Greek Dark Ages Photos:

Greek Dark Ages
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Greek Dark Ages
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Greek Dark Ages
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Greek Dark Ages
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Greek Dark Ages Basic Informations:

Fall of the Mycenaeans
2> From around 1200 BC, the palace centres and outlying settlements of the Mycenaeans' highly organized culture began to be abandoned or destroyed, and by 1050 BC, the recognisable features of Mycenaean culture had disappeared. Many explanations attribute the fall of the Mycenaean civilization and the Bronze Age collapse to climatic or environmental catastrophe combined with an invasion by Dorians or by the Sea Peoples or the widespread availability of edged weapons of iron, but no single explanation fits the available archaeological evidence. [edit]

Tags:Troy,Bronze Age Collapse,Sea Peoples,Archaeological Evidence,Edged Weapons,Mycenaean Civilization,People,Mycenaean,
Mediterranean warfare and the Sea Peoples
2> Around this time large-scale revolts took place in several parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, and attempts to overthrow existing kingdoms were made as a result of economic and political instability by surrounding people who were already plagued with famine and hardship. Part of the Hittite kingdom was invaded and conquered by the so-called Sea Peoples whose origins - perhaps from different parts of the Mediterranean, such as the Black Sea, the Aegean and Anatolian regions - remain obscure. The thirteenth and twelfth-century inscriptions and carvings at Karnak and Luxor are the only sources for "Sea Peoples", a term invented by the Egyptians themselves and recorded in the boastful accounts of Egyptian military successes:[2] The foreign countries...made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were on the move, scattered in war. No country could stand before their arms...Their league was Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh. —[3] A similar assemblage of peoples may have attempted to invade Egypt twice, once during the reign of Merneptah about 1224 BC, and then again during the reign of Ramesses III about 1186 BC. [edit]

Tags:Hittite,Black Sea,Karnak,Luxor,Peleset,Tjeker,Shekelesh,Denyen,Weshesh,Merneptah,Ramesses Iii,Military,Arts,
Dark Age culture
2> With the collapse of the palatial centres, no more monumental stone buildings were built and the practice of wall painting may have ceased; writing in the Linear B script ceased, vital trade links were lost, and towns and villages were abandoned. The population of Greece was reduced,[4] and the world of organized state armies, kings, officials, and redistributive systems that offered security to individuals disappeared. Most of the information about the period comes from burial sites and the grave goods contained within them. To what extent the earliest Greek literary sources, Homeric epics (8th-7th century) and Hesiod's Works and Days (7th century) describe life in the 9th-8th centuries remains a matter of considerable debate. Map of the Dark age Greece. The fragmented, localized and autonomous cultures of reduced complexity are noted for such diversity of their material cultures in pottery styles (conservative in Athens, eclectic at Knossos), burial practices and settlement structures, that generalizations about a "Dark Age society" are misleading.[5] Tholos tombs are found in early Iron Age Thessaly and in Crete but not in general elsewhere, and cremation is the dominant rite in Attica, but nearby in the Argolid it was inhumation.[6] Some former sites of Mycenaean palaces, such as Argos or Knossos, continued to be occupied; other sites' experiencing an expansive "boom time" of a generation or two before they were abandoned, James Whitley has associated with the "Big-man social organization", based on personal charisma and inherently unstable: he interprets Lefkandi in this light.[7] Some regions in Greece, such as Attica, Euboea and central Crete, recovered economically from these events faster than others, but life for the poorest Greeks would have remained relatively unchanged as it had done for centuries. There was still farming, weaving, metalworking and potting in this time, albeit at a lower level of output and for local use in local styles. Some technical innovations were introduced around 1050 BC with the start of the Proto-geometric style (1050-900 BC), such as the superior pottery technology, which resulted in a faster potter's wheel for superior vase shapes and the use of a compass to draw perfect circles and semicircles for decoration. Better glazes were achieved by higher temperature firing of clay. However, the overall trend was toward simpler, less intricate pieces and fewer resources being devoted to the creation of beautiful art. During this time the smelting of iron was learnt from Cyprus and the Levant, exploited and improved upon, using local deposits of iron ore previously ignored by the Mycenaeans: edged weapons were now within reach of less elite warriors. Though the universal use of iron was one shared feature among Dark Age settlements,[8] it is still uncertain when the forged iron weapons and armour achieved superior strength to those that had been previously cast and hammered from bronze. From 1050 BC many small local iron industries appeared, and by 900 almost all weapons in grave goods were made of iron. The distribution of the Ionic Greek dialect in historic times indicates early movement from the mainland of Greece to the Anatolian coast to such sites as Miletus, Ephesus, and Colophon, perhaps as early as 1000 BC, though the contemporaneous evidence is scanty. In Cyprus some archaeological sites begin to show identifiably Greek ceramics,[9] a colony of Euboean Greeks was established at Al Mina on the Syrian coast, and a reviving Aegean Greek network of exchange can be detected from 10th-century Attic Proto-geometic pottery found in Crete and at Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor.[10] [edit]

Tags:Greek,Linear B,Lefkandi,Euboea,Cyprus,Al Mina,Homeric Epics,Hesiod's ,Material Cultures,Tholos Tombs,Thessaly,Cremation,Attica,Argolid,Inhumation,Argos,Knossos,Big-man Social Organization,Proto-geometric Style,Levant,Miletus,Ephesus,Colophon,Proto-geometic Pottery,Samos,Homeric Epic,Athens,Crete,Hesiod,Homer,
Post-Mycenaean Cyprus
2> Cyprus was inhabited by a mix of "pelasgian" and Phoenicians, joined during this period by the first Greek settlements. Potters in Cyprus initiated the most elegant new pottery style of the 10th and 9th centuries, the 'Cypro-Phoenician' 'black on red' style[11] of small flasks and jugs which held precious contents, probably scented oil. Together with distinctively Greek Euboean ceramic wares it was widely exported and is found in Levantine sites, including Tyre and far inland in the late 11th and 10th centuries. Cypriote metalwork was exchanged in Crete. [edit]

Tags:Pelasgian,Phoenicians,Tyre,
Society
2> It is likely that Greece during this period was divided into independent regions organized by kinship groups and the oikoi or households, the origins of the later poleis. Excavations of Dark Age communities such as Nichoria in the Peloponnese have shown how a Bronze Age town was abandoned in 1150 BC but then reemerged as a small village cluster by 1075 BC. At this time there were only around forty families living there with plenty of good farming land and grazing for cattle. The remains of a 10th century building, including a megaron, on the top of the ridge have led to speculation that this was the chieftain’s house. This was a larger structure than those surrounding it but it was still made from the same materials (mud brick and thatched roof). It was perhaps also a place of communal storage of food and of religious significance. High status individuals did in fact exist in the Dark Age, but their standard of living was not significantly higher than others of their village.[12] Most Greeks did not live in isolated farmsteads but in small settlements. It is likely that, as at the dawn of the historical period two or three hundred years later, the main economic resources for each family was the ancestral plot of land of the oikos, the kleros or allotment; without this a man could not marry.[13] [edit]

Tags:Oikoi,Poleis,Nichoria,Megaron,
Lefkandi burial
2> The Protogeometric building and the cemetery at Toumba Lefkandi. Lefkandi on the island of Euboea was a prosperous settlement in the Late Bronze Age,[14] possibly to be identified with old Eretria.[15] It recovered quickly from the collapse of Mycenaean culture, and in 1981 excavators of a burial ground found the largest 10th century building yet known from Greece.[16] Sometimes called 'the heroon, this long narrow building (150 feet by 30 feet) contained two burial shafts. In one were placed four horses and the other contained a cremated male buried with his iron weapons and an inhumed woman, heavily adorned with gold jewellery.[17] The man's bones were placed in a bronze jar from Cyprus, with hunting scenes on the cast rim. The woman was clad with gold coils in her hair, rings, gold breast plates, an heirloom necklace (an elaborate Cypriot or Near Eastern necklace made some 200–300 years before her burial) and an ivory handled dagger at her head. The horses appeared to have been sacrificed, some appearing to have iron bits in their mouths. No evidence survives to show whether the building was erected to house the burial, or whether the 'hero' or local chieftain in the grave was cremated and then buried in his grand house; whichever is true, the house was soon demolished and the debris used to form a roughly circular mound over the wall stumps. Within the next few years and down to c 820 BC, rich members of the community were cremated and buried close to the eastern end of the building, in much the same way as Christians might seek to be buried close to a saint's grave; the presence of imported objects, notable throughout more than eighty further burials, contrast with other nearby cemeteries at Lefkandi and attest to a lasting elite tradition. [edit]

Tags:Eretria,Heroon,Ivory,
End
2> The archaeological record of many sites demonstrates that the economic recovery of Greece was well advanced by the beginning of the 8th century BC. Both cemeteries such as the Kerameikos in Athens or Lefkandi and sanctuaries such as Olympia, recently-founded Delphi or the Heraion of Samos, first of the colossal free-standing temples, are richly provided with offerings including items from the Near East, from Egypt and from Italy made of exotic materials such as amber or ivory, while exports of Greek pottery demonstrate contact with the Levant coast at such sites as Al Mina and with the region of the Villanovan culture to the north of Rome. The decoration of pottery becomes more and more elaborate and includes figured scenes which parallel the stories of Homeric Epic. Iron tools and weapons become better in quality, while renewed Mediterranean trade must have brought new supplies of copper and tin to make a wide range of elaborate bronze objects such as tripod stands like those offered as prizes in the funeral games celebrated by Achilles for Patroclus.[18] Other coastal regions of Greece besides Euboea were once again full participants in the commercial and cultural exchanges of the eastern and central Mediterranean, while communities developed which were governed by an elite group of aristocrats rather than by the single basileus or chieftain of earlier periods.[19] [edit]

Tags:Kerameikos,Olympia,Delphi,Heraion Of Samos,Amber,Villanovan,Figured Scenes,Tripod Stands,Achilles,Patroclus,Basileus,
New writing system
2> By the mid- to late eighth century a new alphabet system was adopted from the Phoenicians by a Greek with first-hand experience of it. The Greeks adapted the Phoenician writing system, notably introducing characters for vowel sounds and thereby creating the first truly alphabetic (as opposed to abjad) writing system. The new alphabet quickly spread throughout the Mediterranean and was used to write not only the Greek language, but also Phrygian and other languages in the eastern Mediterranean. As Greece sent out colonies west towards Sicily and Italy (Pithekoussae, Cumae), the influence of their new alphabet extended further. The ceramic Euboean artifact inscribed with a few lines written in the Greek alphabet referring to "Nestor's cup", discovered in a grave at Pithekoussae (Ischia) dates from c. 730 BC; it seems to be the oldest written reference to the Iliad. The Etruscans benefited from the innovation: Old Italic variants spread throughout Italy from the 8th century. Other variants of the alphabet appear on the Lemnos Stele and in the alphabets of Asia Minor. The previous Linear scripts were not completely abandoned: the Cypriot syllabary, descended from Linear A, remained in use on Cyprus in Arcadocypriot Greek and Eteocypriot inscriptions until the Hellenistic era. [edit]

Tags:Greek Language,Abjad,Phrygian,Pithekoussae,Cumae,Nestor's Cup,Iliad,Etruscans,Old Italic,Lemnos Stele,Alphabets Of Asia Minor,Cypriot Syllabary,Linear A,Arcadocypriot Greek,Eteocypriot,Hellenistic Era,
References
2> ^ O.T.P.K. Dickinson: The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age: continuity and change between the twelfth and eighth centuries B.C. (2006) ^ Sandars (1978). ^ Edgerton and Wilson (1936), pl 46, p.53; and J. Wilson, " Egyptian Historical Texts" in Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (3rd ed., 1969). ^ Snodgrass 1971:360-68. ^ "The most striking feature of the Dark Ages is its regionalism, its material diversity" (James Whitley, "Social Diversity in Dark Age Greece", The Annual of the British School at Athens 86 [1991:341-365]) p. 342, 344ff. ^ Snodgrass 1971:140-212. ^ Whitley 1991. ^ Whitley 1991:343, notes regional differences in iron-working in A.N. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece (1971:213-95), and I.M. Morris, "Circulation, deposition and the formation of the Greek Iron Age," Man, n.s. 23(1989:502-19) ^ V. Karageorghis, Early Cyprus, 2002. ^ R.W.V. Catling, "Exports of Attic protogeometric pottery and their identification by non-analytical means", Annual of the British School at Athens 93 (1998:365-78), noted in Robin Lane Fox, Travelling Heroes in the Epic Age of Homer, 2008:48; Fox provides the cultural background to his study of Euboean cultural contacts in the Mediterranean in the 8th century. ^ N. Schreiber, The Cypro-Phoenician Pottery of the iron Age, 2003 ^ Snodgrass (1971). ^ Hurwitt (1985). ^ Lefkandi excavation reports: bibliography ^ The candidates and their opponents are noted in Fox 2008:51 note 23. ^ M. R. Popham, P. G. Calligas, and L. H. Sackett, (eds.), Lefkandi II: the Protogeometric Building at Toumba, Part 2. The Excavation, Architecture and Finds, BSA Suppl. vol. 23, Oxford 1993. ^ Edward Bispham, Thomas Harrisom, Brian A. Sparkes, Ancient Greece and Rome, page 89, The Edinburgh Companion, Ed 2006. ^ Homer, Iliad XXIII ^ J.N. Coldstream, Geometric Greece: 900-700 BCE 1979 [edit]

Tags:Ancient Greece,Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating To The Old Testament,
Bibliography
3> Chew, Sing C., World Ecological Degradation: Accumulation, Urbanization and Deforestation 3000 BC - AD 2000, 2001, [ISBN 0-7591-0031-4] Chapter 3, The second-millennium Bronze Age: Crete and Mycenaean Greece 1700 BC - 1200 BC. Desborough, V.R.d'A. (1972). The Greek Dark Ages. . Faucounau, Jean, Les Peuples de la Mer et leur histoire, Paris : L'Harmattan, 2003. Hurwitt, Jeffrey M., The Art and Culture of Early Greece 1100-480 BC, Cornell University Press, 1985, Chapters 1-3. Langdon, Susan, Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece, 1100-700 BC, Cambridge University Press, 2010. Latacz, J. '"Between Troy and Homer : The so-called Dark Ages in Greece", in: Storia, Poesia e Pensiero nel Mondo antico. Studi in Onore di M. Gigante, Rome, 1994. Jan Sammer, New Light on the Dark Age of Greece [1] (Immanuel Velikovsky Archive). Snodgrass, Anthony M. (c2000). The dark age of Greece : an archaeological survey of the eleventh to the eighth centuries BC. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-93635-7 (hb) ISBN 0-415-93636-5 (pb).  Sandars, N.K. (c1978). The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the ancient Mediterranean 1250-1150 BC. London: Thames and Hudson. ISBN 0-500-02085-X.  Whitley, James, Style and Society in Dark Age Greece: The Changing Face of a Pre-literate Society, 1100-700 BC, Cambridge University Press, 2003, Series : New Studies in Archaeology. v d e Ancient Greece Outline Timeline Periods Cycladic civilization Minoan civilization Mycenaean civilization Greek Dark Ages Archaic period Classical Greece Hellenistic Greece Roman Greece Geography Aegean Sea Hellespont Macedonia Sparta Athens Corinth Thebes Thermopylae Ionian Sea Ionia Aeolis Doris Antioch Alexandria Pergamon Miletus Ephesus Delphi Delos Olympia Troy Rhodes Crete Peloponnesus Epirus Cyprus Pontus Magna Graecia Ancient Greek Colonies Politics Apella Ecclesia Heliaia Boule Agora Graphē paranómōn Areopagus League of Corinth Diadochi Rulers Kings of Sparta Kings of Athens Archons of Athens Kings of Macedon Kings of Pontus Kings of Paionia Roman Emperors Kings of Kommagene Kings of Lydia Attalid Kings of Pergamon Diadochi Kings of Argos Tyrants of Syracuse Life Agriculture Clothing Cuisine Athenian democracy Economy Education Festivals Homosexuality Law Marriage Mourning ritual Olympic Games Pederasty Philosophy Prostitution Religion Slavery Warfare Wine Military Wars Army of Macedon Antigonid Macedonian army Pezhetairoi Hoplite Seleucid army Hellenistic armies Phalanx formation Peltast Sarissa Xyston Sacred Band of Thebes People Philosophers Anaxagoras Anaximander Anaximenes Antisthenes Aristotle Democritus Diotima of Mantinea Diogenes of Sinope Epicurus Empedocles Heraclitus Hypatia Leucippus Gorgias Parmenides Plato Protagoras Pythagoras Socrates Thales Themistoclea Zeno Authors Aeschylus Aesop Alcaeus Archilochus Aristophanes Bacchylides Euripides Herodotus Hesiod Hipponax Homer Ibycus Lucian Menander Mimnermus Pindar Plutarch Polybius Sappho Simonides Sophocles Stesichorus Thucydides Theognis Timocreon Tyrtaeus Xenophon Others Alexander the Great Alcibiades Archimedes Aspasia Demosthenes Euclid Hipparchus Hippocrates Leonidas Lycurgus Milo of Croton Pericles Ptolemy Solon Themistocles Groups Playwrights Poets Philosophers Tyrants Mythological figures Cultures Ancient Greek tribes Greeks Thracian Greeks Ancient Macedonians Buildings Temples Parthenon Temple of Artemis Acropolis Ancient Agora Temple of Zeus at Olympia Temple of Hephaestus Samothrace temple complex Arts Architecture Coinage Literature Music Pottery Sculpture Theatre Sciences Astronomy Mathematics Medicine Technology Language Proto-Greek Mycenaean Homeric Dialects Aeolic Arcadocypriot Attic Doric Ionic Locrian Macedonian Pamphylian Koine Writing Linear A Linear B Greek alphabet Greek numerals Attic numerals Lists Cities in Epirus Theatres Cities

Tags:Cycladic Civilization,Minoan Civilization,Classical Greece,Hellenistic Greece,Outline,Timeline,Archaic Period,Roman Greece,Geography,Aegean Sea,Hellespont,Macedonia,Sparta,Corinth,Thebes,Thermopylae,Ionian Sea,Ionia,Aeolis,Doris,Antioch,Alexandria,Pergamon,Delos,Rhodes,Peloponnesus,Epirus,Pontus,Magna Graecia,Ancient Greek Colonies,Apella,Ecclesia,Heliaia,Boule,Agora,Graphē Paranómōn,Areopagus,League Of Corinth,Diadochi,Kings Of Sparta,Kings Of Athens,Archons Of Athens,Kings Of Macedon,Kings Of Pontus,Kings Of Paionia,Roman Emperors,Kings Of Kommagene,Kings Of Lydia,Attalid Kings Of Pergamon,Kings Of Argos,Tyrants Of Syracuse,Agriculture,Clothing,Cuisine,Athenian Democracy,Economy,

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