Ancient Greece

by Thomas R. Martin

  The forerunners of these civilizations in the third millennium B.C. had developed advanced metallurgy in bronze, lead, silver, and gold—a technology that had deep effects on Minoan and Mycenaean life, from war to farming to the creation of new objects of wealth and status. These metallurgical advances apparently took place independent of similar developments in the Balkans and the Near East. Devising innovative ways to alloy metals at high temperatures, Aegean smiths created more-lethal weapons for warfare, new luxury goods, and more-durable and effective tools for agriculture and construction. This new technology made metal weaponry more effective in dealing death. A copper weapon had offered relatively few advantages over a stone one, because this soft metal easily lost its shape and edge. Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was much stronger and able to hold a razor edge; its invention made possible the production of durable metal daggers, swords, and spearheads. The earliest Aegean daggers have been found at third-millennium Troy in western Anatolia. The dagger soon became standard equipment for warriors in the Bronze Age and an early entry in the catalogue of weapons that fueled the arms races familiar in human history. Daggers gradually lengthened into swords, increasing the killing efficiency of these new weapons.

  Bronze Age smiths could also add expensive decorations to weapons and jewelry to make them objects for display and ostentation, serving as highly visible symbols of their owners’ wealth and rank in society. Since human beings seem by nature to be status-seeking organisms, new and more-expensive metal objects gave people yet another way to set themselves apart, if they could afford it. For example, elaborately decorated weapons helped mark the division between men and women in society because they signified the masculine roles of hunter and warrior that had emerged long ago in the division of labor of hunter-gatherers. Since the desire to accumulate wealth in the form of metal objects and to possess costly examples as status symbols stimulated demand for metals and for the skilled workers who could fashion them, the creation of a new kind of wealth and status represented one of the most important social consequences of the development of metallurgy. Greater availability of such objects made even more people desire them, further stimulating demand across society. This process in turn affected people’s expectations about what constituted rewards appropriate for their labor or for displaying their status. Now they expected to be able to acquire goods made of metal—utilitarian objects, such as tools, and luxury goods, such as jewelry. The elite also prized the products of other specialized crafts perfected in the Near East, such as decorative pieces carved from imported ivory. Growing numbers of crafts specialists in turn swelled Bronze Age Aegean settlements, though the communities remained quite small by modern urban standards. Some of these specialists were itinerant Near Easterners who had traveled west looking for new markets for their skills. They brought with them not only their technological expertise but also a repertoire of myths that influenced the peoples with whom they interacted. In this way they became indirect agents of cultural change.

  Mediterranean polyculture—the cultivation of olives, grapes, and grain together in one agricultural system—also grew common in the third millennium, as people began to make use of sharper and better metal tools and to exploit new plants to expand their diet. The emergence of this system, which still dominates Mediterranean agriculture, had two important consequences: an increase in the food supply, which stimulated population growth, and further diversification and specialization of agriculture. This newly diversified agriculture in turn produced valuable new products: olive oil and wine, both of which required new storage techniques for local use and for trade. The manufacture of giant storage jars therefore gained momentum, adding another specialization to the crafts of the period. Specialization in the production of food and goods also meant that the specialists in these fields had no time to grow their own food or fashion the variety of things they needed for everyday life. They had to acquire their food and other goods through exchange.

  Society therefore became increasingly interdependent, both economically and socially. In the smaller villages of early Stone Age Greece, reciprocity had probably governed exchanges among the population of self-sufficient farmers. Reciprocal exchange did not aim at economic gain but rather promoted a social value: I give you some of what I produce, and you in return give me some of what you produce. We exchange not because either of us necessarily needs what the other produces, but to reaffirm our social alliances in a small group. Bronze Age society in the Aegean region eventually reached a level of economic interdependence that went far beyond reciprocity and far surpassed in its complexity the economies that had been characteristic of even larger Neolithic villages such as Çatal Hüyük.

  THE PALACE SOCIETY OF MINOAN CRETE

  People had inhabited the large, fertile island of Crete for several thousand years before the emergence about 2200–2000 B.C. of the system that has earned the title of the earliest Aegean civilization. This civilization, which was characterized by large architectural complexes today usually labeled “palaces,” relied on an interdependent economy based primarily on redistribution controlled by the rulers. The first, “pre-palace,” settlers in Crete presumably immigrated across the sea from nearby Anatolia about 6000 B.C. These Neolithic farming families originally lived in small settlements nestled close to fertile agricultural land, like their contemporaries elsewhere in Europe. In the third millennium B.C., however, the new technological developments in metallurgy and agriculture began to affect society on Crete dramatically. By about 2200 or somewhat later, huge many-chambered buildings (the so-called palaces) began to appear on Crete, usually near but not on the coast. The palaces were multistoried and sprawling, their walls decorated with colorful paintings of ships on the sea, leaping dolphins, and gorgeous women. Today this Cretan society is called Minoan after King Minos, the legendary ruler of the island. The palaces housed the rulers and their servants and served as central storage facilities, while the general population clustered around the palaces in houses built one right next to the other, in smaller towns nearby, and in country houses in outlying areas.

  Earthquakes leveled the first Cretan palaces about 1700 B.C., but the Minoans rebuilt on an even grander scale in the following centuries. Accounting records preserved on clay tablets reveal how these large structures served as the hubs of the island’s top-down, redistributive economy. Probably influenced by Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Minoans at first developed a pictographic script to symbolize objects, for the purpose of keeping such records. This system evolved into a more linear form of writing to express phonetic sounds. Unlike cuneiform or hieroglyphics, this system of writing was a true syllabary, in which characters stood for the sound of the syllables of words. This script, used during the first half of the second millennium B.C., is today called Linear A. The identity of the language that it recorded remains unknown, and linguistic specialists can decipher only some of the words; recent scholarship suggesting that the language of Linear A belonged to the Indo-European family has not convinced the majority of scholars. In other ways, such as their religious architecture, the Minoans certainly differed from the population on the Greek mainland. Since Minoan civilization had direct contact with and great influence on the mainland inhabitants, however, it is appropriate to treat it as part of the early history of Greece.

  Linear A is sufficiently well understood to see that it was used for records in the form of lists: records of goods received and goods paid out, inventories of stored goods, livestock, landholdings, and personnel. With their emphasis on accounting, the Minoans kept records of everything from chariots to perfumes. The receipts record payments owed, with careful notation of any deficits in the amount actually paid in. The records of disbursements from the palace storerooms cover ritual offerings to the gods, rations to personnel, and raw materials for crafts production, such as metal issued to bronze smiths. None of the tablets records any exchange rate between different categories of goods, such as, for example, a ratio to state how much grain counted as
the equivalent of a sheep. Nor do the tablets reveal any use of bullion as money in exchanges. (The invention of coinage lay a thousand years in the future.)

  The palace society of Minoan Crete therefore appears to have operated primarily on a redistributive economic system: The central authority told producers how much they had to contribute to the central collection facility and also decided what each member of the society would receive for subsistence and reward. In other words, the palaces did not support a market economy, in which agricultural products and manufactured goods are exchanged through buying and selling. Similar redistributive economic systems based on official monopolies had existed in Mesopotamia for some time, and, like them, the Cretan redistributive arrangement required both ingenuity and a complicated administration. To handle receipt and disbursement of olive oil and wine, for example, the palaces had vast storage areas filled with hundreds of gigantic jars next to storerooms crammed with bowls, cups, and dippers. Scribes meticulously recorded what came in and what went out by writing on clay tablets kept in the palace. Specific administrators had the job of collecting quotas of the most valuable items—animals and textiles—from the various districts into which the palace’s territory was divided. The process of collection and redistribution applied to crafts specialists as well as to food producers, and the palace’s administrative officials set specifications for crafts producers’ contributions, which amounted to work quotas. Although not everyone is likely to have participated in the redistribution system, it apparently dominated the Cretan economy, minimizing the exchange of goods through markets. People out in the countryside perhaps occasionally sold goods to one another, but the volume of exchange in these small markets never remotely rivaled the scope of the redistributive economic system of the palaces.

  Overseas trade probably operated as a monopoly through the palace system, too, with little role for independent merchants and traders. The Minoan palaces conducted a great deal of commerce by sea, seeking raw materials and luxury goods. Copper could be obtained on Cyprus, but the tin needed to make bronze was only found in a few very distant locations. Therefore, trade for this essential metal connected Crete, if indirectly, to places as far away as Britain and even Afghanistan. Egypt was a favorite destination for Minoan seafarers, who are depicted in Egyptian tomb reliefs as bringing gifts or tribute to Egypt’s rulers. Some Minoans evidently stayed on in Egypt as mercenary soldiers or artists, and Minoan-style frescoes (wall paintings on plaster) have been found at Avaris (Tel el-Dab’a) there. Minoan Crete was also in contact with the Near East and the island of Cyprus in the eastern Mediterranean, with traders and crafts specialists from those areas probably voyaging westward to Crete as often as the Minoans went eastward.

  Archaeological evidence suggests that Minoan civilization operated smoothly and peacefully for centuries. The absence of fortification walls around the palaces, towns, and isolated country houses of Minoan Crete imply that Minoan settlements saw no need to defend themselves against one other. By contrast, contemporary settlements elsewhere around the Aegean Sea and in Anatolia had elaborate defensive walls. The remains of the newer Minoan palaces, such as the famous one at Knossos on the north side of the island (fig. 2.1)—with its hundreds of rooms in five stories, storage jars holding 240,000 gallons, indoor plumbing, and brightly colored scenes painted on the walls—have led many to see Minoan society as especially prosperous, peaceful, and happy. The prominence of women in palace frescoes and the numerous figurines of bosomy goddesses found on Cretan sites have even prompted speculation that Minoan society continued to be a female-dominated culture of the kind that, as discussed earlier, has sometimes been postulated as the indigenous society of prehistoric Europe. But the wealth of weaponry found in the graves of Cretan men shows that expertise in combat and martial display bestowed special status in Minoan society. The weapons strongly suggest that men dominated in the palace society of Minoan Crete, and it is common to speak of “princes” or “kings” as the leaders in this society of palaces.

  MINOAN CONTACT WITH MYCENAEAN GREECE

  The long-distance international trade of Minoan Crete established extensive overseas contacts for the residents of the palaces, and this network of trade gained strength as the Minoans learned to build still larger ships that could carry more cargo and survive better in Mediterranean storms. Their daring sailors voyaged long distances not only to Egypt and the other civilizations of the Near East, but also to the islands of the Aegean and southern Greece. On the Greek mainland they encountered another civilization today called Mycenaean, after its most famous archaeological site. Inspired by the Greek poet Homer’s tale of the Trojan War, archaeologists have uncovered the Bronze Age site of Mycenae in the Peloponnese (the large peninsula that is southern Greece), with its elaborate citadel on multiple terraces and fortification walls built of large stones meticulously fitted together (fig. 2.3 on p. 44). The discoveries at Mycenae gained such renown that “Mycenaean” has become the general term for the Bronze Age civilization of mainland Greece in the second millennium B.C., although neither Mycenae nor any other of the settlements of Mycenaean Greece ever ruled Bronze Age Greece as a united state.

  Fig. 2.1: The Minoan-era palace at Knossos on Crete was a sprawling, multistory building with extensive areas for storage of goods and large public gatherings. Centers such as this were the hubs of the “top-down,” redistributive economic systems of the Minoans. © iStockphoto.com / Ralf Siemieniec.

  The discovery in the nineteenth century A.D. of treasure-filled graves at Mycenae thrilled the European world. Constructed as stone-lined shafts, these graves entombed corpses buried with golden jewelry, including heavy necklaces festooned with pendants, gold and silver vessels, bronze weapons decorated with scenes of wild animals inlaid in precious metals, and delicately painted pottery. The first excavator of Mycenae, the businessman-turned-archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, thought that he had found the grave of King Agamemnon (fig. 2.2), who commanded the Greeks at Troy in Homer’s poem The Iliad. In truth, however, the shaft graves date to the sixteenth century B.C., long before the Trojan War of the twelfth century. The artifacts from the shaft graves point to a warrior culture organized in independent settlements ruled by powerful commanders, who enriched themselves by conducting raiding expeditions near and far, as well as by dominating local farmers. The retrospective story of the Trojan War told in The Iliad refers, at least in part, to the aims of Mycenaean society as they passed down to later ages in oral literature. The aggressive heroes of Homer’s poem sail far from their homes in Greece to attack the citadel of the Trojans in western Anatolia. Their announced mission is to rescue Helen, the Greek queen whom the son of the king of Troy had lured away from her husband, but they were intensely focused on gathering booty by sacking Troy and other places in the neighborhood. The precious objects and symbols of wealth and power found in the graves dating long before the Trojan War show that a society of warriors with goals similar to those of the male heroes of The Iliad was in place at least four centuries earlier than the setting of the poem’s story.

  Fig. 2.2: This gold mask was discovered in a grave at Mycenae. Sometimes called the “Death Mask” of Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek army in the Trojan War, its identity and function remain mysteries. It does reveal, however, how rich the rulers of Mycenae became: They could afford to demonstrate their superior social status by burying such valuable objects. Wikimedia Commons.

  The construction of another kind of burial chamber, called tholos tombs—spectacular underground domed chambers built in beehive shapes from closely fitted stones—marks the next period in Mycenaean society, beginning in the fifteenth century B.C. The architectural details of the tholos tombs and the Near-Eastern-art-inspired styles of the burial goods found in them testify to the far-flung contacts that Mycenaean rulers maintained throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Reference to Mycenaean soldiers in Egyptian records indicates that mainland warriors could take up service far from home.

  Contact w
ith the civilization of Minoan Crete was tremendously influential for Mycenaean civilization; Minoan artifacts and artistic motifs turn up on the mainland in profusion. The evidence for contact between Minoans and Mycenaeans raises a thorny problem in the explanation of cultural change. Since the art and goods of the Mycenaeans in the middle of the second millennium B.C. display many features clearly reminiscent of Cretan design, the archaeologist who excavated Knossos, Arthur Evans, argued that the Minoans had inspired Mycenaean civilization by sending colonists to the mainland, as they undeniably had to various Aegean islands, such as Thera. This demotion of Mycenaean civilization to secondary status offended the excavators of Mycenae, and a continuing debate among scholars raged over the relationship between the two cultures. They were certainly not identical; they spoke different languages. The Mycenaeans made burnt offerings to the gods; the Minoans did not. The Minoans constructed sanctuaries across the landscape in caves, on mountaintops, and in country villas; the mainlanders built no shrines separate from their central dwellings. When in the fourteenth century B.C. the mainlanders started to build palace complexes reminiscent of those on Crete, the Mycenaeans designed their palaces around megarons, spacious reception halls with huge ceremonial hearths and thrones for the rulers; the Minoans had not done that in their palaces. Some Mycenaean palaces had more than one megaron, which could soar two stories high with columns to support a roof above the second-floor balconies of the palace.