This explanation of technological change in prehistoric Europe has had to be revised, however, in the light of scientific analytic techniques refined only as recently as the late 1960s. Radiocarbon dating forced the revision by permitting scientists to give close estimates of the age of prehistoric organic materials from archaeological excavations. Laboratory analysis of the amount of radioactive carbon-14 remaining in materials such as bones, seeds, hides, and wood can now determine with an acceptable margin of error the length of time since the death of the material submitted for testing. Dendrochronology, the chronological evidence obtained from counting the internal rings of long-lived trees, has helped refine the accuracy of radiocarbon dating. These techniques applied to archaeological material from Neolithic Europe have suggested a more complex process of change than previously imagined. It now seems established that farming communities had already developed in Greece and the Balkan Mountains immediately to the north as early as the seventh millennium B.C. On this chronology, it is still possible to believe that traders and migrating farmers from the Near East introduced domesticated cereal grains into Greece, but it is also not ruled out that Greek agriculture developed as the result of independent innovation. As for the domestication of cattle, the evidence suggests that this important development in how human beings acquired meat to eat took place in this region of Europe at least as early as in the Near East. In this case, a European population apparently introduced change on its own, by independent local innovation rather than through diffusion.
Radiocarbon dates further suggest that European metalworkers developed copper metallurgy independently from Near Eastern metalsmiths because they show this technology developing in various European locations around the same time as in the Near East. By the fourth millennium, for instance, smiths in the Balkans were casting copper ax heads with the hole for the ax handle in the correct position. The smiths of southeastern Europe started alloying bronze in the same period in the third millennium as their Near Eastern counterparts, learning to add 10 percent of tin to the copper that they were firing. The European Bronze Age (to use the terminology in which periods of history are labeled according to the metal most in use) therefore commenced at approximately the same date as the Near Eastern Bronze Age. This chronology suggests contemporary but independent local innovation, because otherwise we would expect to find evidence that metallurgy had begun much earlier in the Near East than in Europe, to allow the necessary time for the diffusion of the technology all the way from the Near East to Europe.
Thus, the explanation of important changes in prehistoric European history has become more complicated than it was when diffusion alone seemed sufficient to explain these developments. It no longer seems possible to think that the Neolithic population of Greece was wholly dependent on Near Easterners for knowledge of innovative technologies such as megalithic architecture and metallurgy, even if they did learn agriculture from them. Like their neighbors in Europe, the inhabitants of prehistoric Greece participated in the complex process of diffusion and in independent invention, which brought such remarkable technological and social changes in this period through the interacting effects of contact with others, sometimes very distant others, and local innovation.
TWO
From Indo-Europeans to Mycenaeans
When did the people living in and around the central Mediterranean Sea in the locations that make up Greece become Greeks? No simple answer is possible, because the concept of identity includes not just the social and material conditions of life but also ethnic, cultural, religious, and linguistic traditions. So far as the available evidence shows, the Mycenaeans of the second millennium B.C. were the first population in Greece that spoke Greek. By that date, then, groups of people clearly existed whom we can call Greeks. No records tell us what the Mycenaeans called themselves; in Greek, as it developed in the historical period, they referred to their country as “Hellas” and themselves as “Hellenes,” from the name of a legendary chief from central Greece, Hellen (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War 1.3.2). Those terms remain the proper usage in Greek today. “Greece” and “Greek,” in fact, come from Latin, the language of the Romans.
The deepest origins of the language of the Greeks and the other components of their identity lie deeper in the past than Mycenaean times, but tracing those origins remains a challenge because written records do not exist from such early times. Scholarly investigation of the fundamental components of ancient Greek ethnic and cultural identity has centered on two major issues: the significance of the Indo-European heritage of ancient Greeks in the period c. 4500–2000 B.C., and the consequences for Greeks of their interactions with the older civilizations of the Near East, Egypt in particular, in the second millennium. Even though the details of these processes of cultural formation remain exceptionally controversial, on a general level it is clear that both these sources of influence affected the construction of Greek identity in lasting ways.
There are definite sources of influence on early Greek culture to be found in the history of the second millennium, for which we have significant archaeological evidence and even some written documents. Before the rise of Mycenaean civilization in mainland Greece, Minoan civilization flourished on the large island of Crete. The Minoans, who did not speak Greek, had grown rich through complex agriculture and seaborne trade with the peoples of the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt. The Minoans passed on this tradition of intercultural contact to the civilization of the Mycenaeans, whom they greatly influenced before losing their power after the middle of the millennium. The centers of Mycenaean civilization were destroyed in the period from about 1200 to 1000 B.C. as part of widespread turmoil throughout the eastern Mediterranean region. The descendants of the Greeks who survived these catastrophes eventually revived Greek civilization after the Dark Age (1000–750).
INDO-EUROPEAN AND NEAR EASTERN ROOTS
The central issue concerning the Indo-European background of Greek identity and culture is whether groups of peoples whom we call Indo-Europeans migrated into prehistoric Europe over many centuries and radically changed the nature of the lives of people already there, including the indigenous inhabitants of Greece. Debate continues over the location of the homeland of the earliest Indo-Europeans, but the most likely suggestion seems to be either central Asia or Anatolia. Recent though controversial research in computer analysis of linguistic evidence seems to tip the balance in favor of Anatolia. The final phase of Indo-European migration caused devastation across Europe around 2000 B.C., according to the also controversial hypothesis that aggressive peoples at that time moved in large groups across vast distances. The Greeks of the historical period are then seen as the descendants of this group of invaders.
The concept of an original Indo-European identity is constructed from the later history of language. Linguists long ago recognized that a single language had been the earliest ancestor of most of the major ancient and modern groups of languages of western Europe (including, among others, Greek, Latin, and English), of the Slavic languages, of Persian (Iranian), and of various languages such as Sanskrit spoken on the Indian subcontinent. They therefore bestowed the name “Indo-Europeans” on the original speakers of this ancestral language. Since the original language had disappeared by evolving into its different descendant languages well before the invention of writing, its only traces survive in the words of the later languages derived from it. Early Indo-European, for example, had a single word for night, which passed down as Greek nux (nuktos in the genitive case), Latin nox or noctis, Vedic (the type of Sanskrit used in the ancient epic poetry of India) nakt-, English night, Spanish noche, French nuit, German Nacht, Russian noch, and so on. To give another example: that English speakers have the words I and me, two completely dissimilar pronouns, to refer to themselves in different grammatical contexts is a feature inherited from the pronouns of Indo-European.
Map 2. Areas of Indo-European Language Groups
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c. 4500–2000 B.C.: Movem
ents of Indo-European peoples into Europe?
c. 3000–2500 B.C.: Bronze metallurgy under way in the Balkans and on the island of Crete.
c. 3000–2000 B.C.: Development of Mediterranean polyculture.
c. 2200 B.C.: Earliest Cretan palaces of Minoan civilization.
c. 2000 B.C.: Violent destruction of many European sites.
c. 1700 B.C.: Earthquakes destroy early Cretan palaces.
c. 1600–1500 B.C.: Shaft graves at Mycenae on Greek mainland.
c. 1500–1450 B.C.: Earliest Mycenaean tholos tombs.
c. 1400 B.C.: Earliest Mycenaean palaces.
c. 1370 B.C.: Palace of Knossos on Crete destroyed.
c. 1300–1200 B.C.: Highpoint of Mycenaean palace culture.
c. 1200–1000 B.C.: Violent disturbances across the Aegean region in the era of the Sea Peoples.
c. 1000 B.C.: Mycenaean palace society no longer functioning.
* * *
Scholars of linguistics think that words in later languages that descended from the original language of the earliest Indo-Europeans can offer hints about important characteristics of that group’s original society. For example, the name of the chief Indo-European divinity, a male god, survives in the similar sounds of Zeus pater and Jupiter, the names given to the chief god in Greek and Latin, respectively. This evidence leads to the conclusion that Indo-European society was patriarchal, with fathers being not just parents but rather the authority figure controlling the household. Other words suggest that Indo-European society was also patrilocal (the wife moving to live with the husband’s family group) and patrilineal (the line of descent of children being reckoned through their father). Indo-European language also included references to kings, a detail suggesting a hierarchical and differentiated society rather than an egalitarian one. Finally, both linguistic and archaeological evidence was taken to mean that Indo-European males were warlike and competitive. Since the language of the Greeks, the fundamental component of their identity, indisputably came from Indo-European origins, they represented one linguistically identifiable group descended from Indo-European ancestors.
The most controversial interpretation of the significance of the early Indo-Europeans argues that they invaded Europe in waves and imposed patriarchal, hierarchical, and violent values on the peoples they found there. On this hypothesis, the indigenous populations of prehistoric Europe had been generally egalitarian, peaceful, and matrifocal (centered on women as mothers), and the Indo-European invasions destroyed these qualities. This argument further asserts that these earlier Europeans had originally worshipped female gods as their principal divinities, but the Indo-Europeans forcibly degraded these goddesses in favor of their male deities, such as Zeus, the king of the gods for the Greeks. This brutal transformation would have begun about 4500 B.C., with different groups of Indo-Europeans moving into Europe over the following centuries, eventually sacking and ruining many pre–Indo-European sites in Europe around 2000 B.C.
Opponents of the theory of the Indo-European origin of other aspects of the Greeks’ culture except for language argue that no evidence clearly shows Indo-Europeans migrating into Europe as distinct groups powerful enough to abolish already-existing social structures and beliefs and force their own practices on the people already there. It may even be that Indo-European social traditions had never differed significantly from those originally evolved by the non–Indo-European societies of prehistoric Europe. Therefore, characteristics of later, historical Greek society, such as patriarchy and social inequality for women, might in truth have already existed among the indigenous inhabitants of Greece. For example, another theory proposes that Stone Age male hunter-gatherers had pushed human society down the road toward patriarchy by kidnapping women from each other’s bands in an attempt to improve their own band’s ability to reproduce itself and thus survive. Since men as hunters had experience traveling far from base camp, they were the ones to raid other bands. In this way, men would have acquired dominance over women long before the date when early Indo-Europeans are supposed to have initiated their invasions of Europe.
On this view, the indigenous society of Europe became patriarchal without outside influence, even though its religion paid great respect to female divinities, as evidenced by the thousands of Venus figurines (female statuettes with large breasts and hips) uncovered in European archaeological excavations of prehistoric sites, and by the many goddesses prominent in Greek religion. Alternatively, the growth of social inequality between men and women may have been a consequence of the changes accompanying the development of plow agriculture and large-scale herding in late Stone Age Europe (see chapter 1). Scholars who deemphasize the significance of the Indo-Europeans as a source of cultural change argue further against blaming them for the widespread destruction of European sites around 2000 B.C. Instead, they suggest, exhaustion of the soil, leading to intense competition for land, and internal political turmoil could have motivated the violent clashes that devastated various European settlements at the end of the third millennium.
One aspect of the question of Greek identity that has aroused fierce controversy is the relation between Greece and the Near East, especially Egypt. Some nineteenth-century scholars downplayed or even denied any significant cultural influence of the Near East on Greece, despite the clear evidence that the ancient Greeks acknowledged with appreciation that they had learned a great deal from those peoples outside Greece who, they fully recognized, represented more-ancient civilizations. Greeks with knowledge of the past proclaimed that they had taken a lot in particular from the older civilization of Egypt, especially in religion. Herodotus reported that priests in Egypt told him that as well as being the first people to create altars, festivals, statues, and temples of the gods, the Egyptians had initiated the tradition of bestowing epithets or titles on divinities, and that the Greeks had adopted this tradition from Egypt—and, Herodotus adds, the evidence the priests provided him proved that “these claims were valid” (The Histories 2.4.2).
Modern research agrees with the view of the ancient Greeks that they had learned much from Egypt. The clearest evidence of the deep influence of Egyptian culture on Greek is the store of fundamental religious ideas that flowed from Egypt to Greece, such as the geography of the underworld, the weighing of the souls of the dead in scales, and the life-giving properties of fire, as commemorated in the initiation ceremonies of the international cult of the goddess Demeter of Eleusis (a famous site in Athenian territory). Greek mythology, the stories that Greeks told themselves about their deepest origins and their relations to the gods, was infused with stories and motifs with roots in Egypt and the Near East. But the influence was not limited to religion. For one thing, Greek sculptors in the Archaic Age chiseled their statues according to a set of proportions established by Egyptian artists.
Archaeology reveals that people living in Greece had trade and diplomatic contacts with the Near East at least as early as the middle of the second millennium B.C. What cannot be true, however, is the modern theory that Egyptians invaded and colonized mainland Greece in this period. Egyptian records refer to Greeks as foreigners, not as colonists. Furthermore, much of the contact between Greece and the Near East in this early period took place through intermediaries, above all the seafaring traders from the island of Crete. In any case, in thinking about the “cultural debt” of one group to another, it is crucial not to fall into the trap of seeing one group as the passive recipient of ideas or skills or traditions transmitted by a superior group. What one group takes over from another is always adapted and reinterpreted according to the system of values of the group doing the receiving. Everything they receive from others they transform so as to give the innovations functions and meanings suited to their own purposes and cultural traditions. When the Greeks learned from the peoples of the Near East and Egypt, they made what they learned their own. This is how cultural identity is forged, not by mindless imitation or passive reception. The Greeks themselves constructed their own iden
tity, based above all on shared religious practices and a common language. In the aspects of their culture that they originally took from others, they put their own stamp on what they learned from foreigners. The construction of Greek identity took a long time. It would be pointless to try to fix the beginning of this complex process at any single moment in history. Rather than look for a nonexistent single origin of Greek identity, we should try to identify the multiple sources of cultural influence that flowed together over the long run to produce Greek culture as we find it in later times.
BRONZE AGE CIVILIZATIONS OF EUROPE
The late Bronze Age (the second millennium B.C.) provides crucial evidence for understanding how Greeks became Greeks. The “first civilizations of Europe” belong to this period: Minoan civilization on the large island of Crete (southeast of the mainland peninsula of Greece) and on other smaller Mediterranean islands, and Mycenaean civilization on the mainland and on some of the islands and coast of the Aegean. The Minoans, who spoke a still-unidentified language, built a prosperous civilization before the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans. Both populations had extensive trading contacts with the Near East, complex agricultural and metallurgical technologies, elaborate architecture, striking art, and a marked taste for luxury. They also inhabited a dangerous world whose perils ultimately overwhelmed all their civilized sophistication.
Ancient Greece Page 4