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1 Chapter 1 : Pre-Greek substrate - Wikipedia The main thesis of this book is that the Greeks started their history as a multi-ethnic population group consisting of both Greek-speaking newcomers and the indigenous population of the land, and that the body of 'Hellenes' as known to us from the historical period was a deliberate self-creation. Although today the only surviving example of such sophisticated ancient Greek mechanics is the Antikythera mechanism, it is clear that complex mechanical devices existed in ancient Greece. The site of the Delphine Oracle, arguably the most important oracle in the classic world and sacred since prehistoric times 1, originally being a shrine to Gaia and a centre from which sacred temples and oracle centres were placed apparently according to principles of longitude. Delphi is also associated with the worship of Apollo the sun god, who is said to have killed the serpent Python at Delphi, essentially supplanting one form of worship with another. The sites status as an Earth Navel was recognised by Herodotus, who connected the oracle centre at Delphi with the one at Karnak in Egypt. The most famous of all the Greek oracles, Delphi contains a tradition of geodesy in its origin myth, which says that it was located by Zeus who released two birds from the eastern and western ends of the earth, with the point where they flew past each other being considered the centre of the world and therefore marked with an omphalos stone. Delphi also lies along the same alignment formed by connecting Dodona to Behdet in Egypt which was the geodetic capital of Northern Egypt before 3, BC according to Stecchini, and which sits on the same longitude as Thebes and the same Latitude as Alexandria. Herodotus connected Delphi with Thebes in his narration. Delphi is also associated geometrically with another two places; One in Anatolia Turkey and the other in Africa, also both considered oracle centres and earth-navels. These three points form an inverted Isoscelese triangle. All three sites were visited by Heraclese, who represents the collective unconsciousness of Ancient Greece. The Greek Oracle Centres: The importance of the oracles to the ancient Greeks is apparent from their prominence in mythological and historical texts; however, they were never exclusive to Greece, and although they are recorded as an Egyptian introduction, it is known that many of the Oracle sites were shrines to the mother-goddess or Gaia, before they were converted to the more traditional Sybilline sanctuaries. Herodotus repeated what he was told by the priestesses of Dodona, the first Greek oracle, concerning its introduction: She alighted on an oak, and sitting there began to speak with a human voice, and told them that on that spot where she was, there should thenceforth be an oracle of Jove Zeus. They understood the announcement to be from Heaven, so they set to work at once and erected a shrine. The dove that flew to Libya bade the Libyans to establish there the oracle of Ammon Amon. In Egypt however, Herodotus was given a different version of the legend. The priests of Jupiter Amon at Thebes said: So strong are the similarities between the two, that an earlier prehistoric connection between cultures can be easily inferred. The Oldest Oracle centre in Greece. Originally a shrine to the mother goddess it later became dedicated to the Greek god Zeus. Prophesies were made from the rustling of the leaves in a sacred grove. Herodotus noted the religious transference from the earlier earth-mother-goddess to a pantheon of gods between Greece and Egypt, at the same time confirming the status of Dodona as the first Greek oracle site, and places the existence of oracles before the gods. This is the most ancient oracle in Greece, and at that time there was no other. The Minoans have a provenance that traces back to the Neolithic period 4, and it is immediately noticeable to see in the remnants of their empire that they shared the apparently universal prehistoric preference for bull worship and the mother-goddess, which shares mythological parallels with both the Egyptian Isis Hathor and the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar and the Anatolian Earth-Goddess. It is therefore of interest that the epicenter of the Minoan civilization was the Cretan capital of Knossos with its nearby village of Omphalos. Knossos shares geometric connections with several other ancient and sacred sites. This apparent geodetic placement of Knossos has been noted by others Manias, Stecchini etc. Mackenzie 24 had the following to say concerning the subject of the Minoan mother-goddess worship before the advent of the Egyptian pantheon: It is interesting to note that on pre-hellenic Crete, she was depicted in a strikingly similar way to the Babylonian Ishtar. Mackenzie goes on to say: The upper part of the body is bare, and she has enormous breasts. All of these icons are repeated in the set of myths surrounding the oracle centers, which are Page 1

2 later imported from Egypt, and which relate to a deeper set of myths. Earth-Mother-Earth The close relationship between Neolithic Greece and Anatolia is confirmed by Oliva who mentions that the ceramic culture in Greece evolved from the beginning of the sixth millennium B. He also says of it: Page 2

3 Chapter 2 : Greeks and Pre-Greeks By systematically confronting Greek tradition of the Heroic Age with the evidence of both linguistics and archaeology, Margalit Finkelberg proposes a multidisciplinary assessment of the ethnic, linguistic and cultural situation in Greece in the second millennium BC. Proto-Greek linguistic area according to linguist Vladimir I. The Minoan civilization in Crete, which lasted from about c. Little specific information is known about the Minoans even the name Minoans is a modern appellation, derived from Minos, the legendary king of Crete, including their written system, which was recorded on the undeciphered Linear A script [6] and Cretan hieroglyphs. They were primarily a mercantile people engaged in extensive overseas trade throughout the Mediterranean region. Mycenaean Greece Mycenaean Greece, ca. Mycenaean civilization originated and evolved from the society and culture of the Early and Middle Helladic periods in mainland Greece. Mycenaean Greece is the Late Helladic Bronze Age civilization of Ancient Greece and it is the historical setting of the epics of Homer and most of Greek mythology and religion. The Mycenaean period takes its name from the archaeological site Mycenae in the northeastern Argolid, in the Peloponnesos of southern Greece. Athens, Pylos, Thebes, and Tiryns are also important Mycenaean sites. Mycenaean civilization was dominated by a warrior aristocracy. Around BC, the Mycenaeans extended their control to Crete, center of the Minoan civilization, and adopted a form of the Minoan script called Linear A to write their early form of Greek. The Mycenaeans buried their nobles in beehive tombs tholoi, large circular burial chambers with a high-vaulted roof and straight entry passage lined with stone. They often buried daggers or some other form of military equipment with the deceased. The nobility were often buried with gold masks, tiaras, armor and jeweled weapons. Mycenaeans were buried in a sitting position, and some of the nobility underwent mummification. Around â BC, the Mycenaean civilization collapsed. Numerous cities were sacked and the region entered what historians see as a " dark age ". During this period, Greece experienced a decline in population and literacy. The Greeks themselves have traditionally blamed this decline on an invasion by another wave of Greek people, the Dorians, although there is scant archaeological evidence for this view. Ancient Greece â BC [ edit ] Further information: Classical Anatolia and Ancient history of Cyprus "The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. Ancient Greece refers to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Dark Ages to the end of antiquity circa AD. In common usage it refers to all Greek history before the Roman Empire, but historians use the term more precisely. Some writers include the periods of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations, while others argue that these civilizations were so different from later Greek cultures that they should be classed separately. Traditionally, the Ancient Greek period was taken to begin with the date of the first Olympic Games in BC, but most historians now extend the term back to about BC. The period that follows is classed as Hellenistic. Not everyone treats the Classical Greek and Hellenic periods as distinct; however, and some writers treat the Ancient Greek civilization as a continuum running until the advent of Christianity in the 3rd century AD. Ancient Greece is considered by most historians to be the foundational culture of Western civilization. Greek culture was a powerful influence in the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of Europe. Ancient Greek civilization has been immensely influential on the language, politics, educational systems, philosophy, art and architecture of the modern world, particularly during the Renaissance in Western Europe and again during various neo-classical revivals in 18th and 19th-century Europe and the Americas. Iron Age â BC [ edit ] Further information: Protogeometric art The Greek Dark Ages ca. The collapse of the Mycenaean coincided with the fall of several other large empires in the near east, most notably the Hittite and the Egyptian. The cause may be attributed to an invasion of the Sea People wielding iron weapons. When the Dorians came down into Greece they also were equipped with superior iron weapons, easily dispersing the already weakened Mycenaeans. The period that follows these events is collectively known as the Greek Dark Ages. Kings ruled throughout this period until eventually they were replaced with an aristocracy, then still later, in some areas, an aristocracy within an aristocracyâ an elite of the elite. Warfare shifted from a focus on cavalry to a great emphasis on infantry. Page 3

4 Due to its cheapness of production and local availability, iron replaced bronze as the metal of choice in the manufacturing of tools and weapons. Slowly equality grew among the different sects of people, leading to the dethronement of the various Kings and the rise of the family. At the end of this period of stagnation, the Greek civilization was engulfed in a renaissance that spread the Greek world as far as the Black Sea and Spain. Writing was relearned from the Phoenicians, eventually spreading north into Italy and the Gauls. Page 4

5 Chapter 3 : Pre-Hellenic Goddesses Together with the issues of the ethnic, linguistic and cultural identity of the pre-hellenic population of Greece, I will discuss the terms on which cultural interaction between Greeks and pre-greeks was made possible, the duration of this interaction and its eventual impact on the civilisation of historic Greece. This book has a wealth of information on Pre-Hellenic Greek myths, and some surprising information about the goddesses that were worshipped long before the Olympian gods became the main gods of classic Greece. To read the complete myths, I highly recommend Lost Goddesses of Early Greece, which can be purchased on amazon. Thousands of years before classical myths took form, a rich oral tradition of mythmaking had existed. These earlier goddesses that ruled the world were relegated to a lower position after three waves of barbarian invadersâ the Ionians, the Achaeans and finally the Dorians, moved into Greece from to B. These invaders brought with them a patriarchal social order and their thunderbolt wielding God, Zeus. They were unable to completely wipe out the firmly rooted Goddess worship so they integrated these goddesses into their myths. Gaia acquired an oracular function because dreams were believed to ascend from the realm of the dead. A priestess divined the future while in a trance as she sat on a three- legged stool over vapors arising from a crevice. She appears in records of her worship at Delphi, Athens and Aegae and was the earliest possessor of the Delphic oracleâ before Poseidon, Dionysos or Apollo. She is the kore, or maiden form, of the Earth Goddess. Sometimes she is called Ge, or Aneidora, she who sends up gifts, or Pandora giver of all gifts. In a later myth told by Hesiod, she is portrayed as a curious, troublesome girl who releases evil into the world. She is the force that binds people togetherâ the collective conscious, the social imperative, and the social order. In the Olympian myths, Themis is made into a lesser goddess and allowed two functions: She is a fertility Goddess, the primal mother of on-going creation. In Crete the epithet Antheia flower goddess was connected with Aphrodite at Knossos. This title reveals an old link to herbal magic and she is associated with the apple myrtle, poppy, rose and water-mint. Aphrodite is also the maker of morning dew. She came to Greece from Cyprus and was originally from western Asia. When the patriarchal order revised the story of her birth, the procreative Goddess from Asia is portrayed as having been born of sea foam caused by the severed genitals of Ouranos, who had been castrated by his son, Cronos. She is the Goddess of untamed nature. Central to her worship are ecstatic dances and the sacred bough, probably derived from ancient moon tree worship, the source of immortality, secret knowledge and inspiration. Artemis assists females of all species in childbirth and gave the name artemisia to the medicinal herb now called mugwort, which is used to encourage delivery. She was worshipped throughout Greece, but was most popular in Arcadia where she lived in the wild forests and was the most virginal of the Goddesses. Another important site for her worship was Ephesus in Anatolia where her qualities of Mother Goddess were emphasized. She usually drives oxen or steers, or sometimes horses. Little trace of her worship has survived. Goddess of the waning and dark moon, she has chthonic associations and rules over ghosts and demons. In Olympian myths she is the daughter of Hera and Zeus. She is the Goddess of women and fertility. Hera was worshipped throughout Greece, but her chief center was at Argos. Runners were selected from three age groups representing the three phases of the moon. In patriarchal mythology Hera becomes the wife of Zeus and is portrayed as a jealous, vindictive wife. When the conquering Northerners pass from Dodona to Thessaly, Zeus drops his wife Dione at Dodona, and in passing from Thessaly to Olympia, he marries Hera--the conquering chieftain marries a daughter of the conquered land. Though Hera is portrayed as troublesome, in reality she reflects the turbulent native princessâ coerced but never really subdued by an alien conqueror. She was originally a Cretan Goddess who watched over the home and town. Attributes of fertility and renewal are revealed in her association with tree or pillar and snake symbolism. Athena is patron of wisdom, arts and skillsâ she especially protects architects, sculptors, potters, spinners and weavers. She was also Goddess of the matrifocal Pelasgoi of Peloponnese. When the Mycenaean princes of the mainland adopted and adapted Athena, she became the shielded defender of their citadels, particularly Athens. In Olympian mythology she is firmly established as the cold, rigid Goddess of war. She is the Grain-Mother, the giver of crops. Her origins are Cretan and she has been strongly identified with Gaia Page 5

6 and to Isis. Every autumn the women of early Greece observed a three-day, agricultural fertility ritual, the Thesmophoria, in honor of Demeter. The Thesmophoria, the Arrephoria, the Skirophoria, The Stenia and the Haloa were rites practiced by women only and were of extremely early origin. They later emerged as the Eleusinian Mysteries. These Mysteries were kept secret, but may have to do with crops and the Rite of Initiationâ those who partake of the rite have better hopes concerning the end of life. Demeter is sometimes compared to Isis in that she was a Queen of the Underworld because as an Earth Mother, she could pass between the two realms. As the daughter of Demeter the Maiden form, Persephone may have also ruled the Underworld. This may be a historical reference to the invasion of the northern Zeus-worshippers. The original myth is very ancient and is a widely revered story of mother and daughter. It long pre-dates the Judeo-Christian deification of father and son. No part of this web site is to be copied without the permission of the author. Do you like stories with Pre-Hellenic Goddesses? If so, click on banner below: Page 6

7 Chapter 4 : History of Greece - Wikipedia Greeks and Pre-Greeks has 8 ratings and 0 reviews. By systematically confronting Greek tradition of the Heroic Age with the evidence of both linguistics. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition. Cambridge University Press, This book is an attempt to solve the puzzle of Greek prehistory from an interdisciplinary point of view. The author applies mainly linguistic evidence and myth to recreate society in the times previous to the Homeric epics. Finkelberg excels in her use of linguistic evidence, and it is precisely this use that strengthens her thesis. Although linguistic facts and the distribution of the Greek dialects form the basis of the argument, the author is conscious that her readership may not have the necessary background. Her explanations are therefore simple and always introduced with historical appreciation and context for the development in question, without dwelling on minutiae. Most books that deal with Aegean prehistory have an archaeological slant, but archaeology without the analysis of linguistic data can only give a partial image. As Finkelberg herself remarks Let us now examine in some detail the eight chapters of which the book is comprised. In the introduction, Finkelberg discusses the four main points which the book will develop. First, she defends the role of linguistics in studying the past and advocates the study of myth as a cultural artefact that reflects the present and the past complementarily and simultaneously. Whereas previous scholars had identified the suffixes -nth- and -ss- as Luwian, and Luwian itself together with other Anatolian languages as Indo-European, nevertheless the idea of a non-indo-european pre-hellenic substratum still prevails. After establishing the cultural similarity derived from linguistic affinity, Finkelberg examines in the fourth chapter the topic of kingship in Greece and western Asia. Her arguments are based on Greek myth and comparative evidence from the Hittites. She is conscious of the possible weakness of her arguments and insists that evidence must be taken cumulatively The pattern of succession that Finkelberg proposes for Bronze Age Greece is that of an inheritance from mother to daughter in which the queen would perform important You are not currently authenticated. View freely available titles: Page 7

8 Chapter 5 : Prehistoric Greece greeks and pre-greeks By systematically confronting Greek tradition of the Heroic Age with the evidence of both linguistics and archaeology, Margalit Finkelberg proposes a multi-disciplinary assessment of the ethnic, linguistic and cultural situation in Greece in the second millennium BC. Birgitta Eder The Classical Review http: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use: Finkelberg Greeks and Pre-Greeks. Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition. Cambridge University Press, The Classical Review, 57, pp doi: Click here Downloaded from http: Greece from Thessaly to Crete and to Western Asia Minor managed to entertain and to sustain the idea of common descent, language, religion and history. The main thesis of F. She develops her argument in eight chapters: Rather than founding their group identity on belief in a common descent, the body of Hellenes perceived itself as an ethnically heterogeneous group. In this chapter F. The Classical Review vol. The Odyssey would not function as a story of the returning king, who rescues his wife and his throne in the nick of time, if Telemachus had succeeded his father on that throne. By implication one has to place Mycenaean Thebes in a region of Lesbian dialect, whereas Mycenae and Tiryns would lie in a border zone between Arcado-Cypriot and Ionic, and Pylos would be located in a purely Arcado-Cypriot speaking area. One misses here a discussion on whether this reconstruction is actively supported by the Late Bronze Age evidence in the form of the linguistically rather homogeneous Linear B texts from Thebes, Mycenae and Pylos. Successive population movements brought Mycenaean migrants to the East, where they subsequently emerged as Philistines. Throughout the book F. She takes it implicitly and explicitly for granted that these mythical traditions go back and pertain to the Greek Late Bronze Age. For anyone interested in the construction of some of the Greek foundation myths I strongly recommend F. One wishes that F. One would have thought that the theoretical approaches to questions of ethnicity which F. The Greek dialect as represented by the Mycenaean Linear B t h e c la s s i c a l r ev i ew texts is for F. This and other passages seem to imply that F. Mito, storia, tradizioni poetiche. Atti del Convegno Internazionale Urbino, 13â 15 giugno Despite their different allegiances, one cannot deny that later there were some similarities between them. Notably, with regard to the subdivision of the population, Epidauros seems to have provided the model for Argos. Brillante deals with Argive genealogies and argues that they ought to be considered part of a single, composite history, which has its geographical centre in the plain of Inachos. The following section is focussed on archaic epics. The most conspicuous example is the description of the Argive contingent in the Catalogue of Ships Hom. Olivieri closes this section by highlighting similarities and reversals which mark the myths of the Seven and the Epigoni. Page 8

9 Chapter 6 : A Brief History of Early and Pre-Classical Greece, Classical Drama and Theatre GREEKS AND PRE-GREEKS By systematically confronting Greek tradition of the Heroic Age with the evidence of both linguistics and archaeology, Margalit. The Early Greek World, History and Prehistory [For a more detailed history and cultural overview of ancient Greece, see the Perseus web site click here. Geography and Greek Culture The geography of Greece is a primary factor, if not the pre-eminent feature of the culture and lives of the ancient populations who lived there. Inhabiting an area that is ninety percent mountains with little arable land forced the Greeks into ways of life which did not center strictly around farming and agriculture. They were, for the most part, driven to go to sea to make ends meet. Indeed, no place in Greece is further than fifty miles from the sea, so the inevitability of fishing and maritime adventure was incumbent on many in antiquity, as it still is. To this day, many Greeks make a living in shipping, for instance, Aristotle Onassis, the multi-millionaire who acquired a fortune in international trade and married Jacqueline Kennedy after the assassination of her first husband. Ironically, while the mountainous topography pushed the Greeks to explore lands far beyond their immediate locale, at the same time it also separated the cities of Greece and obstructed intra-hellenic contact, leading many of them to develop along discrete, sometimes incompatible lines. For instance, settlements as close as Athens and Thebes which are less than sixty miles apart not only came to see each other as "foreign" but even evolved a long-lasting rivalry that persisted into the Classical Age. Ironically, in some ways the ancient Greeks became generally friendlier with peoples across the sea than their own neighbors, because the landscape made foreign nations seem "closer" than many cities on the Greek mainland. Overall, their geographical situation forced the ancient Greeks from early on to look outward from their immediate locality and internationalize their interests. This broadened their horizons and exposed them like few other civilizations to foreign ideas and ways of living. The ensuing cosmopolitanism played an important role in their development as a focal group in ancient Western Civilization. For a people living on the edge of nowhere, they found themselves uniquely thrust in medias res "into the middle of things". The Prehistory of Greece The earliest inhabitants of Greece are a mysteriousâ and possibly mythologicalâ people called the Pelasgians about whom we know very little. These natives and their culture were overwhelmed and ultimately utterly annihilated by the invasion of a new people known now as the Indo-Europeans click here to read more about the Indo-Europeans. So, when people today study the ancient Greeks, they are examining not the earliest known humans in the area but later invaders called the Indo-Europeans. This is clear because of the language the Greeks spoke. All extant forms of ancient Greek clearly derive from a common ancestor called Proto-Indo-European, a language which engendered a large number of daughter languages found across much of the Eurasian continent, all the way from India to Norway. These closely related tongues show that the Indo-Europeans must have migrated over thousand of miles in different directions, displacing natives and settling themselves in lands across a wide swath of the Eurasian continent. Another thing we know about the Indo-Europeans is that they tended to enter a region in successive waves. That is, Indo-Europeans rarely migrated into an area just once, and Greece was no exception. As early as BCE one Indo-European contingent had begun infiltrating the Greek peninsula and by the end of that millennium at least three major discrete migrations of these intruders had surged across various parts of Greece. One racial group of these Indo-Europeans was called the Ionians. They settled along the eastern coast of Greece, in particular the city of Athens, and along the western coast of Asia Minor modern Turkey. Another group, the Dorians, settled the Peloponnese the southern part of Greece and many inland areas. The result was a "dark age" accompanied by massive disruptions in the Greek economy and civilization, including a total loss of literacy. This dark age lasted about three centuries, from to BCE and, while it seems from our perspective today like a dismal time, it must have been a dynamic and fascinating period in Greek history, perhaps a wonderful time to have lived. Many of the things we associate with Greek cultureâ for instance, vase-painting, epic poetry, and ship-buildingâ assumed their basic and most familiar forms during this "dark" age. Particularly, many of the Greek myths read and studied today are traceable to this time period. Quite a few are set in the generations just before the dark age or in its early phases. For example, the famous Page 9

10 cycle "collection" of myths about the Trojan Warâ if, in fact, it is based on any real event in historyâ must date to some time around BCE. Among other famous characters included there are the beautiful Helen and her hapless Greek husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. All later became enduring characters in drama as well as epic. The gods also play a large role in The Iliad, in particular, the king of the gods Zeus, the sun god Apollo, and the goddess of wisdom Athena. Along the way he encounters a number of deities and monsters and much mayhem, but ultimately with the help of his patroness, the goddess Athena, he arrives back in his kingdom safe, if not entirely sound. There encounters his wife Penelope and son Telemachus after an absence of twenty years. These stories convey such a compelling sense of realism about their day and time that more than one scholar has been tempted to see in them history rather than mere myth, but their historicity is questionable at best. One such investigator was Heinrich Schliemann, a nineteenth-century German millionaire and archaeologist, who excavated what is now known as Troy. The debate about the amount of verifiable history preserved in Homeric epic lingers unresolved to this day, a tribute to the enduring, gripping picture of humanity painted by this purportedly blind poet. The Pre-Classical Age of Greek History With the reappearance of written records after the dark age, Greek history as such comes back into focus. From the earliest extant inscriptions and vase-paintings with writing on them, we know that the alphabet was introduced to the Greek world at some point around BCE, which is probably at or about the time Homer himself lived. This provides one way to explain why his epics, originally composed "orally" i. They came into being at just the right moment, when oral poets were still active but writing had been introduced so oral poetry could be recorded. This revolutionary period in Greek historyâ and indeed world historyâ witnessed the rise of the polis, the classical city-state for instance, Athens, Sparta and Corinth which would dominate the political scene for several centuries. These quasi-independent communities in their inter-political rivalry elevated Western civilization to unprecedented heights. This epoch now known as the Pre-Classical Age BCE is also called the Age of Tyrants because powerful individuals came to rule the majority of these city-states by overthrowing the existing regime in a military coup. While our word "tyrant" which comes from the Greek tyrannos has strongly negative overtones, the Greek term had in antiquity both negative and neutral connotations, or sometimes even positive ones. That is, not all Greek tyrannoi plural of tyrannos were seen as "tyrannical. He established festivals that united the Athenians culturally, boosted their economy by creating a market for Athenian exports and stabilized Attic i. Athenian coinage, making it widely respected throughout the Mediterranean world. Though he brought himself to power through force and violence, he used the position he assumed to better the lives of his fellow townsmen in general. Other tyrants around the Greek-speaking world did much the same. More than one is famous as a "lawgiver," the man who, even while sole ruler, paved the way for fair and representative government in his city. Thus, this age is also known as the Age of Lawgivers. The introduction of writing, no doubt, played a great role in the advancement of law which initially entailed little more than the codification of already existing customâ in Greek, the word for "custom" is nomos which eventually became the term used for "law"â Athens had no less than two great lawgivers: Both have left their imprint on English. A solon today means a "politician," and draconian means "extremely harsh or punitive" because Draco was famous for the severity of the punishments his laws imposed. Also, because at this time the Greeks began to colonize large parts of the Mediterranean worldâ in particular, Asia Minor and Sicily the large island southwest of Italy â and the coastal regions of the Black Sea as well, this age has also been dubbed the Age of Colonization. In particular, the Greeks settled in large numbers in southern Italy which came to contain so many of them that the later Romans referred to the area as Magna Graecia "Big Greece". In part because of their essentially Greek heritage, the people and culture of southern Italy and Sicily are to this day very different from those of central and northern Italy. The reason Greek colonization occurred on such a grand scale at this time goes back to changes in Mesopotamia the modern Middle East, more than once the distant impetus for significant developments in the Western world. Their conquest and brutal treatment of captive states demolished many of the existing social, political and economic structures in the day. Among those subjugated to the Assyrians were the Phoenicians who lived on the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean. From that crossroad, they had enriched themselves through a network of commercial exchange protected by a powerful navy but, when the Assyrians conquered and Page 10

11 uprooted them, that navy evaporated and the trade routes of the eastern Mediterranean were opened up. The Greeks stepped into the vacuum, making a new life of wealth for themselves in shipping and cultural exchange, and went on to colonize those areas where they traveled most often, in part to protect their trade routes. Put simply, had the Assyrians not shattered the Phoenicians, the Greeks might never have found the economic energy needed to spark the cultural revolution they undertook in the Classical Age. Yet one more way to refer to this period is the Lyric Age, a name derived the dominant form of literature in the day. While long heroic epics predominated as the principal form of narrative entertainment in earlier days, by the middle of pre-classical times ca. These poems were shorter, livelier, and focused on modern life and love, not the glorious past. Because the singers of these poems often accompanied themselves on the lyreâ the lyre is a stringed musical instrument which could be plucked to create certain harmoniesâ this sort of poetry came to be known as lyric poetry. By BCE lyric poetry ruled the ancient Greek entertainment scene. Lyric poets and their musical verse were in great demand with the public, much the way rock stars are today. Indeed, the analogy of lyric poetry and rock music is not altogether off-base. In their day, Greek lyric poets were idolized, imitated and at least one is reported to have performed in a state of intoxication. Her name is Sappho, and her love poetry is perhaps the most famous of all time. Unfortunately, most of her poetry is now lost, shattered in its long passage through neglectful ages, so much so that we are not sure we have even a single poem of hers complete. But the many fragments of her songs which survive today attest to the high reputation in which the ancients held her. Were it not followed by an age even more magnificent i. If nothing else, all the titles of this pivotal epoch point up the centrality of these centuries as a pivotal and formative moment in not only Greek history but all of Western Civilization. And so it will come as little surprise that this was the time and place, the laboratory if you will, where Greek drama was created. Page 11

12 Chapter 7 : theinnatdunvilla.com Greeks and Pre-Greeks (ebook), Margalit Finkelberg Boeken theinnatdunvilla.com is a platform for academics to share research papers. In, the highly developed Minoan civilisation of Crete began to be uncovered by Sir Arthur Evans and others. In the years following these discoveries the Minoan was firmly believed to have been the dominant civilisation of the Bronze Age Aegean. It was not until, when the Pylos Linear B archives were discovered by Carl Blegen and the Cincinnati expedition, that the majority of archaeologists realised what had been clear to only a few, namely, that we should speak of two Aegean civilisations rather than one: Although Mycenaean Greece developed later and under considerable Minoan influence, it eventually prevailed, and in the Late Bronze Age Crete turned into a Mycenaean province. The former Minoan colonies became Mycenaean, and after ca. In, when the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris was made public, it was demonstrated beyond doubt that the language of the Mycenaean civilisation was Greek. As a result, an entirely new period, that of Mycenaean Greece, was added to Greek history. Many a reconstruction of the religion, society, economics and institutions of Mycenaean Greece published in the first half of the twentieth century proceeded from this assumption. Nilsson and, Homer and the Monuments by H. Lorimer, From Mycenae to Homer by T. Ironically, the years in which the two latter appeared were precisely the time when the pendulum of scholarly opinion as regards the historical value of the Homeric poems swung back. More than one factor was responsible for this development. The picture of Mycenaean society that emerged after the decipherment of Linear B led to an increasing understanding that the Homeric poems are by no means a direct reflection of that society; the study of the Homeric formulae showed that, contrary to what the pioneers of oral formulaic theory had believed, the traditional language is characterised by a high degree of flexibility and adaptation, so that it is absolutely out of the question that everything we find in Homer could have arrived untouched from the Bronze Age; finally, it was shown that the picture of society arising from the Homeric poems properly belongs to a later period. This last conclusion was almost entirely due to the work of M. Finley, whose articles and especially the book The World of Odysseus opened a new era in the historical study of Homer. As a result, a new consensus has arisen, which locates the historic background to the Homeric poems in the first rather than in the second millennium bc. Yet, the argument that made it difficult to see in Homer a direct reflection of Mycenaean Greece also holds good as regards the hypothesis that a poet who presumably lived in the eighth or even seventh century bc was describing a society which preceded him by two hundred years. That is why contemporary scholarly opinion tends to see the eighth century bc as providing the appropriate historic background for the Homeric poems. It should not be forgotten that we owe our very knowledge of the existence of Mycenaean Greece to the stimulus that the poems of Homer furnished to Schliemann and others more than a hundred years ago. As Nilsson demonstrated in the s, the cities identified by Homer as capitals of the kingdoms of heroic Greece were significant Mycenaean sites. If we also take into account that the language of Homer is a Kunstsprache consisting of different historic layers of the Greek language, including the earliest ones; that his formulae for weapons exhibit a combination of Bronze Age military technologies with those of the Archaic period; and that the same mixture of different historic periods is characteristic of his view of death and the afterlife, it would be difficult to avoid the conclusion that at least some parts of what we find in Homer must go back to earlier periods, including the Bronze Age. It would therefore be anachronistic to approach epic tradition with modern criteria of historicity and on the basis of this to deny it all historical basis whatsoever. Henige, the subtitle of which, Quest for a Chimera, speaks for itself: It is well known that the suffixes -nth- and -ss- on the basis of which it was identified are closely paralleled by the suffixes -nd- and -ss- of the languages of Asia Minor attested in the Classical period, such as Lycian, Lydian and Carian. The discovery and decipherment of Hittite and other Bronze Age Anatolian languages has shown that they are closely related to the languages of Asia Minor and that the suffixes -nth- and â ss should be identified as typically Anatolian or, to be more precise, Luwian. Since the issues of ethnicity and ethnic identity in ancient Greece have recently become the focus of a lively scholarly discussion, I will address them separately in a later section. Together with the issues of the ethnic, linguistic and cultural identity of the pre-hellenic Page 12

13 population of Greece, I will discuss the terms on which cultural interaction between Greeks and pre-greeks was made possible, the duration of this interaction and its eventual impact on the civilisation of historic Greece. The book will address these questions by systematically confronting the Greek tradition of the Heroic Age with the evidence of linguistics and archaeology. The even spread of the suffixes -ss- and -nth- over western Asia, Greece and Crete strongly suggests that the so-called pre-hellenic populations of Greece were of Anatolian stock. If true, this would lead us not only to Anatolia but also farther east, for the simple reason that the Anatolians of Asia, Indo-Europeans though they were, cannot be taken separately from the great civilisations of the Near East. As the archaeological discoveries of recent years show, the Bronze Age Aegean was in close contact with these civilisations. The degree to which this new assessment of the linguistic and archaeological evidence at our disposal may affect the terms of the current discussion of the cultural identity of Aegean civilisation will be examined in Chapter 3. The archaeological record shows little or no break in continuity in the material culture of Greece for the second millennium bc. To quote Caskey again, The process of change, which is reflected by archaeological evidence from many parts of the region, cannot have been simple. Rather, as was generally the case when migrations took place, the newcomers arrived in groups of various sizes, probably over an appreciable period of time. The people whom they found in possession also varied in the size and prosperity of their communities, some ready to resist while others deemed it necessary or prudent to make terms with the foreigners. What it adds to the evidence of archaeology, however, is the element of fusion it implies between the Greeks and the indigenous population. The issue is obviously of crucial importance, and in Chapters 4 and 5 I will try to pursue it further by analysing the patterns of marriage between heterogeneous descent groups as they emerge in the literary and historical sources. Large-scale migrations at the end of the Bronze Age transformed the dialect map of Greece into an irrational mosaic, where dialects with little linguistic overlap e. Boeotian and Attic inhabit contiguous territories, but closely related dialects such as Arcadian and Cyprian are geographically remote from each other. In view of this, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the historic Greek dialects are no more than fragments of a whole which had ceased to exist before the political map of Greece as we know it was shaped. As I will argue in Chapter 6, the manner in which the principal dialect features are distributed among the historic dialects leads to the conclusion that before the collapse of Mycenaean Greece a dialect continuum characteristic of long-settled areas had spread without disruption over most of the territory of Greece. The evidence of the dialects thus agrees with archaeological evidence, in that both show that there was no break in continuity during the second millennium bc. All this changes at the end of the second millennium. The destruction levels and depopulation attested at many Mycenaean sites testify to a sharp break in cultural continuity. There can be no doubt that we are facing the end of an era, and the same is true of other sites all over the Eastern Mediterranean. As I will argue in Chapter 7, the evidence supplied by the Greek dialects not only substantiates the picture drawn by archaeologists but, in that it unequivocally demonstrates the intrusive character of Doric and other West Greek dialects, also points towards the factors that effected the collapse of Mycenaean Greece. There can be little doubt that Greek tradition regarding the dramatic end of the Heroic Age and the migration of the last survivors of the Race of Heroes refers to the same events. Furthermore, as I will argue in this chapter, the collapse of Mycenaean Greece ought to be brought into correspondence with recent archaeological discoveries in the Levant, which throw new light on the material culture of the Philistines. Analysis of the epic tradition about the Trojan War allows us to suggest that certain events concerning the end of Mycenaean Greece did not make their way into the mainstream Greek tradition. This tradition, and above all the poems of Homer, either deliberately suppressed these events or moulded them anew in accordance with the contemporary agenda Chapter 8. The latter consisted in answering the need for the consolidation of heterogeneous population groups that found themselves on the territory of Greece at the beginning of the first millennium bc. By creating a foundational myth that promulgated the idea of a common past, the new Greek civilisation established continuity between the Greece of the Heroic Age and historic Greece and thereby acquired the sense of common identity that it initially lacked. The culmination of any historical enquiry is the point where the results of several disciplines coincide. That such major breakthroughs occur only too rarely should not deter us from trying to achieve meaningful correlations between different types of evidence, each with its own bias of Page 13

14 survival and specific problems of interpretation. In recent years, such meaningful correlations between archaeology and linguistics have been established by Colin Renfrew, whereas Elizabeth Barber has shown that the dispersal of weaving technologies often supplies no less reliable evidence for population movements than the dispersal of languages. We have to consider every scrap of information that can throw light on human prehistory, for the simple reason that it is only such a multi-disciplinary approach that can give us a wider perspective of the past and guarantee real progress in the field. The very fact of linguistic attribution of a given language or group of languages is a matter of great historical import. Thus, the conclusion that Greece was once occupied by non-greek-speaking population groups only became possible as a result of analysis of the suffixes -nth- and -ss-. The same is true of population movements. The character of relationships between individual languages or dialects, in that it allows for coherent interpretation of these relationships in terms of geography, affords linguistics a much better vantage point for assessing the dispersal of populations than the one provided by archaeology. Thus, as we shall see in Chapter 7, while archaeology does not supply a clear picture as to the nature of the factors responsible for the collapse of Mycenaean Greece, analysis of the Greek dialects does offer such a picture. The importance of the evidence provided by the ancient texts themselves is also immediately obvious. Unfortunately, as far as Aegean prehistory is concerned, only scarce textual evidence is available. Immensely important as the Linear B texts are, the historical information that they accumulate is not even remotely close to that contained in the documentary materials of the Near East. Some of these documents, such as the Hittite historical records relating to royal succession in the Old Hittite Kingdom, are addressed in the present book, but only as circumstantial evidence, as it were. What the student of Greek prehistory has instead are literary sources originating in oral tradition. While it goes without saying that this tradition should not be treated on an equal footing with documentary sources nor used without being correlated with archaeological and linguistic evidence, it can nevertheless be employed with profit for the reconstruction of history. This is recognised even by those students of contemporary oral traditions who are best known for their critical attitude to the value of these historical traditions. Where there is no writing or almost none, oral traditions must bear the brunt of historical reconstruction. There are two ways in which historical myth can be used for understanding the past. First, it can be taken as telling us something about the past that it purports to describe; second, its historicity can be placed solely within the present, that is, within the period in which it was actually fixed. While older scholars favoured the first approach, the second is more widespread in our days. What makes it difficult for me to adopt either unreservedly, however, is the extreme reductivism characteristic of both approaches. While one tends to see everything in historical myth as direct evidence of the past that the myth ostensibly describes, the other tends to deny to the myth any past dimension whatsoever. Nobody today would deny that at any given moment historical myth functions as a cultural artefact representative of the period in which it circulates rather than the one which it purports to describe. Beidelman, deny all evidential value to traditions about the past, is directly relevant here: Page 14

15 Chapter 8 : Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition by Margalit Finkelberg These myths found their most brilliant expression in the early Greek epic poems attributed to Homer, ancient Greece's greatest early poet. Homer's first epic, The Iliad, tells the tale of the Greeks' sack of Troy and the anger of their great hero, Achilles. Who are you, people? I gave up reading. Who wrote all that rubbish, please? Why do you do this? Long time ago I said what I thought at Wikipedia talk: When they arrived, and then, the day after? When Wikipedia change its policy of not respecting expert knowledge, and when such a system will be introduced, may be, I will do something to help. I will then make again one year brake and come back to see whether vandalism is still in full swing. So the way this project works is, if you find something that is not right, you fix it. Merely making dismissive comments and lamenting the poor quality of content, sourcing etc does not make any difference to the quality of this article which indeed leaves a lot to be desired. Alas, there are many people both inside and outside WP who go around constantly complaining about it, but do not dedicate even 1 minute of their time to improve it I do not mean you here, but I have come across this attitude way too often, so please forgive the bitterness. At the risk of sounding offensive, "put your money where your mouth is". I get quite bitter sometime, although with good reason. I will se what could be done. First only minimal improvements,may be mor later. A hellenistic relic found on Paros with an engraved chronological list of Graecian events and reads: Another source consist Alcman and Sophocles who wrote before Aristoteles about the "Graikes mothers of the Hellenes". For that matter, neither can Aristotle and Plato. First, the Parian marble is not about "legendary events" but about history as perceived in the 3rd century BC. You can see for yourself that it is meant by its author to precisely date events, of which "mythological" for us can only be characterized those of prehistory, events which for these people were history, not mythology. It surely consists the most tangible evidence that the Greeks of the Hellenistic times believed that their name was "Graikoi" in the far past before they changed it to Hellenes. The fact that it is a primary source makes it all the better. Aristotle actually held the two peoples to be identical, saying that the Graikoi changed their name to Hellenes and this is repeated in other sources. Alcman, the seventh and Sophocles in the fifth century BC styled the Graikes as "the mothers of the Hellenes". According to the interpretation proposed by Martin West this "suggests a myth that men of the Hellenes married women of the Graikoi. Meteor b, Alcman fr. Should we interpret it as literal history? Maybe it was so, maybe it was not. What is there about what we call mythology that we consider "literal history"? Even the names "Danaans", "Achaeans" and "Argives" are given in quasi-mythical texts Yet, all suppositions we make on the prehistory of ancient Greeks are characterized by this uncertainty. What is sure, the myth existed among the Greeks and it seems to have been pretty much accepted. That is all that is needed in this article. Not some impossible historical certainty. If I understand well, it is not the existence of the legend you are disputing but the possibility of it being true? I guess that talking about prehistory, a legend is as sound as this might get. I will also quote Apollodorus here: Those who were called Greeks he named Hellenes after himself and divided the country among his sons. The reason I gave these sources was because I thought that the editor mainly responsible for this article might make use of them. But it is not clear or direct evidence that their name was Graikoi. As for primary vs. However, Wikipedia is explicitly designed as a tertiary reference, not making its own inferences from primary sources, but relying on reliable secondary sources for interpretation. Without disagreeing as to the need to back primary sources with modern ones, I have to disagree with your opinion about the history as perceived back then. The ancient Greeks were especially meticulous in their historical pursuits, so their history is not considered legend, unless we are talking about prehistory as is the case here regarding the "Graikoi". Most modern sources do not call most of written Greek history legendary We base our history based on those very writings. Archaeology comes second, to prove what is written, when and where possible. Anyways, I think that you may believe that the Parian Marble is about the age of Deucalion or the Troyan War, but it is not. Most is about information from the 5th, 4th and 3rd century and is distinctly historic in nature. This serves as an example of how the Greeks considered parts of what we nowadays call mythology to have been real tangible events If taken verbatim, it Page 15