What does it look like when a civilization collapses?
For my part, I hope to never know from experience, but we can indulge this morbid curiosity by
looking into ancient history, where few societies imploded quite so spectacularly as the Mycenaean
world of the Greek Bronze Age.
Yet even if we presume that mega-scale piracy and a war in Troy figured into it somehow,
the process of collapse for Greece’s interconnected palace ecosystem is clouded in the smoke and
rubble of its own downfall.
Still, in the end, it sure as hell broke – palaces lay abandoned, trade had evaporated, the population
shrank, writing was forgotten – and it took nearly half a millennium before the Greeks
re-emerged from the ensuing Dark Age.
Now that’s a bit of a dodgy term, and historians will die for their terminology, so while the
modern interpretation emphasizes the Loss of Writing as The Darkness rather than making
a value judgement, we can better understand this point in history not as the absence of
something, but as the drafting table for what will become the most fundamental concepts
of Greek Civilization going forward.
To see how, let’s do some history.
By the traditional reckoning, the stone-built
citadel of Mycenae falls in 1177 BC, and within a century and change, all but 40 of the 300+
settlements across Greece fall off the map, while the use of Bronze for tools and finery
likewise disappears.
The island of Crete and the Mycenaean heartland of the Peloponnese had it the worst, and with
pirates just off the coast, no city walls for protection, and no economy to support
dense urban settlement – the survivors of the collapse went to the safest logical space:
away.
So while the urban population utterly collapses down to less than a tenth, the overall populace
had only halved – Yet for those survivors, we can imagine their feelings by picturing
the view down from the hills and reflecting on the once-magnificent palaces of their ancestors
lying empty as a shell.
It’s not just that life is hard, it used to be better.
The greatest Mycenaean citadels suffered the
hardest falls, and many would never be inhabited again, but the periphery up north had a softer
landing – a hilltop citadel on the Attica peninsula might never have been abandoned,
and would remain in use as it became the Athenian Acropolis.
(plot twist).
Further out on the island of Euboea we find the rare sight of new stone construction:
a small palace-like estate with the remains of a cremated king, his wife, and horses,
seemingly done to emulate the heroic burials recounted in the Trojan War.
Surprisingly, this grave does hold some bronze-work, but it’s vastly outnumbered by goods made
of Iron.
And this illustrates one of the period’s big riddles: How did the Bronze Age upgrade
to the Iron Age if all of civilization went kaplooey?
It seems incongruous, but it made perfect sense to the Greeks, because to them, Iron
was a downgrade, merely a product of cruel necessity.
The two chemical components for Bronze were mostly sourced outside of the Aegean: with
Copper from Cyprus and Tin as far as England – but when the trade routes dried up after
the collapse, bronze-making got way the hell harder.
However, Iron ore was naturally occurring beneath most of mainland Greece.
The technique came from Cyprus and was likely introduced in the 1000s BC at bustling spots
like Lefkandi, but it soon became widespread.
We can appreciate that Iron’s a harder material, but the Greeks thought it was too much of
a pain in the ass to smelt for how much uglier it was than Bronze.
To be fair, correct.
Contrary to our darling March of Progress, the 8th century poet Hesiod coined the entire
concept of the Iron Age to bitterly lament the decline from the heroic glories of Bronze
to the backbreaking labor that Iron represents.
But even if Iron was a scrub-metal for idiot
losers, its prevalence does show us that Greeks were slowly coalescing into large enough groups
to mine, smelt, and make use of the stuff.
In the immediate wake of the fall, the basic group unit was the Oikos, a family with the
head of household, immediate relatives, slaves, and any retainers who attached themselves
to the Oikos for protection.
A far cry from Mycenaean royalties, but it was fit for purpose.
Over the centuries, they grew into villages, then towns, and by the 8-to-700s: cities.
And it’s here that we can finally speak of The Polis, an urban center surrounded by
supportive farmland and dozens of smaller villages, which will become the definitive
unit of Greek society.
We translate the concept as a City State, but it’s the combination of City and Land
that creates a thousand self-sufficient poleis across Greece – your Spartas, your Athens-es,
and countless others whose arrival marks the turn from the Dark Age into the Polis Age,
where Greece as we recognize it comes into form.
However, I’m getting ahead of myself, because
this shift took hundreds of years, and that notable slowness owed in part to how hard
Greece can actually be to live in.
Every tiny valley between the mountains could accommodate some herdspeople, but larger communities
may rapidly find themselves outstripping what that land provides.
This started causing trouble around the 800s, so the Greeks employed three new strategies:
first was to conquer your neighbors by force and take their land, that’ll be Sparta’s
MO – second was to trade with those new Phoenician merchants to sell what you have
and buy what you need, that’s the Athens strat – and third was to send some of your
people out to make a new town on some distant coast or island and collaborate at a distance,
this was originally the Euboea strategy, but it’d soon be an everyone strategy.
And all this movement brought the Greeks into
closer and more frequent contact with those seafaring Phoenicians ­– merchants though
they were, their biggest gift to Greek civilization was not goods, but writing.
Because some curious Greek in the late 800s saw a Phoenician marking down trade logs,
and figured they could use those same characters to write Greek.
Of course the languages aren’t 1-1, so the big swerve was taking the Phoenician characters
Greek didn’t have sounds for, and instead making them represent vowels.
Now, this easy list of 20-odd shapes could convey everything imaginable, with no ambiguity,
and let ideas traverse both distance and time.
The uses were immediately apparent, not just for ledgers, laws, and inscriptions, but poetry.
And from very first scraps of text, it seems like the number one poetic focus was The Trojan
War – as it was possibly the single biggest event in Mycenaean history.
That said, it's pretty damn impressive that Polis-era Greeks even knew it had happened
– For the stories to survive the loss of writing and the aforementioned total desolation
of urban society etc etc, the original tales from Bronze age poets needed to pass through
an unbroken oral tradition, dispersed across the Aegean and preserved through generations
of families in quotes, fragments, and episodes.
No small task.
That storytelling chain inspired the heroic
burial at Lefkandi, and survived until long-distance trade re-emerged, letting storytellers start
comparing notes.
The tale of the Trojan War was far too vast for one poet to recount in a night, so the
Greeks told it in a series of episodes within a broader Epic Cycle.
So with the advent of writing, it became possible to take several smaller stories, dozens even,
and codify them into one cohesive megawork; Or in this case, two, because the late 8th
century graces us with The Iliad and The Odyssey.
We ascribe these to the legendary poet Homer, but whomever he may have been, the stories
as we have them are the product of thousands of oral storytellers and scribes working together
over hundreds of years.
And you can hear that pan-Hellenic collaboration in the poems, combining elements from every
Greek dialect, and simultaneously including details only a Polis-Age poet would have seen
with things only a Bronze Age story could remember.
Spooky!
Both stories at once show the harshness of
war and piracy as well as the glories of the heroic past, and that perspective really only
makes sense coming from a small family looking down a hill onto that broken palace of their
ancestors.
The subtle yet pervasive melancholy of these poems is the voice of every Dark Age poet
who carried that story from Mycenae to Homer.
And if we are to speak of a single poet Homer, his great innovation was combining the episodes
into character dramas for Achilles and Odysseus.
All the mythological embellishments prevent it from serving as any strict chronicle, but
the values and deeds of the epic heroes become guiding moral principles for a shared Greek
identity.
The epics aren’t a sacred text, but rather the main ideological statements of what Greeks
should be.
And on a meta level, they define this new society: if you can read the epics in Greek,
then you are Greek.
So by the 700s, Greeks have local political unity in the Polis, and a broader cultural
unity through language and the epics.
And this spirit of communal individuality drives the Greek love of competition, flexing
your excellence in pursuit of glory, and that heroic swagger manifests in athletic competition.
In 776 BC, the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia hosts the very first Olympic Games – and
in true heroic style, Olympic victors would be immortalized in poetry.
It’s all the spirit of Epic Heroism.
So as we enter the Polis Age, we see some
elements of continuity back from the Bronze Age: the spoken Greek language, the pantheon
of gods, memories of Troy on fire – But in the time between the loss and rediscovery
of writing, Greece was transforming into a land of city states, all inspired by the heroic
glories in their shared epics.
Gotta say, composing the core essence of all Greek civilization is not bad for a Dark Age…
Now go read the Iliad.
Thank you for watching!
Greek history is just such a joy for me it’s a miracle I’m able to make videos on anything
else.
In that vein I’d like to thank our patrons here for subsidizing my Hellenic hyperfixation,
and I’ll see you all in the next video.