Early Greece. Oswyn Murray

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СКАЧАТЬ of cremation in place of inhumation. About a century after the final collapse of Mycenean culture occur the first signs of a reawakening. Renewed contact between Athens and Cyprus, the area of the Greek world which offers most archaeological continuity with the Mycenean past, brought from southern Asia Minor a major new technological advance, iron smelting; from about 1050 iron began to replace bronze as the metal in everyday use. About the same time in Athens a new style of pottery began to emerge, of considerably higher quality than before – Proto-Geometric (from about 1050 to 900), decorated with simple repeated geometric patterns and broad bands of dark and light. Again it is to this period, from about 1050 to 950, that the Ionian movement across the Aegean Sea from Athens to the coast of Asia Minor can be dated on the evidence of a number of excavated sites.

      The site that has revealed most about development within the Dark Age is Lefkandi, a small low promontory on the inner coast of Euboea; here a single trial hole 8.5 metres deep to bedrock has provided an almost continuous sequence of artefacts from the early Mycenean period (about 2000 BC) through the Dark Age period to about 825 BC, with only a short gap of perhaps fifty years around 1150–1100; successive excavations in the surrounding area have revealed large cemeteries from the Dark Age period. This was clearly a substantial settlement with a remarkable level of continuity and prosperity across the Dark Age.

      The most remarkable discovery at Lefkandi was made in 1980. A local headmaster chose the August bank holiday to hire a bulldozer in order to clear a tiresome unexcavated site in his garden: he revealed and half destroyed the most important and most puzzling Dark Age monument yet found. It is a building dating from about 950 BC, apsidal with a porch at the other end, at least 47 metres long by 10 metres wide, with complex internal dividing walls, an external wooden colonnade and a central row of supporting pillars for the roof. The clay floor was laid on levelled rock; the walls are of mud brick on a base of roughly shaped stone, and faced with plaster internally; the roof was thatched. It is clearly a public or religious building similar in form both to the major houses of the late Dark Age and to the earliest religious buildings such as the late Geometric temple of Apollo at Eretria. But it is some two hundred years earlier than these buildings, and is neither a chief’s house nor a temple. For the purpose of the structure is clear: centrally placed in the main room, two adjacent pits were dug at the same time as the building was constructed. In the first were the skeletons of four horses; in the second were two burials. One was a cremation: a bronze amphora decorated with hunting scenes around the rim contained the ashes of a man. The top of the vessel was closed with a bronze bowl, under which the decorated funeral shroud had been folded and was still preserved; beside the amphora was placed the iron sword, spearhead and whetstone of the cremated warrior. The other burial was that of a woman, not cremated, but laid out with feet and hands crossed; there were gilt hair coils by her head, a gold decorated pendant at her throat and a necklace of gold and faience beads; her breasts were covered by gold discs joined with a large gold plaque; beside her lay decorated pins. By her head was an iron knife with an ivory handle. Part of the building was constructed over the remains of the funeral pyre.

      The burial rites recall those of Patroklos in Iliad 23, with its ritual sacrifice of his favourite horses and of human victims, or the accounts of Viking burials in south Russia two thousand years later, as described by Arab observers; in the words of Ibn Rustah,

      When one of their notables dies, they make a grave like a large house and put him inside it. With him they put his clothes and the gold armlets he wore, and, moreover, an abundance of food, drinking bowls and coins. They also put his favourite wife in with him, still alive. Then the grave door is sealed and she dies there.

      Such a building in the Greek world would normally have been designed for use; yet as soon as it was constructed the roof was smashed in and the entrance closed up. Ramps were constructed up the walls and the building was filled with rubble. It remained thereafter as a long mound, remembered sufficiently to be the focal point for the orientation of a group of later rich graves in the cemetery, which seem to be significantly grouped around one end, and perhaps belong to members of the same powerful family.

      We stand at the midpoint between the Mycenean world and historical Greece, in the presence of a ritual murder such as was often re-enacted with horror in later myth. The world revealed is a world of wealth and power unknown elsewhere for two centuries either way. At present this discovery is unique, and we should remember that Lefkandi shows a continuity from the Mycenean period not found elsewhere. But it shows that, if it were ever possible to excavate the Lefkandi settlement in its entirety, the Dark Age would no longer be quite so dark.

      The picture elsewhere is very different. From the archaeological evidence the Ionian migration and the importance of Athens in it are confirmed. But the earlier period is very obscure. The change in burial customs might indicate the arrival of a new people, the Dorians; but it could be explained as merely a reversion to older habits (the more spectacular forms of Mycenean burial were bound to disappear anyway), and burial customs are not always evidence for population change: the Roman empire saw a total change from cremation to burial during the first three centuries AD, for no reason that anyone has yet been able to discern. Some archaeologists have therefore preferred not to believe in a Dorian invasion, and to claim that the different groups in mainland Greece had been present since the beginning of Mycenean culture: the palaces were destroyed either by passing raiders, like the later Viking harassment of Celtic and Anglo-Saxon culture, or by local uprisings of a subject people. But despite the existence of some cultural continuity after the fall of the palaces, it is the general impression of discontinuity, the desertion of old settlements for new, and the instances of the use of old settlements for burial, which suggest most strongly the influx of a new population. And if any weight is to be given to legend, though they cannot be shown to have destroyed Mycenean culture, it would seem likely that it was the mysterious Dorians who benefited from the vacuum created. Other ages have known the same phenomenon, a people without culture leaving no sign of their coming but desolation, and a world that has to be created anew.

II

       Sources

      SOCIETIES without writing are dependent on the human memory for the transmission of knowledge of the past and of information in the present. Mnemonic devices, the use of recurrent story patterns and folk-tale motifs and repetitive phraseology serve also an aesthetic purpose, to produce a pleasing effect on the audience; it is for such reasons that the rhythmic patterns of poetic metre are widespread among primitive peoples. Those who achieve special skill in composing metrically will acquire special status as the spokesmen of the community, in their dual functions of preserving the past and interpreting the present. The earliest surviving literary evidence for the history of Greece is poetic; the advent of writing in the eighth century changed the position only slowly: it takes generations for the poet to lose his inherited status, and it was not until the middle of the sixth century that prose literature began to develop.

      The aoidos or singer of epic was a professional oral poet, composing and reciting from a stock of traditional material. His theme was the exploits of the heroes of a distant past, the end of the Mycenean period; there seems to have been no attempt to reach back earlier, or to compose poems on more recent events. This oral epic flourished solely or primarily in Ionia, and its nature can best be illustrated from the linguistic peculiarities it exhibits. The dialect of epic is artificial: to an Ionic base have been added numerous borrowings from Aeolic and other east Greek dialects, to create a language whose forms are especially adapted to the flowing hexameter metre. The oral poet doubtless relied on memory to repeat with variations already existing poems, but he also needed to be able to compose as he sang. Apart from the repetition of descriptions of material objects or recurring scenes such as feasts, debates, battles or the sunrise, he acquired a whole vocabulary of formulae – metrical units adapted to particular positions in the hexameter line. As a result of the work of Milman Parry on the similarities between Homeric poetry and the practices of the СКАЧАТЬ