The Emergence of Greece [antikvár]

Introduction The transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age in Greece was followed by two colonization movements and an Orientalizing period. Visions of verdigris changing to rust ? Portly administrators lording it over normally subservient natives? Mummies and hieroglyphs at Athens? Illusions that may only be fostered by the frequent use of the word "Archaic" in this volume. Such archaeological shorthand attempts to state over-concisely what happened between the Lion Gate and the Parthenon - something clearly of significance to change Greece from a palace-centered network of petty kingdoms into a politically experienced collection of autonomous city-states whose individual members were capable of producing work in the fields of literature and all the arts still regarded with admiration and deference today. "Iron Age" is a convenient phrase indicating that iron and not bronze is now the basic metal used for artifacts; though not wholly inappropriate, it is a misleading title for the years we shall cover -1 icq to 500 bc. "Archaic" covers the period preceding the "Classical" age - words originally coined to describe the development of Greek art down to its "flowering" in the 5th century. "Colonization" is our word for what the Greeks called "setting up home abroad," and we shall see that many of these settlements first set up in our period became famous cities, responsible for the dissemination of Greek art, ideas and hfe-style over much of the Mediterranean world - first eastward across the Aegean to Miletus, Ephesus, even Troy, then west to Sicily and southern Italy (the area soon dubbed "Great Greece" whose history we shall survey down to the years of Roman expansion), also north to Byzantium and the Black Sea and south to Cyrene and Libya, near neighbors of Carthage. We cannot ignore a return traffic - during this period Greece made renewed and fruitful contact with the old, and some new, civilizations of the Near East, resulting in our "Orientalizing period," the eager acceptance of ideas and iconography into many aspects of Greek life. Another name given to the Iron Age is the "historical period," which may mislead even more. Only during the last 250 years of our period was writing used by the Greeks, and not until its very end do we find mention of any form of historical writing - not too long before our earliest preserved historical texts, of Herodotus from Hahcarnassus and the Athenian Thucydides. The poets of an earlier age may tell us something of the conditions of their times — Homer, Hesiod, Pindar among them - but they wrote for their contemporaries and not for us. Thus in the "historical period" a great deal of our knowledge must still be derived from archaeology. Here there may be little to impress on the scale of Mycenae or the Acropohs, but let it be noted that an early Greek temple was erected on the ruins of Agamemnon's palace, while the Parthenon is built on the foundations of an earlier temple. As at England's York Minster or France's Notre Dame, we would hesitate before removing the oflfending building to extend our knowledge of earher times. The archaeology of "Archaic" Greece has often been hampered by such tenacious rebuilding - it is easier to strike gold than to reach the early levels of Naples or Istanbul! While the buildings in such levels are often of slight construction, ruined, robbed or rotted away, and the archaeological sites of our period may often disappoint the visitor, the objects found in such excavations are regularly of far more intrinsic and historical value than those found elsewhere and a visit to the museum will without doubt repay the visitor's curiosity.