How Did Ancient Greece Start

We all have to start somewhere and the Ancient Greeks didn’t arrive in Greece ready to write world changing epic poems, philosophy, and tragedies. They wandered into the Aegean after splitting from other Indo-Europeans, settled, founded a civilization, saw it collapse, and started again. As you do. The story of how the Greeks became the Greeks is a complex and surprising story. Far beyond the spread of their culture and language under the Romans, the Greeks saw a massive rise, rapid decline, and steady rise that eventually led them to be a massive influential cultural force for human history. But how specifically did the Greeks become Greeks?

First, let’s talk about some of the factors that make life in Greece special. There is very little arable land, and 75% of the land is covered with steep craggy mountains. Further, the Greeks and their predecessors lacked an important resource for the Bronze age, the bronze itself. Thus, whoever lived in the area had to import it from elsewhere, as well as other important building and staple materials. This meant that any peoples who developed a presence in the area had to rely on the sea for trade. This was not hard in the Aegean. The Aegean is dotted with Islands that are relatively close to each other. It also helped that there were plenty of older and established trading partners, such as the Hittites, Phrygians, Lydians, and other Indo-Europeans in Anatolia. In the Near East they traded with Western Semites such as the Phoenicians, and in the south with the Egyptians. All of which would see significant Hellenization under the empires of Alexander and Rome to the point they would eventually speak and write Greek.

In any event, it might surprise you to learn that the Greeks were not the first people living in Greece, and they were rather late arrivals. Greek sources acknowledged the presence of a people they named the Pelasgians. Herodotus records that they were barbarians with their own languages, but many decided to assimilate with the incoming Greeks. According to Homer in the Iliad Book 2, they were around during the Trojan war. Their fleet of ships is mentioned in the famous Catalogue of Ships, led by Achilles. Herodotus does write about them Hellenising in some areas like Attica, while maintaining their own cultures in others. Either way, we don’t know too much about the Pelasgians. They may have been one people, but more likely they were many peoples the Greeks lumped together as the indigenous population.

Another important pre-Greek people we need to look at when discussing the origins of the greeks are the Minoans. They were a civilization that developed on the island of Crete around 2000 BCE, and spread into the nearby Cyclades islands, meaning they were the first recognizable civilization in the Aegean. The Minoans did not call themselves that. Minoan is the name modern historians gave them based on the myth of the Cretan king Minos from the myth of the minotaur. For all we know that story has no relation to the Minoans because we don’t know much about them. They left a written language, in a script influenced by Egyptian Hieroglyphics we call Linear A, a similar pictographic script. The written language remained in use by the Minoans after they were incorporated into later Greek hegemony until 1300. As for culture, they worshipped different gods from the Greeks, with a central female deity. Like the Greeks after them, they relied on naval trade with their neighbors and seemed to have naval power in terms of warfare. Their political structure also seems to have been centralized around palaces in Crete, with the main palace in Knossos. With the construction of these palaces, a sophisticated form of political and economic organization centered on them developed with smaller palaces around Crete popping up as sub centers, with their influence spreading all the way to ancient Egypt. While we know little about their broader culture, the importance of the Minoans cannot be overstated, because the Greeks seem to have taken much that made the Minoans special and built on it.

In any event, depending on the theory, the Greeks arrived on the scene in around 2300 to 1600 BCE. We don’t know for sure because there are no real records until the Greeks started writing. What we do know is a series of natural disasters destroyed the Minoan cities and settlements. This was over a long time span, long enough to see them rebuild some cities, only for them to be destroyed again. One such disaster was the eruption on the island of modern day Santorini. The volcano preserved the Minoan settlement nearby in a similar manner to how the eruption of mount Vesuvius preserved Pompei. At around 1580 BCE, the Greeks overtook the Minoans and emulated their society. They formed similar centers across the Aegean and on the mainland of Greece.

We call this civilization Mycenaean Greece after the first discovered location in Mycenae. Based on archaeological evidence in Hittite and Egyptian records as well as the Homeric epics, they probably referred to themselves as Achaeans. Yes, these are the people described in the Homeric epics, even if Homer got most details wrong. We will get back to Homer. In fact, Homer is the only reason we are talking about the Minoans and the Myceneans, as Homer establishes one of the few connections between the ancient Greeks and the older Myceneans.

Were the Myceneans politically united as one entity like the Minoans may have been, or did they reflect the kingdoms in the Iliad as separate culturally connected kingdoms? The answer is in between. They adopted the central palace political and economic structure of the Minoans. The difference is that they copied this model across the Aegean into separate palaces surrounded by smaller subservient palaces. Other than the spread of this model, another significant difference is they heavily walled their cities, while the Minoans did not. Mycenaean palaces can be found in Knossos in Crete, Pylos in Messenia, Therapne in Laconia, Mycenae, Tiryns and Midea in Argolus, and Athens among others.

Like later Greeks, they spread out and founded settlements and trading outposts across the Mediterranean. We know they grew rich via trade by 1500 BCE and established themselves in the Aegean, spreading out across the Eastern Mediterranean and trading with the Hittites and Egyptians.

As previously alluded to, the Mycenaeans relied on trade to get Bronze as well, and they were masters at working the metal. They crafted fine weapons with them, funerary masks, and other luxury goods. They had an upper class and a lower class, and the wealth difference was high compared to the later dark age. The resources from trading went to the top and were spent on fineries like bronze works, and on building large defensive walls for the palaces. The chief or king was called a Wanax, and he ruled the main palaces while lesser chiefs ruled the sub palaces. The Wanax and the elites were also buried in vaulted tombs and with finery.

The Mycenaeans also adapted the Minoan Linear A script to produce what we call the Linear B script. The script’s Greek closely resembles the Arcado-Cypriot dialect of ancient Greek. It is a syllabic script, meaning it doesn’t record letters, but combinations of consonants with a vowel – think Chinese. Like Chinese, there are some pictographic symbols, but for the most part it is syllabic, with the syllables strung together to form words Greek speakers may be familiar with.

Don’t get excited just yet. If you thought that Linear B is a repository of Ancient Greek myths, poems, philosophy, or science, you and the scholars who cracked it would be very disappointed. Surprisingly, considering the Mycenean civilization was what Homer was trying to describe, Linear B tablets are almost all strictly business, mostly records; administrative and mercantile records of goods traded, catalogues, lists of animals and supplies, and very little else. They had numbers, units of measurement, and were very well organized, especially compared to Minoan Linear A.

On this note, even though we still have not deciphered Linear A, we know the two scripts were used for very different purposes. Linear A seems to have been used more often outside of record-keeping and has been used in religious and other functions. For all we know Linear A might contain poetry, or narratives. But unfortunately, if they did practice poetry, it wasn’t recorded in Linear B and remained oral like Balkan epic poetry today. In the end, Linear B is, for all intents and purposes, was a very clunky script made up of more than 200 symbols each representing a syllable. There is a reason it was forgotten once the Mycenean civilization collapsed.

But in any event, from what little we gleaned from Linear B that wasn’t strictly records, the Mycenaeans worshipped much of the same gods and goddesses as the later Greeks. They had the same or similar sounding names, and from what little details gleaned, functioned in much the same role. There were some differences, however. Some gods were an adaptation of the Minoan goddesses, especially the chief goddess whom we know very little about. Others came with the Greeks into the region and were forgotten by the time of Homer, or changed identities. Religious worship was also centralized in the palaces rather than shrines outside of them. We have statues from both civilizations as well.

So, where did this seemingly prosperous society all go wrong? The late Bronze Age collapse is to blame. In 1200 the Myceneans faced a rapid catastrophe. Another unspecified catastrophe affected the surviving Mycenean centers around 1150. Both catastrophes were a part of the larger scale bronze age collapse which included the invasions of the sea peoples. The sea peoples are still one of history’s biggest unsolved mysteries. They were probably more than one peoples who migrated somewhere from the North, North Eastern, and East Mediterranean. Some Greeks may have also been a part of the sea peoples according to Egyptian records. These peoples invaded or attempted to settle into places such as the Nile Delta, Hittite lands, and into the arable lands of the Myceneans. The destruction depopulated even small towns and caused migration waves away from vulnerable settlements to safer areas. Such was the case in the mainland with Achaea and Arcadia, or into the Western coasts of Asia Minor. Some unknown force destroyed the main palaces of the Myceneans. Some palaces and larger settlements were rebuilt only for another unknown force to destroy them again a few decades later. We don’t know if these forces were the sea peoples or some other nation, or if it was Mycenean infighting.

Whatever the case, this crisis affected the entire Mediterranean, meaning that Myceneans and their neighbors could not trade as their civilizations burned around them. The chaos of the bronze age collapse disrupted the Mycenean trade infrastructure and their trade partners. The supplies the Myceneans required for their civilization such as Bronze dried up. The valued structures, massive walls, expensive weapons, elaborate funerary culture, and bronze artifacts the Myceneans were known for became materially unfeasible. Settlements larger than 200 people would become unheard of for centuries. This was the dark age, and it saw a monumental shift in how the Greeks lived.

Without trade, the elite class disappeared. With the shrinking population and settlement sizes, Greece’s class system became simple. You had villages that normally didn’t exceed 200 people, usually a handful of families. Each family had an inherited plot of land that was to be passed down from father to son. There were also people who didn’t own land, and they usually worked for those that did, but that number was lower early in the dark age. The Wanax became a local chief. The collection of villages made up a region, or demos. This demos had a head chief, who earned the position by being the most powerful village chief. They met in a council and decided on policies of the demos. There was no distinction between chiefs and sub chiefs, all were given the same designation. In fact, as a sort of proto-democracy, if the sub chiefs decided on a policy or decided to ignore the chief’s orders in a battle, the chief had to go along with the majority. That said, chiefs, no matter their level in the demos, lived in a house that wasn’t all that different from the other villagers, albeit often slightly bigger, but not much. At this point, society wasn’t as divided by class.

It should also be noted that this was a violent society. Chiefs led raiding parties on other villages to steal livestock or take slaves. The combatants under the chiefs in these raiding parties were farmers. Any man who was able bodied would fight to preserve and enrich the demos. There was a heavy level of competition between quite literally everyone. Between farmers, between villagers to be chief, and between chiefs themselves.

During this time, the Greeks forgot Linear B. What is the point in using a script centered around records if there was nothing so significant to record? Instead, we’ll talk about something just as interesting as administrative records, pottery… Listen, it was called the dark age for a reason. The term comes from art history to describe the sudden downturn in quality of Greek crafts after the Mycenaean age. The craftspeople at first continued to create Mycenaean-like pottery and crafts, but of significantly lower quality. Pottery did play an important part in funerary services and everyday life, so it wasn’t going to disappear during this time though. Pottery’s presence was always felt and that is why art historians and archaeologists will spend significant time talking about Greek pottery. Eventually, Dark age pottery would be revived into the proto-geometrical and then geometrical styles of pottery when the technology, economy, and culture picked up. They were able to produce more intricate art as time went on because of an important development during the dark age: Greece’s unwilling entering of the Iron age.

Unlike copper ore, iron ore is native to Greece. Iron was already known during the Mycenean age, but the wealth of the Myceneans kept the bronze trade alive. It was only during the dark age, when importing bronze was no longer an option that small iron ore mines popped up around Greece. The adoption of iron was a slow process, and wouldn’t pick up steam for a while. Iron tools allowed for techniques that increased the quality of the pottery and the intricacies of the designs. Outside of pottery, iron obviously made better tools for farming and violence. As Iron began to proliferate around Greece, production by craftspeople and farmers became easier and the people started to grow in wealth and even begin trading again.

The booming economic prosperity would lead to a larger population and creeping wealth inequality. Not every son could inherit land. This may have been one of the factors of the foundation of so many Greek colonies across the Mediterranean. Chiefs leading expeditions assigned farmland to volunteers.

With this spread we have to talk about the Greek language itself. There are four main dialects in ancient Greek. Athenians spoke Attic Greek, as did the Ionians in Western Anatolia. Spartans spoke Doric, which was one of the West Greek dialects. Myceneans’ Linear B preserved a dialect that was part of the Arcadio-Cypriot dialect. There was no correct Greek, all these dialects are considered subsets of the Greek language. To the ancient Greeks, these accents were mutually intelligible. If you look at a map of where these dialects lie, you will see that Greek speaking areas around the Mediterranean are not uniform. Different dialects aren’t necessarily grouped together but are spread out like patchwork. Close neighbors spoke different accents while distant peoples sometimes spoke the same accent. This had a big part to play in Greek identity and politics and was partially the basis of alliances in later wars. For example, in the Greco-Persian wars Athens was interested in siding with the Ionians partially because of this. In the Peloponnesian wars, Dorics allied together under Sparta.

Archaeologically, the spread of dialects is little understood, but the Greeks proposed an explanation for it. Literary sources like Herodotus claim that it all started with the descendants of the hero Hercules, or Herakles in Greek. The Heraklids were originally from the Peloponnese but were exiled. They convinced the Dorics in the North to invade the Peloponnese with them. The joint Heraklid-Dorics invasion pushed the different dialect speakers away from their homes and caused them to shift around and found distant colonies to escape the chaos. Early Mycenaean scholars took this story so seriously, they tried to pin the blame for the bronze age collapse on this Doric invasion. Eventually these Dorics and Heraklids would become the Spartans. Did the Doric invasion happen? Maybe, but if it did, it would have happened during the dark ages, nor during the bronze age collapse.

What about Homer in all this? The society he tried to describe was the Mycenaean one, but as there were no written records, or any way for Homer to know how exactly the Mycenaeans lived, he turned to his present for reference. Scholars infer a lot about Dark age Greece from Homer’s poems rather than Mycenaean Greece. Archaeological records show that the way of life Homer describes falls more in line with the dark age, just a little exaggerated for effect. For example, the political organization of the chiefs (erroneously called kings in most translations) seems to be more accurate to how dark age chiefs lived and organized themselves. The packed dirt floors of Odysseus’ home is also more in line with excavated chiefly homes rather than the massive walled Mycenaean palaces. The palaces didn’t enter myth through Homer, but they did enter myth another way. The surviving ruins were interpreted by the ancient Greeks to have been built by the cyclopes.

The Dark age ends more or less with the adoption of an alphabet from the Phoenicians. Unlike Linear B, this alphabet was consonants and vowels, cutting the more than 200 signs down to around 24 depending on the dialect. The alphabet was adopted not for record keeping, but to preserve epic poetry like Homer’s and Hesiod’s. With this new script, Greece entered the Archaic age. Written works like Herodotus’ Histories started to develop a sustained Greek identity. As Herodotus wrote “the kinship of all Greeks is in blood, speech, the shrines of gods, the sacrifices that we have in common, and the likeness of our way of life.”

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