Greek Dark Ages

The Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1200 BC–800 BC) refers to the period of Greek prehistory from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean civilization in the 11th century BC to the rise of the first Greek city-states in the 9th century BC and the epics of Homer and earliest writings in alphabetic Greek in the 8th century BC.

Archaeology shows a collapse of civilization in the eastern Mediterranean world during this period. The great palaces and cities of the Myceneans were destroyed or abandoned. Hittite civilisation collapsed. Cities from Troy to Gaza were destroyed. The Greek language ceased to be written. Greek dark age pottery has simple geometric designs and lacks the figurative decoration of Mycenean ware. The Greeks of the dark age lived in fewer and smaller settlements, suggesting famine and depopulation, and foreign goods have not been found at archaeological sites, suggesting minimum international trade. Contact was also lost between foreign powers during this period, yielding little cultural progress or growth of any sort.

Kings ruled throughout this period until eventually they were replaced with an aristocracy, then still later, in some areas, an aristocracy within an aristocracy -- an elite of the elite. Warfare shifted from a focus on cavalry to a great emphasis on infantry. Due to its cheapness of production and local availability, iron replaced bronze as the metal of choice in the manufacturing of tools and weapons. Equality grew slowly among the different classes of people, leading to the dethronement of the various kings and the rise of the family.

Families began to reconstruct their past in attempts to link their bloodlines with heroes from the Trojan War, more specifically Heracles. While most of this was legend, some were sorted by poets of the school of Hesiod. Most of these poems are lost, though, but some famous "storywriters", as they were called, were Hecataeus of Miletus and Acusilaus of Argos.

It is thought that the epics by Homer contain a certain amount of tradition preserved orally during the Dark Ages period. The historical validity of Homer's writings is vigorously disputed; see the article on Troy for a discussion.

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.

The rise of a new writing system

The use of the syllabary system of the Minoans, the so-called Linear scripts, fell into sharp decline in favour of a new alphabet system, adopted from the Semitic Phoenicians to write not only the Greek language, but also other languages in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time. Before this turbulent time, Myceneans were writing their Greek language in Linear B but after the Dark Ages when history was being recorded once again, we find this new alphabet, the more familiar alpha-beta-gamma. The early Etruscans must have also benefited from the same new writing system at this time since by the time the Etruscans arrived to Western Italy in centuries following 1200 BC, the writing system quickly spread further across Italy for the purposes of Latin, and was even adapted by Germanic tribes to the north in the form of runes. The Lemnians, with a language similar to Etruscan spoken on the Aegean island of Lemnos, used an identical alphabet to the Etruscans on an inscription called the Lemnos Stele. The previous Linear scripts were not completely abandoned however, since some inscriptions are found written in it which date to later centuries, such as the Eteocypriot inscriptions.

Mediterranean warfare and the Sea Peoples

It is around this time that large-scale revolts took place and attempts to overthrow existing kingdoms by surrounding people who were already plagued with famine and hardship. The Hittite kingdom was invaded and fell, by the hand of the so-called Sea Peoples, a group of peoples originating from surrounding areas around the Mediterranean. A similar assemblage of peoples attempted to take over Egypt twice, once during the reign of Merneptah, and then again during the reign of Ramses III. In both attempts the Egyptian defenses were successful in avoiding the same fate as the Hittites however.

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