The History of Ancient Greece: 3rd millennium B.C. - 323 B.C.. John Bagnell Bury
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plain. It imported indeed the glazed Mycenaean wares and was in contact with Aegean civilisations. Its position marks it out as probably an intermediary between the Aegean and the regions of the Danube; just as at the other side Crete was the intermediary between the Aegean and the regions of the Nile. But Troy stands, in a measure, apart from the “Mycenaean” world; beside it, in contact with it, yet not quite of it, the Trojan civilisations seems the issue of a parallel local development, always in constant relations with the rest of the Aegean, yet pursuing its own path. This was natural; for in speech and race the Trojans stood apart. We know with full certainty who the people of Troy were; we know that they were a Phrygian folk and spoke a tongue akin to our own. The six cities of Troy perhaps correspond to successive waves of the Phrygian immigration from south-eastern Europe into north-western Asia Minor, an immigration which seems to have extended over the third, and early portion of the second, millennium.
SECT. 3. INFERENCES FROM THE RELICS OF AEGEAN CIVILISATION
Having taken a brief survey of the character and range of the “Mycenaean civilisations,” we come to inquire whether any evidence exists, amid these chronicles of stone and clay, of gold and bronze, for determining the periods of its rise, bloom, and fall. In the first place, it belongs to the age of bronze. Men had begun to obtain tin in ample quantities from the far west, from the tinfields of Spain and Britain, to mix it with the copper of Cyprus and make the implements which they required sufficiently cheap to be in general use. On the other hand, the iron age had not begun. Iron was still a rare and precious metal, in the later part of the period; it was used for rings, but not yet for weapons. The iron age can hardly have commenced in Greece long before the tenth century; and if we set the beginning of the bronze age at about 2000 BC, we get the second millennium as a delimitation of the period within which “Mycenaean” culture flourished and declined.
The volcanic upheaval of the earth’s crust which overwhelmed the islands of Thera and Therasia ought to give us, if geology were an exacter science, a valuable date. We have seen that, when the inhabitants of Thera were surprised by the disaster, the Mycenaean earthware which they used was still in an early stage; and if we knew the time of the eruption we should have an important chronological landmark. The approximate date of 2000 BC has been assigned by an explorer, but geologists are not agreed, and they could not dispute the possibility that the eruption may have happened several centuries later.
The art of writing was known to the Cretans, but we can interpret neither their signs nor their language; and so far no written document has been discovered which would be likely, even if we could read it, to help our chronology. But in another land where men had already, for ages past, chronicled their history in a language which does not hide its tale, evidence has been discovered which teaches us in what centuries the potters of the Aegean made their wares and shipped them to distant shores. In the early part of the fifteenth century Mycenaean vases were represented on a wall-painting at Egyptian Thebes. At Gurob, a city which was built in the fifteenth century and destroyed two or three hundred years later, a number of “false-necked” jars imported from the Aegean have been found; and they belong not to the earlier but to the later period of Mycenaean pottery.
But Egyptian evidence is found not only on Egyptian soil, but on both sides of the Aegean. Three pieces of porcelain, one inscribed with the name, the two others with the “cartouche”, of Amenhotep III. of Egypt, and a scarab with the name of his wife, have been found in the chamber-tombs of Mycenae. It is a curious coincidence that a scarab of the same Amenhotep was discovered in the burying-place of Ialysus in Rhodes, while no cartouches or names of other Egyptian monarchs have been found in the regions of the Aegean. The single occurrence of such a scarab in one place might be an unsafe basis for an argument; but the coincidence seems to point to some special epoch of active intercourse between the Aegean and Egypt in this king’s reign. It would follow that in the fifteenth century at latest the period of the chamber-tombs and the vaulted tombs began. Perhaps it was at this time that artists derived from Egypt the idea of the wonderful pattern which they wrought with the chisel at Orchomenus, with the brush at Tiryns. But there is a still earlier testimony to intercourse with Egypt. On an inlaid dagger-blade, found in one of the rock-tombs on the Mycenaean citadel, we see represented a scene from Egyptian life—ichneumons catching ducks in a river which can only be the Nile. The workmanship is Aegean, not Egyptian; but the Aegean artist knew Egypt.
Aegean pottery found its way, as we might expect, to Cyprus as well as to Egypt; and in a tomb found near Salamis imports from Egypt, to which approximate dates can be assigned, have been discovered along with clay vessels from the Aegean. A scarab of Queen Ti and some gold collars which belong to the age of Amenhotep III. and Amenhotep IV fix the fourteenth century as the date of the grave, and thus reinforce the chronological evidence which has come to light in other places. Another grave of the same burying-ground contains Egyptian ware of the thirteenth century along with Mycenaean jars.
The joint witness of all these independent pieces of evidence proves that the civilisation of which Mycenae was one of the principal centres was flourishing from the fifteenth to the thirteenth centuries.
Such was the world which the Greeks had come to share, and soon to transform, on the borders of the Aegean Sea. It was a world created by folks who belonged to the European race which had been from of old in possession of this corner of the earth. Their civilisation, itis well to repeat, was simply a continuation and supreme development of that more primitive civilisation of which we caught glimpses before the bronze age began. There is no reason to suppose that these peoples were designated by any common name; there were doubtless many different peoples with different names, which are unknown to us. We know that there were Pelasgians in Thessaly and in Attica; tradition suggests that the Arcadians were Pelasgians too. But it is probable that all these peoples, both on the mainland of Greece and in the Aegean islands, belonged to the same race—a dark-haired stock—which also included the Mysians, the Lydians, the Carians, perhaps the Leleges, on the coast of Asia Minor. Adventurous speculators in the field of ethnology are inclined to think that this same race was dispersed all over the Mediterranean shores, in Spain and Italy and on the coast of Africa, and that the original centre of dispersion was the region of the Upper Nile.
If we may judge from the ancient names of places, which the Greeks preserved, it would seem that languages closely akin were spoken on both sides of the Aegean and in the isles; the coast-men and highlanders of western Asia Minor called their capes and hills and streams by names which resemble in root and formation those which we find on the coast and in the highlands of Greece, and in islands of the intermediate sea. But the strange thing is that the diffusion of the civilisation which we have been examining stopped short at the margin of the Asiatic shore. It extended to Rhodes, and to the small islands north and south of Rhodes, but it did not, until the days of its decline, touch the opposite continent. It is a fact of importance that Lydia, Caria, and Lycia lay outside the Mycenaean world, notwithstanding the affinities of race which bound the inhabitants of those countries to the folks of the Aegean islands and Greece. South of Troy, which stood quite by itself, there are no palaces or fortresses of the Mycenaean age along the east Aegean coast, nor in the large islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Samos. None, at least, have as yet been found. The relics even of commerce with the western Aegean, though one would expect such commerce to have been brisk and constant, are few and rare. There was therefore an obstinate resistance on the part of the inhabitants of these regions to the reception of the Aegean civilisation. The people who held the whole seaboard from the Maeander to the borders of Lycia were the Leleges. At this period there was no maritime Caria; it was not till a later period that the Carians came down from the highlands and confined the Leleges to a small corner of their land.
There seems little doubt that this prehistoric Aegean world was composed of many small states. Of the relation of these states to one another, of the political events of the period, we know almost nothing, and we can guess little; for the records of stone and bronze and gold cannot be interpreted without some clue. A few facts which seem to emerge, partly from archaeological evidence, partly from tradition, partly from hints in a pictured chronicle of Egypt, furnish us with historical problems rather than with historical information.
The eminent position of “golden” Mycenae herself seems to be established. Her comparative wealth is indicated