| HELLADIC c. 1500Ð1200 BCE |
DARK
AGE c. 1200Ð750 BCE |
HELLENIC c. 750Ð338 BCE |
HELLENISTIC 338Ð31 BCE |
| Minoan and Mycenaean Cultures | fragmented Greek culture | Ionian and Classical Greek cultures | Greek culture meets and mixes with surrounding cultures |
Lefkandi is considered an anomaly in Greek history not only because of the many foreign elements it reveals and incorporates, but because it shows remarkable wealth and organization at a time thought to be devoid of both. The remains unearthed at Lefkandi are dated around the 10th century BCE, in the midst of the Dark Age of Greece. Placed between the 12th and 8th centuries BCE, the Dark Age is an essentially blank time between two flourishing eras--the Mycenaean and the Ionian (also called Helladic and Hellenic). It is termed "dark" because of the extremely scant and patchy material evidence it left behind, and its complete lack of any written record.
Setting the Stage: Pre-Dark Age Greece:
Preceding the Dark Age were the highly organized and sophisticated palace cultures of the Minoans and Mycenaeans in southern Greece. The "palaces" of Minoan culture on Crete were really large community centers that supported a people rich in communication, trade, and material wealth. The huge Minoan palaces housed impressive works of art and craftsmanship and stored food for thousands of citizens, all evidence of a highly organized civilization. We also know from palace excavations that they engaged in overseas trade and had their own writing system (Linear A, at this point untranslated). Minoan culture appears to have ended in the mid 15th century BCE.
The Mycenaean civilization that followed on Mainland Greece was no less impressive. It is thought to have either conquered or gradually overrun the Minoan culture, and absorbed some of its elements. Centered similarly around palaces--theirs more on the order of fortresses--the Mycenaeans also had their own written language (Linear B, a forerunner of Classical Greek). They too created great works of art and engaged in vigorous overseas trade, leaving evidence of Egyptian and Oriental influences in their ruins. The Mycenaean palaces were destroyed by unknown forces (some suggest natural disasters, some foreign invasion) in the late 13th century BCE.
What followed was not another age of cultural achievement, but several hundred years of economic, political, and social depression that left almost no imprint on history. Little to no artifacts, ruins, or other traces remain, so this period is termed the Dark Age.
Following the Dark Age, which drew to a close in the 8th century BCE, the Ionian culture rose in Greece. It, like the Mycenaean culture, featured written language, monumental buildings, urban centers, and complex social structure. The Ionian gradually developed into the Classical Greek period in the 5th century BCE, which closed with Alexander of Macedon's conquests in the Mediterranean and the Near East.
The Dark Age--c. 1200-750 BCE:
Based on the profound lack of archeological remains from the period, scholars have drawn some conclusions about the state of society following the Mycenaean age. It is believed that after the collapse of the palaces, the people were for some reason unable to reorganize themselves. They fell into migrating, and settled in small groups that never collected to form a city or widespread culture. Trade, art, architecture, and other practices of organized civilization were virtually abandoned, and writing completely disappeared.
This is why Lefkandi was so unexpected, from an historical point of view. While it has not yielded any writing in its ruins, it has turned up evidence of wealth, social organization, and trade with other areas of the Mediterranean, all at levels presumed impossible in the Dark Age.
Pottery:
Most material remains from the Dark Age demonstrate primarily localized cultures. Pottery decoration, one of the main measures of social contact and exchange, was done in many styles, but none were spread over a very large area. For example, pottery from western Attica did not appear outside of western Attica. The distinct styles also did not evolve much from century to century. Since cultures in contact via trade typically borrow and exchange decorational styles, it is assumed there was not much interaction between groups.
At Lefkandi, however, pottery has been discovered that shows influences from Cyprus in both potting style and decoration (such pottery was also found at Athens). The new styles, unseen before the 11th century in Greece, are very similar to those from Cyprus categorized as Cypriot IIIB. This would indicate that the people of Lefkandi and Athens had not lost contact with outsiders, and overseas ones at that. Contact was probably through trade, and perhaps through migrations.
Writing:
No writing--from tablets, pottery, paintings, mosaics, or any other source--has been recovered from Dark Age Greece. The absence of writing in any form at all seems to indicate that there was no need for writing. The primary uses for writing in the preceding centuries had been record keeping in storerooms and for political purposes. Dark Age Greeks, then, could not have had any storerooms large enough, or political systems broad enough, to need keeping track of in writing. Small-scale, local economies are the only models that would not have required such records.
Architecture:
Another characteristic prominent in Helladic and Hellenic times and missing from the Dark Ages was monumental architecture. The palaces built by the Minoans and Mycenaeans were gigantic stone constructions that provided storage, shelter, and/or protection for thousands of people. The colossal temples, monuments, public places and other architectural feats of the Classical Greeks are even better known to us. No such buildings exist from the intervening Dark years; there were evidently no constructions sturdy enough to survive. The absence of ambitious architecture would logically go hand in hand with an absence of political or religious power structures large enough to merit such monuments. This supports the notion that settlements were small and self-contained.
At Lefkandi, however, the best-known find is a huge 10th century building--precisely what Greece at that time was thought to lack. Similar structures were found at Thebes and Pefkakia, and assigned to the same time period. The house-like structure at Lefkandi measures 47 meters by 10 meters, and is made from wood, mud bricks, and stone. It houses the graves of a man and a woman. The building bears little resemblance to the grand architecture of the Helladic or Hellenic ages, but its existence does suggest that someone possessed enough wealth, skill, and resources to execute a project of fairly ambitious proportions. These communities must have been sufficiently developed to support a person or group of people with enough concentrated wealth and enough labor at their disposal to devote to an expensive burial.
Burial Findings:
Artifacts excavated from the multiple graves at Lefkandi (explained in greater detail elsewhere in this site) also speak not only of wealth but also of wide trade connections throughout the Mediterranean. Graves made later than the two in the large building contain pottery from Athens, jewelry and metal from the Near East, and signs of contact with northern Greece and Macedonia. There is also jewelry that may be of local workmanship, and if so, the skill involved is unusually high for the period.
Prior to this discovery, Dark Age Greeks were thought to have been nearly completely isolated from contact outside their local communities. From the stylistic isolation of pottery and the lack of evidence for trade in and between other parts of Greece, it was assumed that anything requiring more than rudimentary social organization was lost to society. Lefkandi nearly reverses this view, forcing archeologists to rethink their assumptions about Greece in the Dark Age.
Lefkandi challenges most long-held notions about what was going on in Greece between the Mycenaean and Ionian cultures. From a view that excluded much of any sophistication or cultural advancement, we are brought to see that in one area of Greece at least, people were trading, building, and creating at levels far beyond the scope of the primitive and nomadic peoples previously imagined.
The Dark Age is Introduced:
The concept of a Dark Age in GreeceÕs past was not initially based on archeological evidence from Greece itself. The idea was actually proposed in the late 1800s by Egyptologists. Most all ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern cultures have relative chronologies, but no absolute dates, so archeologists have relied on correlations with Egypt--the one empire for which we do have absolute dates--for dating those cultures. They look for places where the Egyptian culture overlaps with another culture, and align the chronologies accordingly. (An example is pottery from the height of Mycenaean culture found in a precisely dated Egyptian city, showing that both existed simultaneously.)
Egyptologists in the 1800s, who were certain that their calculations regarding Egypt's past were correct, found that to properly align the Egyptian and Greek histories, it was necessary to place several hundred years between the Mycenaean and the Hellenic cultures, an idea that had not seemed logical based on Greek archeology at the time. The archeologists were convinced, however, and it soon became widely accepted that there was a missing period in Greek history. Since no material evidence had been found to support the idea, the time was called the Dark Age. From that time very little has been discovered from the Dark Age, and the dearth of information has led archeologists to the above conclusions. Only in recent decades, with the discovery of sites like Lefkandi, have we been able to shed any light on this anonymous era.
The Dark Age in Question:
The matter of lost centuries in Greece's past is far from resolved. Numerous questions and problems arose from the separation of Mycenaean and Ionian culture with such a lengthy and culturally vacuous gap.
Language poses one problem: The Mycenaeans had a well-developed written language (Linear B), as did the Ionian and Classical Greeks, but in the intervening period there is no reason to believe any Greeks practiced writing in any form. Though the Mycenaean and Ionian writing systems differ (one uses characters, the other syllables), the language they recorded is the same, and several hundred years of illiteracy between the two seems implausible.
The so-called "Homeric Question" also remains an enigma: How can the poet called Homer, who lived in the 7th or 8th century BCE, have written the amazing accounts of the Iliad and the Odyssey in sophisticated Greek prose, immediately following a period of widespread illiteracy? His subject, events surrounding the Trojan War at the end of the Bronze Age, is also surprising. Homer writes in great detail of elements such as metalworking that were exclusively part of Mycenaean culture, showing excellent knowledge of far-removed times; his accuracy of description has been verified by Mycenaean excavations. HomerÕs relationship with ancient history is perplexing at the least.
Another fact that calls the Dark Age into doubt is that no Greeks from Ionian times forward made any mention of a Dark Age in their history. The numerous poets, playwrights, historians, writers, and philosophers of Classical times said nothing about it, and made no implication that there had once been any culturally bleak time.
Other various archeological problems arose as well, such as excavations that seemed to show Mycenaean and much later Greek architecture existing without much of a gap in time between them. Mycenaean pottery and "Geometric" style pottery from the 8th century are also found together in some cases, which does not prove there no time passed between their creations, but it does make an extremely long period between seem strange.
Some historians and archeologists attempt to solve these problems by proving that the creation of a Dark Age in Greece's past was a mistake, and that the fault was on the part of the Egyptologists. One of these is the late Immanuel Velikovsky, who believed that rather than adding centuries to the Greek chronology, they should be subtracted from the Egyptian one. He researched deeply the creation of the Egyptian chronology, and found much evidence for its revision, ultimately concluding that the Egyptologists were mistaken in their placement of dates. Velikovsky's model shortens Egyptian history, eliminating the need for a Greek Dark Age. Under this view the period between the Mycenaean and Ionian cultures would have been a matter of decades rather than centuries. His extensive research and arguments are published at http://www.varchive.org/dag/ (his original manuscript remains unpublished). The site is itself a summary (albeit an extensive one) of Velikovsky's work, and so is not restated here. Anyone interested in arguments for reconsidering the Dark Age, or in the history of its conception, will find the site useful.
Lefkandi and its contents would fit with relative ease into a new view in which Greece did not suffer the cultural desolation of a Dark Age. Its active and fairly prosperous culture seems out of step with the Greece we imagined during this time. Until the Dark Age is better understood or eliminated, though, Lefkandi remains an oddity, and challenges traditional ideas about this little-known time in ancient Greece.