The Greek Dark Ages ( 1180–800 BC) was a period in Ancient Greece that was characterized by the collapse of Mycenaean civilization, where the palaces and cities of the Mycenaeans were either destroyed, abandoned, or both. This period was part of the Late Bronze Age collapse, which affected much of the Eastern Mediterranean.
At around the same time, the Hittite civilization in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) also suffered serious disruption and collapse, with cities such as Troy being destroyed. Moreover, in Egypt, the New Kingdom fell into disarray, leading to the Third Intermediate Period of Egypt. Following this mass destruction, there were fewer, smaller settlements, which suggests widespread famine and depopulation. On the Greek mainland, the Linear B script, used by Mycenaean bureaucrats to write the Greek language, ceased to be used. The later Greek alphabet did not develop until hundreds of years later, in the beginning of the Protohistoric Iron Age, 800 BC.
Postpalatial Bronze Age Mycenaean palaces began to come to an end around 1200 BC, and the process concluded decades later, due to internal tensions within the cities which rejected palatial authority and administration, patent in the disappearance of Linear B writing and palatial architecture. There were also conflicts, in the region of Boeotia, between Mycenaean polities like Orchomenos, Gla, and Thebes. Although Thebes and Eleon had an important reoccupation pattern even in Late Helladic IIIC Middle, c. 1170–1100 BC, when other minor sites around also began to rise, palaces had ceased to exist along with art and burial customs.
On the other hand, in the island of Euboea, the site of Lefkandi grew up in an accelerated way in this Postpalatial period (1200–1050 BC) to become a preeminent place as it has a double bay with sea traffic. Additionally, evidence had emerged of the new presence of Hellenes in sub-Mycenaean Cyprus (c. 1100–1050 BC) and on the Syrian coast at Al-Mina. Greek-speaking people arrived in Cyprus in the late 13th to 11th centuries BC, but did not colonize the island, instead integrating into society as "economic and cultural migrants from the periphery to the core."
Early Iron Age There were four centres in the following Prehistoric or Early Iron Age (1050–800 BC), with more than 1000 individuals: Lefkandi, Athens, Argos, and Knossos, which also featured sociopolitical complexity, hierarchies manifested locally though not in a wider area. The decoration on Greek pottery after about 1050 BC lacks the figurative decoration of Mycenaean ware and is restricted to simpler, generally geometric styles: Early Protogeometric (1050–1000 BC), Middle Protogeometric (1000–950 BC), Late Protogeometric (950 BC - 900 BC), Early Geometric (900 BC - 850 BC), and Middle Geometric (850–800 BC). Thomas R. Martin considers that between 950 BC and 750 BC, the Greeks relearned how to write, but using the alphabet of the Phoenicians instead of the Linear B script used by the Mycenaeans, innovating in a fundamental way by introducing vowels as letters. "The Greek version of the alphabet eventually formed the base of the alphabet used for English today."Martin, Thomas R., (October 3, 2019). "The Dark Ages of Ancient Greece" : "Sometime between about 950 and 750 B.C. the Greeks adopted a Phoenician alphabet to represent the sounds of their own language, introducing important changes to the script by representing the vowels of their own language as letters. The Greek version of the alphabet eventually formed the basis of the alphabet used for English today." Retrieved April 21, 2024.
It was previously thought that all contact was lost between mainland Hellenes and foreign powers during this period, yielding little cultural progress or growth. But archaeologist Alex Knodell considers that artifacts, in the Early Iron Age, from excavations at Lefkandi on the Lelantine Plain in the island of Euboea in the 1980s "revealed that some parts of Greece were much wealthier and more widely connected than traditionally thought, as a monumental building and its adjacent cemetery showed connections to Cyprus, Egypt, and the Levant as markers of elite status and authority, much as they had been in previous periods," and this shows that significant cultural and trade links with the east, particularly the Levant coast, developed from c. 900 BC onwards.
Though life was harsh for the Greeks of the Dark Ages, and one major result of the period was the deconstruction of the old Mycenaean economic and social structures, along with the strict class hierarchies and hereditary rule forgotten, a gradual replacement with new socio-political institutions eventually allowed for the rise of democracy in 5th century BC Athens. Notable events after the Dark Ages period that mark the transition to Classical Antiquity include the first Olympics, in 776 BC, and the composition of the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Mediterranean warfare and Sea Peoples
The fall of Mycenaeans in the Bronze Age collapse was attributed to a Dorian or Sea Peoples invasion, but Sea Peoples could have been pirate bands which coalesced due to the collapse, and diverse in origin, like sailors, workers, or mercenaries, coming from ethnicities like those of the Lukka lands, but not necessarily or exclusively Achaeans (Ekwesh).Middleton, Guy D., (2018). "‘I would walk 500 miles and I would walk 500 more’..." , in: Change, Continuity, and Connectivity, pp. 109-110: "[T]he Sea Peoples [were] pirate bands that developed out of the circumstances of collapse. These groups, Hitchcock and Maeir note, could be ethnically diverse […] coming from […] the Lukka, for example […] others relatively new c. 1200 BC . [And if] Ekwesh do refer to Achaeans […] there is still no necessary reason […] to assume they were all, or even predominantly Greek."
Around this time, c. 1200–1150 BC, large-scale revolts took place in several parts of the eastern Mediterranean. Writing in 2013, Jonathan Hall considered that: "[T]he collapse of the political and economic system centered on the Mycenaean palaces provoked a climate of instability and insecurity and [s]ome people – whether for reasons of safety or economic necessity – decided to abandon their former homes and seek a living elsewhere."
Culture
With the collapse of the palatial centers, no more monumental stone buildings were built, and the practice of wall painting may have ceased. Writing in the Linear B script also ceased, and vital trade links were lost as towns and villages were abandoned. Writing in the Linear B script ended particularly due to the redistributive palace economy crashing; there was no longer a need to keep records about commerce.Martin, Thomas R., (1996). "The Early Greek Dark Age and Revival in the Near East" , in: An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander. The population of Greece declined. The world of organized state armies, kings, officials, and redistributive systems disappeared. Most of the information about the period comes from burial sites and the grave goods contained within them.
The emerging fragmented, localized, and autonomous cultures lacked cultural and aesthetic cohesion and are noted for their diversity of material cultures in pottery styles (e.g. conservative in Athens, eclectic in Knossos), burial practices, and settlement structures. The Protogeometric style of pottery was stylistically simpler than earlier designs, characterized by lines and curves. On the other hand, generalizations about the "Dark Age Society" are considered simplifications, because the range of cultures throughout Greece at the time cannot be grouped into a single "Dark Age Society" category."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]) pp. 342, 344ff.
Tholos tombs are found in Early Iron Age Thessaly and in Crete but not in general elsewhere, and cremation was the dominant rite in Attica but nearby in the Argolid, it was burial. Some former sites of Mycenaean palaces, such as Argos or Knossos, continued to be occupied; the fact that other sites experienced an expansive "boom time" of a generation or two before they were abandoned has been associated by James Whitley with the "big-man social organization", which is based on personal charisma and is inherently unstable: he interprets Lefkandi in this light.
Some regions in Greece, such as Attica, Euboea, and central Crete, recovered economically from these events faster than others, but life for common Greeks would have remained relatively unchanged as it had for centuries. There was still farming, weaving, metalworking and pottery but 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 Protogeometric style (1050 BC – 900 BC), such as the superior pottery technology that included 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 the clay. However, the overall trend was toward simpler, less intricate pieces and fewer resources being devoted to the creation of beautiful art.
The smelting of iron was learned from Cyprus and the Levant and was exploited and improved upon by 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, notes regional differences in iron-working in , and I.M. Morris, "Circulation, deposition and the formation of the Greek Iron Age," Man, n.s. 23(1989:502–19) it is still uncertain when the forged iron weapons and armour achieved strength superior to those that had previously been cast and hammered from bronze. From 1050, 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 mainland Greece to the Anatolian coast to such sites as Miletus, Ephesus, and Colophon, perhaps as early as 1000 BC, but contemporaneous evidence is scant. In Cyprus, some archaeological sites begin to show identifiably Greek ceramics;V. Karageorghis, Early Cyprus, 2002. a colony of Euboean Greeks was established at Al Mina on the Syrian coast, and the revival of an Aegean Greek network of exchange can be detected from 10th-century BC Attic Proto-geometric pottery found in Crete and at Samos, off the coast of Asia Minor.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 ; Fox provides the cultural background to his study of Euboean cultural contacts in the Mediterranean in the 8th century.
Religion in the Greek Dark Ages is seen to be a continuation of Bronze Age Greek Religion, specifically the ideas of Hero worship, and how the gods' powers were attributed.
Post-Mycenaean Cyprus
Cyprus was inhabited by a mix of "Pelasgians" 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" styleN. Schreiber, The Cypro-Phoenician Pottery of the Iron Age, 2003 of small flasks and jugs that 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. Cypriot metalwork was exchanged in Crete.
Society