The Minoans (c B.C.)

Transcription

1 The Minoans (c B.C.) The first Greek civilization was that of the Minoans on the island of Crete. The Minoans were heavily influenced by two older civilizations, Mesopotamia and Egypt. Egyptian influence is especially apparent. Minoan architecture used columns much as Egyptian architecture did. Minoan art seems to copy Egyptian art by only showing people in profile, never frontally. Still, the Minoans added their own touches, making their figures much more life like. Since we have not been able to translate the few examples of their hieroglyphic script, known as Linear A, there are large gaps in the picture we have of these people. We do not even know what they called themselves. The term Minoans comes from Greek myths about a legendary king of Crete, Minos, who supposedly ruled a vast sea empire. Two things largely influenced Minoan's civilization. First, they had a large fleet, useful for both trade and defense. Second, Crete's isolated position meant there was no major threat to its security. These factors helped create a peaceful and prosperous civilization reflected in three aspects of Minoan culture: its cities and architecture, the status of its women, and its art. The Minoans had several main cities centered around palaces which collected the island's surplus wealth as taxes. The largest of these was Knossos, whose palace complex was so big and confusing to visitors that it has come down to us in Greek myth as the Labyrinth, or maze, home of the legendary beast, the Minotaur. The sophistication of the Minoans is shown by the fact that they had water pipes, sewers, and even toilets with pipes leading to outside drains. Minoan women seem to have had higher status than their counterparts in many other ancient civilizations. One likely reason was that, without the need for a powerful warrior class and a constant defense, they had more chance attaining high social stature. This is reflected in their religion where the primary deity was an earth goddess. Minoan art also depicts women as being much freer, even participating with men in a dangerous gymnastic ritual of vaulting themselves over a charging bull. Minoan art, especially its pottery, also shows a peaceful prosperous society, with floral designs and such marine wildlife as dolphins and octopuses rather than scenes of war. Its diffusion around the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean shows that Minoan influence was quite widespread. The myth of Theseus and the Minotaur where Athens had to send a yearly sacrifice of its children to Crete, reflects Minoan rule and indicates that it might not always have been so peaceful. Recent archaeological evidence indicates the Minoans did at times practice human sacrifices. Minoan civilization came to a sudden and mysterious end. The cause was a massive volcanic eruption eighty miles northeast of Crete. This eruption caused a shock wave which leveled Crete's cities, a tidal wave which destroyed its navy, and volcanic ash which poisoned its crops. Together these weakened the Minoans enough to let the Mycenaean Greeks take over around 1450 B.C.

2 Questions: 1. What two things helped make Minoan civilization peaceful and prosperous? 2. In what way were Minoan cities advanced? Which of the other ancient civilization does this remind you of? 3. What gives archeologists the idea that Minoan woman had higher status than in other civilizations? What about the Minoan environment might have been responsible for this? 4. In what way was Minoan society not always so peaceful? 5. What is the main theory for why Minoan civilization collapsed? If you were an archeologist, what clues would you look for to help determine the true cause?

3 The Mycenaeans (c B.C.) The Mycenaeans were Greeks from the mainland who took advantage of the Minoans' weakness to conquer Crete and take control of the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean. They were a vigorous people who engaged in trade and some piracy over a wide area extending from southern Italy in the west to Troy and the Black Sea in the northeast. We are almost as much in the dark about Mycenaean history and society as we are about the Minoans. We do have some written records in a script called Linear B which concern themselves mainly with official tax records and inventories. Three types of evidence tell us a little about Mycenaean society. First, we know that they were divided into different city-states such as Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns, and Athens. Most of these consisted of highly fortified central palaces which ruled over surrounding villages. The Mycenaeans tried to run these as centralized states such as existed in Egypt and Mesopotamia. We do not know if these city-states were completely independent or looked to one city, maybe Mycenae, for leadership. Sources, such as the Iliad, tell us that the Mycenaeans could unite in a common endeavor such as the Trojan War. Second, the art, armor, and remains of fortifications, such as those at Mycenae, tell us the Mycenaeans were much more warlike than the Minoans. Later Greeks had no idea of the existence of Mycenaean civilization and thought these massive walls and gates had been built by a mythical race of giants known as the Cyclopses. Finally, archaeological remains also tell us that the Mycenaeans, at least the upper classes, were fabulously wealthy from trade and probably piracy. Gold funeral masks, jewelry, bronze weapons, tripods, and a storeroom with thousands of goblets demonstrate the Mycenaeans' wealth. This is only what we have found; we don t know how much was plundered by grave robbers. Around 1200 B.C.E., a period of turmoil began that would weaken and eventually help destroy Mycenaean civilization. The main troublemakers were the Sea Peoples who destroyed the Hittite Empire, conquered the coast of Palestine, and shook the Egyptian Empire to its foundations. The Sea Peoples also hit the Mycenaeans, destroying some settlements and driving inhabitants inland or across the sea. The Trojan War took place at this time at the hands of the Mycenaeans, who may have been running from the Sea Peoples. Whatever role the Mycenaeans may have played in all these raids, the result was widespread turmoil as cities were sacked, populations displaced, and trade disrupted. Even though the Mycenaeans survived the actual onslaught of the Sea Peoples, they did not survive the aftermath of all this destruction. Reduced revenue from trade may have caused more warfare between the city-states over the meager resources left in Greece. This warfare would only serve to weaken the Mycenaeans further, wreck trade even more, aggravate grain shortages at home, and so on. This opened the way for a new wave of Greek tribes, the Dorians, to move down and take over much of Greece.

4 Questions: 1. In what two important ways were the Mycenaeans different from the Minoans? What is the evidence of these differences? 2. What leads archeologists to conclude that the Mycenaean kings (upper class) were very wealthy? 3. Imagine you are living at the end of the Mycenaean age. Describe what you might be seeing around you and what you might be thinking about it all.

5 The Dark Age of Greece (c B.C.) The centuries following the fall of the Mycenaeans are mostly obscured from our view by an extreme scarcity of records. As a result, this is known as the Dark Age of Greek history. Still, there are a few things that we know about this period that saw the transition from Mycenaean to classical Greek civilization. It was a period of chaos and the movements of peoples. New tribes of Greeks, the Dorians, moved in and displaced or conquered older inhabitants. Those original inhabitants in turn would migrate, oftentimes overseas, in search of new homes. It was also a period of illiteracy and poverty leaving us no written records or sophisticated monuments to tell us about the culture of this period. It was during this period that all knowledge of the written languages of the Minoans and Mycenaeans was lost and Greece went from a literate society to a more primitive society with no writing systems. (When Greece finally emerged from the Dark ages, it has adopted the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels to it, which is how the alphabet has come down to us today. All this led to the Greek world at this time being divided up between various Greekspeaking peoples who were distinguishable from each other by slight differences in dialect and religious practices. However, their similarities were important enough so that we can talk about the Greeks as a people. Two of these Greek peoples in particular should be mentioned: the Dorians and Ionians. The Dorians were Greek invaders who came down from the north to conquer many of the Mycenaean strongholds around 1100 B.C.E. Sometimes they completely blended in with their pre-dorian subjects, and there was little class conflict in their city-states. In other places the Dorians did not intermarry and remained a distinct ruling class over the non-dorian population. The most extreme cases of this were Sparta and Thessaly, where the non-dorians were virtually enslaved and forced to work the soil for the ruling Dorians. Such situations posed a constant threat of violence within city-states. The Ionians were pre-dorian inhabitants who avoided conquest by the Dorians, either by fighting them off or by migrating. The region of Attica, centered around Athens, was a main pocket of resistance to Dorian conquest, as seen in the myth of the Athenian king, Codrus, who sacrificed himself in battle to ensure Athens' safety against a Dorian invasion. Many Ionians either chose to migrate overseas or were forced to do so by invaders. Most of them settled in the Cycladic Islands or on the western coast of Asia Minor, which became known as Ionia from the large number of Ionian Greeks there.

6 Questions: 1. Why do we use the term Dark Age to describe the period after the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization? 2. How was the Greek world different during the Dark Age than during the previous two periods (Minoan and Mycenaean)? 3. Who were the Dorian and Ionian Greeks and what happened to each of these groups of Greek speaking people? 4. The Dark Age eventually gave way to a time which historians call the Archaic Period (or the Age of Expansion). This is when ancient Greece took on the characteristics that make it so famous. Search the web and find at least five important facts about this period.