as marble,
furnished material for expensive buildings and sculpture. The irregular
distribution of these resources made some areas considerably wealthier
than others. The silver mines in Athenian territory, for example, provided
an income that supported the exceptional prosperity of Athens’s so-called
Golden Age in the fifth century.
Modern meteorologists refer to the climate of Greece as Mediterranean, meaning winters drenched with intermittent heavy rain and summers baking with hot, dry weather. Rainfall varied significantly, with the
heaviest (around 50 inches annually on average today) along the western
side of the Balkan Peninsula, while the eastern region, where Athens is
located, receives much less precipitation (16 inches per year). Greek farmers endured a precarious cycle of boom and bust, fearing both drought
14
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
and floods. Nevertheless, the Greeks believed their climate to be the best
anywhere. Aristotle, who saw climate as determining political destiny, believed that “Greeks occupy a middle position [between hot and cold climates] and correspondingly enjoy both energy and intelligence. For this
reason they retain their freedom and have the best of political institutions.
In fact, if they could forge political unity among themselves, they could
control the rest of the world” (Politics 7.7, 1327b29–33).
As Aristotle implied, throughout their history the ancient Greeks never
constituted a nation in the modern sense because their various independent states never united politically. In fact, they often fought wars with one
another. On the other hand, Greeks saw themselves as sharing a cultural
identity because they spoke dialects of the same language, had similar
customs, worshipped the same gods (with local variations in cults), and
came together at international religious festivals, such as the celebration
of the mysteries of the goddess Demeter at Athens or the athletic games
at Olympia in the Peloponnese. Ancient Greece was thus a set of shared
ideas and practices rather than a sharply demarcated territorial or national
entity. How this sense of Greek cultural identity came to be and how it
was maintained over the centuries are difficult questions that must be kept
constantly in mind. That its mountainous topography contributed to the
political fragmentation of Greece seems clear.
PREHISTORY BEFORE AGRICULTURE
The prehistoric background of Greek history belongs to the Stone Age,
so named because the people of the time had mainly stone, in addition
to bone and wood, from which to fashion tools and weapons; they had
not yet developed the technology to make implements from metals. Most
important, at this point human beings did not yet know how to cultivate
crops. When people finally began to develop agricultural technology, they
experienced tremendous changes in their lives and began to affect the
natural environment in unprecedented ways.
The Stone Age is conventionally subdivided into the Paleolithic (Greek
for “Old Stone”) and Neolithic (“New Stone”) Ages. During the hundreds
of thousands of years of the Paleolithic period, human beings roamed
throughout their lives, searching for food in the wild by hunting game,
fishing, collecting shellfish, and gathering plants, fruits, and nuts. Living as hunter-gatherers, these early human beings sometimes migrated
great distances, presumably following large game animals or searching for
more abundant sources of nutritious wild plants. The first human beings
in Greece probably migrated there long ago from the African continent via
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
15
c. 45,000–40,000 years ago: Homo sapiens sapiens first moves out of Africa into
southwestern Asia and Europe.
c. 20,000 years ago: Human habitation begins in the Francthi Cave in southeastern Greece.
c. 10,000–8000 B.C.: Transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic Age marks the beginning of agriculture and permanent settlements.
c. 7000–6000 B.C.: Agriculture and domestication of animals under way in southern and eastern Europe, including Greece.
c. 7000–5000 B.C.: Settlements of permanent houses being built in fertile plains
in Greece.
c. 4000–3000 B.C.: Copper metallurgy under way in Balkan region.
the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia. A skull found at Petralona Cave in
Greece has been dated to at least two hundred thousand years before the
present. At least as early as fifty thousand years ago the type of Paleolithic
human beings known as Neanderthals (from the finds of their remains in
Germany’s Neander Valley) spread over Macedonia and then into Greece
as far south as the plain at Elis in the Peloponnese peninsula. People of
modern type (Homo sapiens sapiens) began to migrate from Africa into Europe
during the last part of the Paleolithic period. This new population eventually replaced completely the earlier populations, such as the Neanderthals;
how this happened remains unknown. Perhaps the newcomers were better
able to cope with natural disasters, such as the tremendous floods that covered the plains in Thessaly for many years beginning about thirty thousand
years before the present.
Ancient hunter-gatherers probably lacked laws, judges, and political organization in the modern sense, which is not to say that they lacked forms
of social organization, regulation, and control. Some Paleolithic graves
containing weapons, tools, animal figurines, ivory beads, and bracelets
suggest that hunter-gatherers recognized social differences among individuals and that an individual’s special social status could by marked by
the possession of more-expensive or elaborate goods. Just as the possession of a quantity of such goods in life had shown that individuals enjoyed
superior wealth, power, or status in their groups, so too the burial of the
goods with the corpse indicated the individual’s prestige. Accordingly, it
appears that some Paleolithic groups organized themselves not along egalitarian lines but rather in hierarchies, social systems that ranked certain
people as more important and more dominant than others. Thus, already
in this early period we find traces of social differentiation (the marking of
16
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
certain people as wealthier, more respected, or more powerful than others
in their group), the feature of human life that characterized later Greek
society, as it has every society in historical times.
TRANSFORMATION OF DAILY LIFE IN THE NEOLITHIC AGE
Daily life as the ancient Greeks knew it depended on agriculture and
the domestication of animals, innovations that gradually took root starting
some ten to twelve thousand years ago at the opening of the Neolithic Age.
The process of gaining this knowledge, which was to change human life
radically, extended over several thousand years. Excavations at the site of the
Francthi Cave in Greece have revealed the gradual process of adapting to
natural changes that prehistoric populations underwent as they learned to
farm. Hunter-gatherers first showed up in this area near the southeastern
Greek seacoast about twenty thousand years before the present. At that
time the cave, used for shelter, lay some three to four miles from the coast
and overlooked a plain verdant with vegetation. Wild horses and cattle
grazed there, providing easy hunting. Over about the next twelve thousand
years, the sea level gradually rose, perhaps as a result of climatic changes,
until only a narrow ribbon of marsh and beach about one kilometer wide
separated the cave from the shoreline. With large game animals no longer
available nearby, the residents of the Francthi Cave now based their diet on
seafood and especially wild plants, such as lentils, oats, barley, bitter vetch,
and pear, gathered from nearby valleys and hillsides.
As hunter-gatherer populations came to depend increasingly on plants
for their survival, the problem became to develop a reliable supply. The
answer, which took thousands of years of repeated trial and error to learn,
was to plant part of the seeds from one crop to produce another crop.
Knowledge of this revolutionary technology—agriculture—first emerged
not in Greece but in the Near East and slowly spread outward. Evidence
from the Francthi Cave and the plains in Thessaly shows the new technology had reached Greece by around 7000 b.c. How it made its way there is
an intriguing puzzle still to be solved. One of perhaps many contributing
factors may have been the contact between different regions that resulted
from the travels of merchants and entrepreneurs, who sailed throughout
the Mediterranean in search of materials and markets by which to make a
profit.
Whatever the ways through which knowledge of agriculture spread,
Neolithic women had probably played the major role in inventing the
technology and the tools needed to practice it, such as digging sticks and
grinding stones. After all, women in hunter-gatherer society had devel-
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
17
oped the greatest knowledge of plants because they were the principal
gatherers of this food. In the earliest history of farming, women did most
of the agricultural labor, while men continued to hunt, although women
hunted smaller game, too, using nets. During this same transitional period, people also learned to breed and herd animals for food, thus helping
replace the meat formerly supplied by the hunting of large mammals,
many of which had become extinct. The first animal to be domesticated
as a source of meat was the sheep, from about 8500 b.c. in the Near
East. (Dogs had been domesticated much earlier but were not commonly
eaten.) Domesticated sheep and goats had become widespread throughout the Near East and southern Europe, including Greece, by about 7000.
In this early stage of domestication, small herds kept close to home were
the rule. They could therefore be tended by men, women, and children
alike.
The production, instead of just the gathering, of food laid the foundation for other changes that we take for granted today. For example, to farm
successfully, people had to live in settled locations, and farming villages
formed in the Near East as early as 10,000 b.c. Permanent communities of farmers, comprising a built environment with a densely settled
population, constituted a new stage in human history. Neolithic villages
sprang up in Macedonia and further south in Greece in Thessaly and Boeotia during the period 7000–5000, concentrating in plains suitable for agriculture. The houses of these early settlements were mostly one-room,
freestanding dwellings in a rectangular shape up to about forty feet long.
At Sesklo in Thessaly, some Neolithic houses had basements and a second
story. Greek houses in this period were usually built with a wood frame
covered with clay, but some had stone foundations supporting mud bricks
(a common building material in the Near East). The inhabitants entered
through a single door and baked food in a clay oven. Settlements like those
at Sesklo or Dhimini in Thessaly housed populations of perhaps several
hundred. At Dhimini a series of low walls encircled the settlement. By the
third millennium, large dwellings were being built in Greece, as at Lerna
in the Argolid region, where the so-called House of Tiles had a roof of
baked tiles covering a multistory building. There are no documents to tell
us about the beliefs of the people who lived in these communities: The
technology of writing was not yet known in Greece. Sculptures such as a
male statue with exposed genitals (fig. 1.3) suggest that rituals meant to
ensure human reproduction were important to the villagers, whose existence literally depended on having a high birthrate to replace the many
people who died as babies or while still young. Expanding its population
was the way for the community to become stronger.
18
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
Fig. 1.3: Greeks in the Neolithic (“New Stone”) Age created art including statues
such as this seated male figure. That this statue had its genitals exposed, with an
erect penis (now broken off), leads some scholars to speculate that it concerned
reproduction and human fertility, which were sources of anxiety in a world in
which many people died young. Wikimedia Commons.
The remarkable changes of the late Neolithic period took place as
innovative human adaptations to what in anthropological terms would
be called the feedback between environmental change and population
growth. That is, as agriculture developed (perhaps in a period when the climate became wetter), populations increased, thus further raising the need
for production of food, thus leading to further population growth, and
so on. The process that led to the innovation of humans producing their
food through agriculture instead of simply finding it in the wild clearly
underlines the importance of demography—the study of the size, growth,
density, distribution, and vital statistics of the human population—in understanding historical change.
Physical evidence for the new patterns of life emerging in the Neolithic
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
19
Age is still emerging at a site in Anatolia (modern Turkey) being explored
by an international team of archaeologists; it is known to us only by its
modern name, Çatal Hüyük (pronounced “Chatal Hooyook,” meaning
“Fork Mound”). Large for its time (housing perhaps six thousand people
by around 6000 b.c.) but otherwise comparable to Greek Neolithic communities, Çatal Hüyük subsisted by raising grains and vegetables in irrigated fields and domesticating animals, along with hunting some game.
Since the community could produce enough food without everyone
having to work in the fields or herd cattle, some workers could become
crafts specialists, producing goods for those producing the food. These artisans not only fashioned tools, containers, and ornaments from the traditional materials of wood, bone, hide, and stone but also developed new
technological skills by experimenting with the material of the future:
metal. Metalworkers at Çatal Hüyük certainly knew how to fashion lead
into pendants and to hammer naturally occurring lumps of copper into
beads and tubes to make jewelry, but traces of slag (the residue from the
process of smelting mineral ores) found on the site further suggest that
they were beginning to learn the technique of extracting metal from the
rock with which it is usually mixed in its natural state. The tricky process
of smelting—the basis of true metallurgy and the foundation of much
modern technology—required temperatures of 700 degrees centigrade.
Melting copper took temperatures almost twice that high. Achieving this
extraordinary heat required building clay furnaces fired by charcoal and
stoked by blowing air into them with bellows, perhaps through tubes
punched through the furnace walls. This was exhausting, sometimes
dangerous work that required great skill and care. Other workers at Çatal
Hüyük specialized in weaving textiles, and the scraps of cloth discovered
there are the oldest examples of this craft ever found. Like other early
technological innovations, metallurgy and the production of cloth apparently also developed independently in other places where agriculture
and settled communities provided a context for such creative divisions of
labor.
The increasing specialization of labor characteristic of Neolithic settlements such as Çatal Hüyük promoted the development of social and
political hierarchies. The need to plan and regulate irrigation, trade, and
the exchange of food and goods between farmers and crafts specialists in
turn created a need for leaders with greater authority than had been required to maintain peace and order in hunter-gatherer bands. In addition,
households that found success in farming, herding, crafts production, or
trade made themselves wealthier and thus different from less successful
villagers. The greater social equality between men and women that prob-
20
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
ably characterized hunter-gatherer society also grew weaker by the late
Neolithic period. Gradual changes in agriculture and herding over many
centuries perhaps contributed to a shift in the relative power of women
and men. Sometime after about 4000 b.c. farmers began to employ plows
dragged by animals to cultivate land that was more difficult to sow than
the areas cultivated in the earliest period of agriculture. Men apparently
operated this new technology because plowing required greater physical strength than digging with sticks and hoes, and men were generally
stronger than women. Men also took over the tending of the larger herds
that had now become more common, with cattle being kept for milk and
sheep for wool. Large herds tended to be grazed at a distance from the village because new grasslands had to be found continually. Men, free from
the responsibility of nursing babies, were able to stay away from home to
tend to the herds. Women, by contrast, became tied down in the central
settlement because they had to raise more children to support agriculture,
which was becoming more intensive and therefore required more laborers than had foraging for food or carrying out the earliest forms of farming. Women also had to shoulder the responsibility for new labor-intensive
tasks, processing the secondary products of larger herds. For example, they
now processed milk into cheese and yogurt and produced cloth by spinning and weaving wool. It seems possible that men’s tasks in this new
specialization of labor were assigned greater prestige and thus contributed
to the growth of inequality between genders. This form of social differentiation, which became a fundamental ingredient in later Greek culture,
thus apparently emerged as a contingency of the fundamental changes in
human life taking place in the late Neolithic Age.
EXPLAINING TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE
The issue of how the prehistoric inhabitants of Greece learned to use
the transformative technologies of the late Stone Age has become more
complex as modern scientific technology has provided new information on the chronology of the changes in different areas. In the broadest
form, the question is to what extent the prehistoric inhabitants of Europe
derived their knowledge of the new technologies from the populations
of Mesopotamia and Egypt, who clearly came first in inventing writing,
building cities, and forming complex civilizations. For a long time scholars regarded European developments as, for all practical purposes, wholly
derived from the Near East through a process of diffusion. That is, traders, farmers, herders, metalworkers, and architects were theorized to have
slowly made their ways to Europe from the Near East, either peacefully or
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
21
as violent invaders. They brought with them, on this model, technologies
hitherto unknown in the lands they entered, such as agriculture, monumental stone construction, and copper metallurgy. In this way, technological knowledge was gradually diffused from the Near East over Europe.
This explanation of technological change in prehistoric Europe has had
to be revised, however, in the light of scientific analytic techniques refined
only as recently as the late 1960s. Radiocarbon dating forced the revision
by permitting scientists to give close estimates of the age of prehistoric organic materials from archaeological excavations. Laboratory analysis of the
amount of radioactive carbon-14 remaining in materials such as bones,
seeds, hides, and wood can now determine with an acceptable margin
of error the length of time since the death of the material submitted for
testing. Dendrochronology, the chronological evidence obtained from
counting the internal rings of long-lived trees, has helped refine the accuracy of radiocarbon dating. These techniques applied to archaeological
material from Neolithic Europe have suggested a more complex process
of change than previously imagined. It now seems established that farming communities had already developed in Greece and the Balkan Mountains immediately to the north as early as the seventh millennium b.c. On
this chronology, it is still possible to believe that traders and migrating
farmers from the Near East introduced domesticated cereal grains into
Greece, but it is also not ruled out that Greek agriculture developed as the
result of independent innovation. As for the domestication of cattle, the
evidence suggests that this important development in how human beings
acquired meat to eat took place in this region of Europe at least as early as
in the Near East. In this case, a European population apparently introduced
change on its own, by independent local innovation rather than through
diffusion.
Radiocarbon dates further suggest that European metalworkers developed copper metallurgy independently from Near Eastern metalsmiths
because they show this technology developing in various European locations around the same time as in the Near East. By the fourth millennium,
for instance, smiths in the Balkans were casting copper ax heads with the
hole for the ax handle in the correct position. The smiths of southeastern
Europe started alloying bronze in the same period in the third millennium
as their Near Eastern counterparts, learning to add 10 percent of tin to
the copper that they were firing. The European Bronze Age (to use the terminology in which periods of history are labeled according to the metal
most in use) therefore commenced at approximately the same date as the
Near Eastern Bronze Age. This chronology suggests contemporary but independent local innovation, because otherwise we would expect to find
22
Backgrounds of Ancient Greek History
evidence that metallurgy had begun much earlier in the Near East than in
Europe, to allow the necessary time for the diffusion of the technology all
the way from the Near East to Europe.
Thus, the explanation of important changes in prehistoric European
history has become more complicated than it was when diffusion alone
seemed sufficient to explain these developments. It no longer seems possible to think that the Neolithic population of Greece was wholly dependent on Near Easterners for knowledge of innovative technologies such as
megalithic architecture and metallurgy, even if they did learn agriculture
from them. Like their neighbors in Europe, the inhabitants of prehistoric
Greece participated in the complex process of diffusion and in independent invention, which brought such remarkable technological and social
changes in this period through the interacting effects of contact with others, sometimes very distant others, and local innovation.
TWO
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
When did the people living in and around the central Mediterranean Sea in the locations that make up Greece become
Greeks? No simple answer is possible, because the concept of
identity includes not just the social and material conditions
of life but also ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions. So far as the available evidence shows, the Mycenaeans
of the second millennium b.c. were the first population in
Greece that spoke Greek. By that date, then, groups of people
clearly existed whom we can call Greeks. No records tell us
what the Mycenaeans called themselves; in Greek, as it developed in the historical period, they referred to their country
as “Hellas” and themselves as “Hellenes,” from the name of a
legendary chief from central Greece, Hellen (Thucydides, The
Peloponnesian War 1.3.2). Those terms remain the proper usage
in Greek today. “Greece” and “Greek,” in fact, come from
Latin, the language of the Romans.
The deepest origins of the language of the Greeks and the
other components of their identity lie deeper in the past than
Mycenaean times, but tracing those origins remains a challenge because written records do not exist from such early
times. Scholarly investigation of the fundamental components
of ancient Greek ethnic and cultural identity has centered
on two major issues: the significance of the Indo-European
heritage of ancient Greeks in the period c. 4500–2000 b.c.,
and the consequences for Greeks of their interactions with
the older civilizations of the Near East, Egypt in particular,
23
24
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
in the second millennium. Even though the details of these processes of
cultural formation remain exceptionally controversial, on a general level
it is clear that both these sources of influence affected the construction of
Greek identity in lasting ways.
There are definite sources of influence on early Greek culture to be
found in the history of the second millennium, for which we have significant archaeological evidence and even some written documents. Before
the rise of Mycenaean civilization in mainland Greece, Minoan civilization
flourished on the large island of Crete. The Minoans, who did not speak
Greek, had grown rich through complex agriculture and seaborne trade
with the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. The Minoans
passed on this tradition of intercultural contact to the civilization of the
Mycenaeans, whom they greatly influenced before losing their power after
the middle of the millennium. The centers of Mycenaean civilization were
destroyed in the period from about 1200 to 1000 b.c. as part of widespread turmoil throughout the eastern Mediterranean region. The descendants of the Greeks who survived these catastrophes eventually revived
Greek civilization after the Dark Age (1000–750).
INDO-EUROPEAN AND NEAR EASTERN ROOTS
The central issue concerning the Indo-European background of Greek
identity and culture is whether groups of peoples whom we call IndoEuropeans migrated into prehistoric Europe over many centuries and radically changed the nature of the lives of people already there, including the
indigenous inhabitants of Greece. Debate continues over the location of
the homeland of the earliest Indo-Europeans, but the most likely suggestion seems to be either central Asia or Anatolia. Recent though controversial research in computer analysis of linguistic evidence seems to tip
the balance in favor of Anatolia. The final phase of Indo-European migration caused devastation across Europe around 2000 b.c., according to the
also controversial hypothesis that aggressive peoples at that time moved in
large groups across vast distances. The Greeks of the historical period are
then seen as the descendants of this group of invaders.
The concept of an original Indo-European identity is constructed from
the later history of language. Linguists long ago recognized that a single
language had been the earliest ancestor of most of the major ancient and
modern groups of languages of western Europe (including, among others, Greek, Latin, and English), of the Slavic languages, of Persian (Iranian), and of various languages such as Sanskrit spoken on the Indian
subcontinent. They therefore bestowed the name “Indo-Europeans” on the
ATL A NTI C
OC EA N
N
CELTIC
BALTIC
GERMANIC
IRANIAN
CELTIC
TOCHARIAN
SLAVIC
IRA
NI
AN
IRANIAN
I AN
SP
LIC
N
CA
ITA
IA
YR
ILL
CELTIC
BLAC K S EA
A
SE
NI
A
N
K
GREE
AR
ME
PHRYGIAN
ANATOLIAN
IRANIAN
IND
O-A
ME DIT E RRANE AN SE A
PE
RS
0
500 mi
0
800 km
IAN
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ULF
RED
SEA
Map 2. Areas of Indo-European Language Groups
IN D IA N
O C EA N
RYA
N
26
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
c. 4500–2000 B.C.: Movements of Indo-European peoples into Europe?
c. 3000–2500 B.C.: Bronze metallurgy under way in the Balkans and on the island
of Crete.
c. 3000–2000 B.C.: Development of Mediterranean polyculture.
c. 2200 B.C.: Earliest Cretan palaces of Minoan civilization.
c. 2000 B.C.: Violent destruction of many European sites.
c. 1700 B.C.: Earthquakes destroy early Cretan palaces.
c. 1600–1500 B.C.: Shaft graves at Mycenae on Greek mainland.
c. 1500–1450 B.C.: Earliest Mycenaean tholos tombs.
c. 1400 B.C.: Earliest Mycenaean palaces.
c. 1370 B.C.: Palace of Knossos on Crete destroyed.
c. 1300–1200 B.C.: Highpoint of Mycenaean palace culture.
c. 1200–1000 B.C.: Violent disturbances across the Aegean region in the era of
the Sea Peoples.
c. 1000 B.C.: Mycenaean palace society no longer functioning.
original speakers of this ancestral language. Since the original language
had disappeared by evolving into its different descendant languages well
before the invention of writing, its only traces survive in the words of the
later languages derived from it. Early Indo-European, for example, had a
single word for night, which passed down as Greek nux (nuktos in the genitive case), Latin nox or noctis, Vedic (the type of Sanskrit used in the ancient
epic poetry of India) nakt-, English night, Spanish noche, French nuit, German
Nacht, Russian noch, and so on. To give another example: that English speakers have the words I and me, two completely dissimilar pronouns, to refer
to themselves in different grammatical contexts is a feature inherited from
the pronouns of Indo-European.
Scholars of linguistics think that words in later languages that descended from the original language of the earliest Indo-Europeans can
offer hints about important characteristics of that group’s original society.
For example, the name of the chief Indo-European divinity, a male god,
survives in the similar sounds of Zeus pater and Jupiter, the names given to
the chief god in Greek and Latin, respectively. This evidence leads to the
conclusion that Indo-European society was patriarchal, with fathers being
not just parents but rather the authority figure controlling the household.
Other words suggest that Indo-European society was also patrilocal (the
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
27
wife moving to live with the husband’s family group) and patrilineal (the
line of descent of children being reckoned through their father). IndoEuropean language also included references to kings, a detail suggesting
a hierarchical and differentiated society rather than an egalitarian one.
Finally, both linguistic and archaeological evidence was taken to mean that
Indo-European males were warlike and competitive. Since the language
of the Greeks, the fundamental component of their identity, indisputably
came from Indo-European origins, they represented one linguistically
identifiable group descended from Indo-European ancestors.
The most controversial interpretation of the significance of the early
Indo-Europeans argues that they invaded Europe in waves and imposed
patriarchal, hierarchical, and violent values on the peoples they found
there. On this hypothesis, the indigenous populations of prehistoric Europe had been generally egalitarian, peaceful, and matrifocal (centered
on women as mothers), and the Indo-European invasions destroyed these
qualities. This argument further asserts that these earlier Europeans had
originally worshipped female gods as their principal divinities, but the
Indo-Europeans forcibly degraded these goddesses in favor of their male
deities, such as Zeus, the king of the gods for the Greeks. This brutal transformation would have begun about 4500 b.c., with different groups of
Indo-Europeans moving into Europe over the following centuries, eventually sacking and ruining many pre–Indo-European sites in Europe around
2000 b.c.
Opponents of the theory of the Indo-European origin of other aspects
of the Greeks’ culture except for language argue that no evidence clearly
shows Indo-Europeans migrating into Europe as distinct groups powerful
enough to abolish already-existing social structures and beliefs and force
their own practices on the people already there. It may even be that IndoEuropean social traditions had never differed significantly from those
originally evolved by the non–Indo-European societies of prehistoric Europe. Therefore, characteristics of later, historical Greek society, such as
patriarchy and social inequality for women, might in truth have already
existed among the indigenous inhabitants of Greece. For example, another
theory proposes that Stone Age male hunter-gatherers had pushed human
society down the road toward patriarchy by kidnapping women from
each other’s bands in an attempt to improve their own band’s ability to
reproduce itself and thus survive. Since men as hunters had experience
traveling far from base camp, they were the ones to raid other bands. In this
way, men would have acquired dominance over women long before the
date when early Indo-Europeans are supposed to have initiated their invasions of Europe.
28
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
On this view, the indigenous society of Europe became patriarchal without outside influence, even though its religion paid great respect to female
divinities, as evidenced by the thousands of Venus figurines (female statuettes with large breasts and hips) uncovered in European archaeological
excavations of prehistoric sites, and by the many goddesses prominent in
Greek religion. Alternatively, the growth of social inequality between men
and women may have been a consequence of the changes accompanying
the development of plow agriculture and large-scale herding in late Stone
Age Europe (see chapter 1). Scholars who deemphasize the significance
of the Indo-Europeans as a source of cultural change argue further against
blaming them for the widespread destruction of European sites around
2000 b.c. Instead, they suggest, exhaustion of the soil, leading to intense
competition for land, and internal political turmoil could have motivated
the violent clashes that devastated various European settlements at the end
of the third millennium.
One aspect of the question of Greek identity that has aroused fierce
controversy is the relation between Greece and the Near East, especially
Egypt. Some nineteenth-century scholars downplayed or even denied any
significant cultural influence of the Near East on Greece, despite the clear
evidence that the ancient Greeks acknowledged with appreciation that
they had learned a great deal from those peoples outside Greece who,
they fully recognized, represented more-ancient civilizations. Greeks with
knowledge of the past proclaimed that they had taken a lot in particular
from the older civilization of Egypt, especially in religion. Herodotus reported that priests in Egypt told him that as well as being the first people
to create altars, festivals, statues, and temples of the gods, the Egyptians
had initiated the tradition of bestowing epithets or titles on divinities, and
that the Greeks had adopted this tradition from Egypt—and, Herodotus
adds, the evidence the priests provided him proved that “these claims were
valid” (The Histories 2.4.2).
Modern research agrees with the view of the ancient Greeks that they
had learned much from Egypt. The clearest evidence of the deep influence of Egyptian culture on Greek is the store of fundamental religious
ideas that flowed from Egypt to Greece, such as the geography of the
underworld, the weighing of the souls of the dead in scales, and the lifegiving properties of fire, as commemorated in the initiation ceremonies
of the international cult of the goddess Demeter of Eleusis (a famous site
in Athenian territory). Greek mythology, the stories that Greeks told themselves about their deepest origins and their relations to the gods, was infused with stories and motifs with roots in Egypt and the Near East. But
the influence was not limited to religion. For one thing, Greek sculptors
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
29
in the Archaic Age chiseled their statues according to a set of proportions
established by Egyptian artists.
Archaeology reveals that people living in Greece had trade and diplomatic contacts with the Near East at least as early as the middle of the
second millennium b.c. What cannot be true, however, is the modern theory that Egyptians invaded and colonized mainland Greece in this period.
Egyptian records refer to Greeks as foreigners, not as colonists. Furthermore, much of the contact between Greece and the Near East in this early
period took place through intermediaries, above all the seafaring traders
from the island of Crete. In any case, in thinking about the “cultural debt”
of one group to another, it is crucial not to fall into the trap of seeing
one group as the passive recipient of ideas or skills or traditions transmitted by a superior group. What one group takes over from another is
always adapted and reinterpreted according to the system of values of the
group doing the receiving. Everything they receive from others they transform so as to give the innovations functions and meanings suited to their
own purposes and cultural traditions. When the Greeks learned from the
peoples of the Near East and Egypt, they made what they learned their
own. This is how cultural identity is forged, not by mindless imitation or
passive reception. The Greeks themselves constructed their own identity,
based above all on shared religious practices and a common language. In
the aspects of their culture that they originally took from others, they put
their own stamp on what they learned from foreigners. The construction
of Greek identity took a long time. It would be pointless to try to fix the
beginning of this complex process at any single moment in history. Rather
than look for a nonexistent single origin of Greek identity, we should try
to identify the multiple sources of cultural influence that flowed together
over the long run to produce Greek culture as we find it in later times.
BRONZE AGE CIVILIZATIONS OF EUROPE
The late Bronze Age (the second millennium b.c.) provides crucial evidence for understanding how Greeks became Greeks. The “first civilizations of Europe” belong to this period: Minoan civilization on the large
island of Crete (southeast of the mainland peninsula of Greece) and on
other smaller Mediterranean islands, and Mycenaean civilization on the
mainland and on some of the islands and coast of the Aegean. The Minoans, who spoke a still-unidentified language, built a prosperous civilization
before the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans. Both populations had extensive
trading contacts with the Near East, complex agricultural and metallurgical technologies, elaborate architecture, striking art, and a marked taste
30
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
for luxury. They also inhabited a dangerous world whose perils ultimately
overwhelmed all their civilized sophistication.
The forerunners of these civilizations in the third millennium b.c. had
developed advanced metallurgy in bronze, lead, silver, and gold—a technology that had deep effects on Minoan and Mycenaean life, from war to
farming to the creation of new objects of wealth and status. These metallurgical advances apparently took place independent of similar developments in the Balkans and the Near East. Devising innovative ways to alloy
metals at high temperatures, Aegean smiths created more-lethal weapons
for warfare, new luxury goods, and more-durable and effective tools for
agriculture and construction. This new technology made metal weaponry
more effective in dealing death. A copper weapon had offered relatively
few advantages over a stone one, because this soft metal easily lost its
shape and edge. Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was much stronger
and able to hold a razor edge; its invention made possible the production
of durable metal daggers, swords, and spearheads. The earliest Aegean daggers have been found at third-millennium Troy in western Anatolia. The
dagger soon became standard equipment for warriors in the Bronze Age
and an early entry in the catalogue of weapons that fueled the arms races
familiar in human history. Daggers gradually lengthened into swords, increasing the killing efficiency of these new weapons.
Bronze Age smiths could also add expensive decorations to weapons
and jewelry to make them objects for display and ostentation, serving as
highly visible symbols of their owners’ wealth and rank in society. Since
human beings seem by nature to be status-seeking organisms, new and
more-expensive metal objects gave people yet another way to set themselves apart, if they could afford it. For example, elaborately decorated
weapons helped mark the division between men and women in society
because they signified the masculine roles of hunter and warrior that had
emerged long ago in the division of labor of hunter-gatherers. Since the
desire to accumulate wealth in the form of metal objects and to possess
costly examples as status symbols stimulated demand for metals and for
the skilled workers who could fashion them, the creation of a new kind
of wealth and status represented one of the most important social consequences of the development of metallurgy. Greater availability of such
objects made even more people desire them, further stimulating demand
across society. This process in turn affected people’s expectations about
what constituted rewards appropriate for their labor or for displaying their
status. Now they expected to be able to acquire goods made of metal—
utilitarian objects, such as tools, and luxury goods, such as jewelry. The
elite also prized the products of other specialized crafts perfected in the
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
31
Near East, such as decorative pieces carved from imported ivory. Growing
numbers of crafts specialists in turn swelled Bronze Age Aegean settlements, though the communities remained quite small by modern urban
standards. Some of these specialists were itinerant Near Easterners who
had traveled west looking for new markets for their skills. They brought
with them not only their technological expertise but also a repertoire of
myths that influenced the peoples with whom they interacted. In this way
they became indirect agents of cultural change.
Mediterranean polyculture—the cultivation of olives, grapes, and grain
together in one agricultural system—also grew common in the third millennium, as people began to make use of sharper and better metal tools
and to exploit new plants to expand their diet. The emergence of this system, which still dominates Mediterranean agriculture, had two important
consequences: an increase in the food supply, which stimulated population growth, and further diversification and specialization of agriculture.
This newly diversified agriculture in turn produced valuable new products: olive oil and wine, both of which required new storage techniques
for local use and for trade. The manufacture of giant storage jars therefore
gained momentum, adding another specialization to the crafts of the period. Specialization in the production of food and goods also meant that
the specialists in these fields had no time to grow their own food or fashion the variety of things they needed for everyday life. They had to acquire
their food and other goods through exchange.
Society therefore became increasingly interdependent, both economically and socially. In the smaller villages of early Stone Age Greece, reciprocity had probably governed exchanges among the population of selfsufficient farmers. Reciprocal exchange did not aim at economic gain but
rather promoted a social value: I give you some of what I produce, and
you in return give me some of what you produce. We exchange not because either of us necessarily needs what the other produces, but to reaffirm our social alliances in a small group. Bronze Age society in the Aegean
region eventually reached a level of economic interdependence that went
far beyond reciprocity and far surpassed in its complexity the economies
that had been characteristic of even larger Neolithic villages such as Çatal
Hüyük.
THE PALACE SOCIETY OF MINOAN CRETE
People had inhabited the large, fertile island of Crete for several thousand years before the emergence about 2200–2000 b.c. of the system that
has earned the title of the earliest Aegean civilization. This civilization,
32
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
which was characterized by large architectural complexes today usually
labeled “palaces,” relied on an interdependent economy based primarily on redistribution controlled by the rulers. The first, “pre-palace,” settlers in Crete presumably immigrated across the sea from nearby Anatolia
about 6000 b.c. These Neolithic farming families originally lived in small
settlements nestled close to fertile agricultural land, like their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe. In the third millennium b.c., however, the
new technological developments in metallurgy and agriculture began to
affect society on Crete dramatically. By about 2200 or somewhat later,
huge many-chambered buildings (the so-called palaces) began to appear
on Crete, usually near but not on the coast. The palaces were multistoried
and sprawling, their walls decorated with colorful paintings of ships on
the sea, leaping dolphins, and gorgeous women. Today this Cretan society
is called Minoan after King Minos, the legendary ruler of the island. The
palaces housed the rulers and their servants and served as central storage
facilities, while the general population clustered around the palaces in
houses built one right next to the other, in smaller towns nearby, and in
country houses in outlying areas.
Earthquakes leveled the first Cretan palaces about 1700 b.c., but the
Minoans rebuilt on an even grander scale in the following centuries. Accounting records preserved on clay tablets reveal how these large structures
served as the hubs of the island’s top-down, redistributive economy. Probably influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Minoans at first developed
a pictographic script to symbolize objects, for the purpose of keeping
such records. This system evolved into a more linear form of writing to
express phonetic sounds. Unlike cuneiform or hieroglyphics, this system
of writing was a true syllabary, in which characters stood for the sound of
the syllables of words. This script, used during the first half of the second
millennium b.c., is today called Linear A. The identity of the language that
it recorded remains unknown, and linguistic specialists can decipher only
some of the words; recent scholarship suggesting that the language of
Linear A belonged to the Indo-European family has not convinced the
majority of scholars. In other ways, such as their religious architecture, the
Minoans certainly differed from the population on the Greek mainland.
Since Minoan civilization had direct contact with and great influence on
the mainland inhabitants, however, it is appropriate to treat it as part of the
early history of Greece.
Linear A is sufficiently well understood to see that it was used for records in the form of lists: records of goods received and goods paid out,
inventories of stored goods, livestock, landholdings, and personnel. With
their emphasis on accounting, the Minoans kept records of everything from
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
33
chariots to perfumes. The receipts record payments owed, with careful
notation of any deficits in the amount actually paid in. The records of
disbursements from the palace storerooms cover ritual offerings to the
gods, rations to personnel, and raw materials for crafts production, such
as metal issued to bronze smiths. None of the tablets records any exchange
rate between different categories of goods, such as, for example, a ratio
to state how much grain counted as the equivalent of a sheep. Nor do the
tablets reveal any use of bullion as money in exchanges. (The invention of
coinage lay a thousand years in the future.)
The palace society of Minoan Crete therefore appears to have operated
primarily on a redistributive economic system: The central authority told
producers how much they had to contribute to the central collection facility and also decided what each member of the society would receive for
subsistence and reward. In other words, the palaces did not support a market economy, in which agricultural products and manufactured goods are
exchanged through buying and selling. Similar redistributive economic
systems based on official monopolies had existed in Mesopotamia for
some time, and, like them, the Cretan redistributive arrangement required
both ingenuity and a complicated administration. To handle receipt and
disbursement of olive oil and wine, for example, the palaces had vast storage areas filled with hundreds of gigantic jars next to storerooms crammed
with bowls, cups, and dippers. Scribes meticulously recorded what came
in and what went out by writing on clay tablets kept in the palace. Specific administrators had the job of collecting quotas of the most valuable
items—animals and textiles—from the various districts into which the
palace’s territory was divided. The process of collection and redistribution
applied to crafts specialists as well as to food producers, and the palace’s
administrative officials set specifications for crafts producers’ contributions, which amounted to work quotas. Although not everyone is likely to
have participated in the redistribution system, it apparently dominated
the Cretan economy, minimizing the exchange of goods through markets.
People out in the countryside perhaps occasionally sold goods to one another, but the volume of exchange in these small markets never remotely
rivaled the scope of the redistributive economic system of the palaces.
Overseas trade probably operated as a monopoly through the palace
system, too, with little role for independent merchants and traders. The
Minoan palaces conducted a great deal of commerce by sea, seeking raw
materials and luxury goods. Copper could be obtained on Cyprus, but the
tin needed to make bronze was only found in a few very distant locations.
Therefore, trade for this essential metal connected Crete, if indirectly, to
places as far away as Britain and even Afghanistan. Egypt was a favorite des-
34
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
tination for Minoan seafarers, who are depicted in Egyptian tomb reliefs as
bringing gifts or tribute to Egypt’s rulers. Some Minoans evidently stayed
on in Egypt as mercenary soldiers or artists, and Minoan-style frescoes
(wall paintings on plaster) have been found at Avaris (Tel el-Dab’a) there.
Minoan Crete was also in contact with the Near East and the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, with traders and crafts specialists from
those areas probably voyaging westward to Crete as often as the Minoans
went eastward.
Archaeological evidence suggests that Minoan civilization operated
smoothly and peacefully for centuries. The absence of fortification walls
around the palaces, towns, and isolated country houses of Minoan Crete
imply that Minoan settlements saw no need to defend themselves against
one other. By contrast, contemporary settlements elsewhere around the
Aegean Sea and in Anatolia had elaborate defensive walls. The remains of
the newer Minoan palaces, such as the famous one at Knossos on the north
side of the island (fig. 2.1)—with its hundreds of rooms in five stories,
storage jars holding 240,000 gallons, indoor plumbing, and brightly colored scenes painted on the walls—have led many to see Minoan society as
especially prosperous, peaceful, and happy. The prominence of women in
palace frescoes and the numerous figurines of bosomy goddesses found
on Cretan sites have even prompted speculation that Minoan society continued to be a female-dominated culture of the kind that, as discussed
earlier, has sometimes been postulated as the indigenous society of prehistoric Europe. But the wealth of weaponry found in the graves of Cretan
men shows that expertise in combat and martial display bestowed special
status in Minoan society. The weapons strongly suggest that men dominated in the palace society of Minoan Crete, and it is common to speak of
“princes” or “kings” as the leaders in this society of palaces.
MINOAN CONTACT WITH MYCENAEAN GREECE
The long-distance international trade of Minoan Crete established extensive overseas contacts for the residents of the palaces, and this network
of trade gained strength as the Minoans learned to build still larger ships
that could carry more cargo and survive better in Mediterranean storms.
Their daring sailors voyaged long distances not only to Egypt and the
other civilizations of the Near East, but also to the islands of the Aegean
and southern Greece. On the Greek mainland they encountered another
civilization today called Mycenaean, after its most famous archaeological
site. Inspired by the Greek poet Homer’s tale of the Trojan War, archaeologists have uncovered the Bronze Age site of Mycenae in the Peloponnese
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
35
Fig. 2.1: The Minoan-era palace at Knossos on Crete was a sprawling, multistory
building with extensive areas for storage of goods and large public gatherings.
Centers such as this were the hubs of the “top-down,” redistributive economic
systems of the Minoans. © iStockphoto.com / Ralf Siemieniec.
(the large peninsula that is southern Greece), with its elaborate citadel on
multiple terraces and fortification walls built of large stones meticulously
fitted together (fig. 2.3 on p. 44). The discoveries at Mycenae gained such
renown that “Mycenaean” has become the general term for the Bronze
Age civilization of mainland Greece in the second millennium b.c., although neither Mycenae nor any other of the settlements of Mycenaean
Greece ever ruled Bronze Age Greece as a united state.
The discovery in the nineteenth century a.d. of treasure-filled graves at
Mycenae thrilled the European world. Constructed as stone-lined shafts,
these graves entombed corpses buried with golden jewelry, including
heavy necklaces festooned with pendants, gold and silver vessels, bronze
weapons decorated with scenes of wild animals inlaid in precious metals, and delicately painted pottery. The first excavator of Mycenae, the
businessman-turned-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, thought that he
had found the grave of King Agamemnon (fig. 2.2), who commanded
the Greeks at Troy in Homer’s poem The Iliad. In truth, however, the shaft
graves date to the sixteenth century b.c., long before the Trojan War of the
twelfth century. The artifacts from the shaft graves point to a warrior culture organized in independent settlements ruled by powerful commanders, who enriched themselves by conducting raiding expeditions near and
far, as well as by dominating local farmers. The retrospective story of the
Trojan War told in The Iliad refers, at least in part, to the aims of Mycenaean
36
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
Fig. 2.2: This gold mask was discovered in a grave at Mycenae. Sometimes called
the “Death Mask” of Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek army in the
Trojan War, its identity and function remain mysteries. It does reveal, however,
how rich the rulers of Mycenae became: They could afford to demonstrate their
superior social status by burying such valuable objects. Wikimedia Commons.
society as they passed down to later ages in oral literature. The aggressive
heroes of Homer’s poem sail far from their homes in Greece to attack the
citadel of the Trojans in western Anatolia. Their announced mission is to
rescue Helen, the Greek queen whom the son of the king of Troy had lured
away from her husband, but they were intensely focused on gathering
booty by sacking Troy and other places in the neighborhood. The precious
objects and symbols of wealth and power found in the graves dating long
before the Trojan War show that a society of warriors with goals similar
to those of the male heroes of The Iliad was in place at least four centuries
earlier than the setting of the poem’s story.
The construction of another kind of burial chamber, called tholos
tombs—spectacular underground domed chambers built in beehive
shapes from closely fitted stones—marks the next period in Mycenaean
society, beginning in the fifteenth century b.c. The architectural details
of the tholos tombs and the Near-Eastern-art-inspired styles of the burial
goods found in them testify to the far-flung contacts that Mycenaean rul-
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
37
ers maintained throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Reference to Mycenaean soldiers in Egyptian records indicates that mainland warriors could
take up service far from home.
Contact with the civilization of Minoan Crete was tremendously influential for Mycenaean civilization; Minoan artifacts and artistic motifs
turn up on the mainland in profusion. The evidence for contact between
Minoans and Mycenaeans raises a thorny problem in the explanation of
cultural change. Since the art and goods of the Mycenaeans in the middle
of the second millennium b.c. display many features clearly reminiscent
of Cretan design, the archaeologist who excavated Knossos, Arthur Evans,
argued that the Minoans had inspired Mycenaean civilization by sending colonists to the mainland, as they undeniably had to various Aegean
islands, such as Thera. This demotion of Mycenaean civilization to secondary status offended the excavators of Mycenae, and a continuing debate
among scholars raged over the relationship between the two cultures. They
were certainly not identical; they spoke different languages. The Mycenaeans made burnt offerings to the gods; the Minoans did not. The Minoans
constructed sanctuaries across the landscape in caves, on mountaintops,
and in country villas; the mainlanders built no shrines separate from their
central dwellings. When in the fourteenth century b.c. the mainlanders
started to build palace complexes reminiscent of those on Crete, the Mycenaeans designed their palaces around megarons, spacious reception halls
with huge ceremonial hearths and thrones for the rulers; the Minoans had
not done that in their palaces. Some Mycenaean palaces had more than
one megaron, which could soar two stories high with columns to support
a roof above the second-floor balconies of the palace.
The mystery surrounding the relationship between the Minoans and
the Mycenaeans deepened with the startling discovery in the palace at
Knossos of tablets written in an adaptation of Linear A. This same hybrid
script had also been found on tablets excavated at Mycenaean sites on the
mainland, where scholars called it Linear B. Michael Ventris, a young English architect interested in codes, startled the scholarly world in the 1950s
by demonstrating that the language being written with Linear B was in
fact Greek and not the Minoan language of Linear A. Because the Linear B
tablets from Crete dated from before the final destruction of the Knossos
palace in about 1370 b.c., they meant that the palace administration had
for some time been keeping its records in a foreign language—Greek—
rather than in Cretan. Presumably this change in the language used for
official record keeping means that Greek-speaking Mycenaeans from the
mainland had come to dominate the palaces of Crete, but whether by violent invasion or some kind of peaceful accommodation remains unknown.
38
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
TABLE 1. EXAMPLES OF WORDS IN LINEAR B SCRIPT
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
ka-ko
kha(l)ko(s)
khalkos
‘bronze’
pa-ka-na
pha(s)gana
phasgana
‘swords’
ti-ri-po
tripo(s)
tripous
‘tripod’
i-je-re-ja
(h)iereia
hiereia
‘priestess’
qa-si-re-u
gwasileu(s)
basileus
‘chief ’
tu-ka-te
thugatē(r)
thugater
‘daughter’
ko-wo
ko(r)wo(s)
kouros
‘boy’
1. The words written in Linear B characters.
2. The words transcribed into syllables (separated by hyphens) using the English
alphabet.
3. The words reconstructed into phonetic form (with letters in parentheses that
must be supplied by the speaker reading the words).
4. The words as they appear in classical Greek (transliterated into the English
a...
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