Dark Ages Greece

Greece of that period was ruled by the Byzantine Empire. Lots of conflict going on there with usurping Emperors, ongoing war with the Caliphate.

Welcome, blackpen. To clarify waylander's post (sorry, waylander), Greece in the period commonly referred to as the Dark Ages in Europe (late 5th to late 8th centirues AD, roughly) was ruled by the Byzantine Empire. Greece in the 10th century BC was in the middle of its own dark age, which predated the Classical period and the rise of the city-states.

As to info on Greece and world history during this period, you'll probably have to build some background and then extrapolate from there. Check out this page. It may or may not be helpful--I haven't vetted the links--but it might be a good place to start.

HN

If you're looking at the time period when the Mycenaen civilization collapsed, around 1100 bc - 750 bc, there's a theory that the culture was wiped out by some sort of ecological disaster (Plato later wrote of the erosion that had caused extreme deforestation). As times changed, the people of the area moved away from the more agrarian lifestyle and more towards the trade and seafaring that helped establish the Greek city-states in the 9th century bc.

There's a book I found at a used book store called Sea People: The Warriors of the Mediterranean -- it was published in the 1970s but it's a worthwhile read. You might also look at the writings of both Homer and Hesiod, who described ancient culture in some detail.

Histry Nerd said:

Welcome, blackpen. To clarify waylander's post (sorry, waylander), Greece in the period commonly referred to as the Dark Ages in Europe (late 5th to late 8th centirues AD, roughly) was ruled by the Byzantine Empire. Greece in the 10th century BC was in the middle of its own dark age, which predated the Classical period and the rise of the city-states.

As to info on Greece and world history during this period, you'll probably have to build some background and then extrapolate from there. Check out this page. It may or may not be helpful--I haven't vetted the links--but it might be a good place to start.

HN

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Well spotted
Duuh!

Snodgrass and Coldstream

blackpen said:

i need information on the dark ages of greece- a lot of it! where can i find it? i also need to brush up on general world history in the 10th century B.C. (900's) i have access to a university library so obscure articles work as well.
thanks!

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Snodgrass and Coldstream?


http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415298997/?tag=absolutewritedm-20

If you want "simpler reading", you're going to miss out on a hell of a lot of information, which might turn around to bite you in the arse later.

Forgive me for asking the obvious, but if you hate ancient history and archaeology, why in the world would you want to write a story set there?

Or is this one of those "do my homework for me" threads?

Thank you for clarifying.

Wild Things

blackpen said:

when i say that i "hate" ancient history, i mean that i hate the way people put it on a pedestal and gloss everything over. perhaps i should have said that i hate ancient historiography.

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Things were wilder in the supernatural way back then.

Here's some more books:

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5021.html


http://www.centuries.co.uk/

(The question this book brings up is one that you can't avoid if you look at duck-shaped perfume vials from Cyprus such as in the Met in NYC...apparently this one little ceramic duck is the ONLY thing in the Met from 925 BC....even if the chronology is off in James, its worth bearing in mind that the last absolute dates are from the 800s BC in Assyria...and perhaps the "Dark Age" was not all that long or "dark"...I still think the Egyptian "High Chronology" is probably wrong)


http://www.bestwebbuys.com/New_Light_on_a_Dark_Age-ISBN_0826210996.html?isrc=b-search

And some more Susan Langdon (Langdon...is she fictive?)

http://www.stoa.org/hopper/text.jsp?doc=Stoa:text:2001.01.0011


And a heroic dude:

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/history/Faculty/morris.html

A man from Cardiff on secondment:

http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/hisar/people/jw/

blackpen said:

thank you very much everyone.
are there any linguistic experts here?
i need to know which dialects the names "persephassa" and persephatta" are of, if that makes sense. so, i know that "persephone" is ionic greek but what are "persephassa" and "persephatta"? i can't find it anywhere.

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Those are both simply variations on Persephone's name. When he wrote "Oedipus," Sophocles used Persephassa, saying:

Hither, this way,
For this way Hermes leads, the spirit guide,
And Persephassa, empress of the dead.

Bear in mind that when you find subtle changes in names like this, while it may be a difference in dialect, it also could be attributed to differences in translation. Anyway, Persephone was also known in some regions as Kora, and once the Romans heard about her they renamed her Proserpina. As to the actual etymology of the name variants, Felix Gourand says this:

The name of the wife of Hades occurs in several forms: Persephone, Persephoneia, Phersephone, Persephassa, Phersephatta. It is difficult to discover the etymology of all of these variations. It is believed that the last half of the word Persephone comes from the word ‘to show’ and evokes and idea of light. Whether the first half derives from a word meaning ‘to destroy’ in which case Persephone would be ‘she who destroys the light’ or from an adverbial root signifying ‘dazzling brilliance’ as in the name Perseus, it is difficult to decide.

This somewhat refutes -- or at least sheds some doubt -- on contentions that the name Persephatta is derived from pteris + ephatto (meaning “she who fixes destruction”), which is the theory you'll run across if you've been reading Graves.

That all having been said, the person we really need to get over here is Lisa (Medievalist). Yoohoo, Lisa, are you lurking?

Dark or Different

blackpen said:

p.s. thanks so much sokal, i'll definitely look into that peter james book, i think it's funny that you suggested him because that was exactly the message i wanted to bring across in my novel

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I like the Peter James book too. While it comes to plenty of dubious conclusions, I think its critique of the High Egyptian Chronology and the distortions it imposed on the "Dark Age" (basically stretching it by 200 years and thus making it appear to be a period with very few sites) is worth thinking about in terms of how it describes the Dark Age as an illusion.

Susan Langdon (here's a review of hers) and Sarah Morris among others

http://www.jstor.org/view/00029114/ap020418/02a00200/0

think a lot more was going on in the Dark Age and that many concerns that are projected backward from the Classical Age cause serious distortions in interpreting the Dark Age. It probably was not so much Dark as just very different from the Palace Cultures of the Mycenean and Minoan Aegean. In Crete especially there is a lot of cultic continuity "right across the Dark Age" as they say...and the cultural/ cultic discontinuity occurs at around 600 BC...which is mystifying to me anyway. Maybe the Wild old Supernatural lasted much longer there.

The Susan Langdon ed. book "New Light on a Dark Age" is very good.

Here is a review:

http://www.jstor.org/view/00029114/ap020417/02a00200/0

And

Sokal said:

The Susan Langdon ed. book "New Light on a Dark Age" is very good.

Here is a review:

http://www.jstor.org/view/00029114/ap020417/02a00200/0

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And:

http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/carage.html

I did a course at university on Dark Age Greece, only to discover by later reading that the period probably didn't really exist, as Sokal says above. It just shows that you shouldn't place your entire trust on reconstructed kinglists for dating purposes....

Something happened

Evaine said:

I did a course at university on Dark Age Greece, only to discover by later reading that the period probably didn't really exist, as Sokal says above. It just shows that you shouldn't place your entire trust on reconstructed kinglists for dating purposes....

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Apparently something happened, but whether it was particularly "dark" or "deep" or lasted for a long time seems to be an open question. It is possible the "Dark Age" was more a matter of disorganization and difference rather than devastation and the complete collapse of populations and institutions. Of course, in some ways this is often true of perceived Dark Ages and the "collapse" of civilizations. As usual, part of the problem may be historiographic: the mass of Mycenean traditions that came through suggests on the one hand that in Greece and the Aegean and Crete and Cyprus there is no major cultural discontinuity, but it also suggested to people like Thucydides that there was a significant gap of some kind between the Heroic past and the historical present. Also the societies at either end of the Dark/Geometric/Orientalizing period were very different. And yet when you work down from the end of the Mycenean, the apparent "darkness" has some basically odd characteristics and when you work back from the illuminated edge of the Archaic (say 600 BC) there is no sign of anything other than steady state-building and international trade.
So what did happen? First, how "non-dark" is the Mycenean Period? Isn't it in fact more full of disruptions than the supposed Dark Age that followed? All over the Levant, the period from say the explosion of Thera in the spring of 1628 BC (based on absolute physical chronology...tree rings and such) to say 1050 BC is much more tumultious and chaotic than the period after 1050. Its true that some very limited literacy is lost, but there is a different form of literacy (literal literacy based on Phoencian letters) that emerges perhaps even before the fall of the Mycenean palaces (see http://www.scienceblog.com/community/older/1997/B/199701827.html
)...So that's probably not a dark thing at all. The palace regime collapses or at least changes (for example there was a Mycenean palace complex on the Athenian Acropolis, but it apparently never fell and remained in use through the Dark Ages and its walls were used as part of Classical buildings and defenses ever after)...so that may not be so Dark either.

And as for pottery styles, the late "sub-mycenean" pottery is pretty poor stuff compared to the beautiful and totally "Dark Age" protogeometric pottery that comes right after it. So again, right there, the Dark Age is technologically and artistically superior to the period just before it.

So...I don't know what to tell you.

Some Chronology

blackpen said:

isokal, i think it's interesting that you bring up the literacy issue. i read somewhere that the oral traditions that homer wrote down had actually been alive by the people who lived through the "dark ages". if you really think about it, these epic poets get most of the credit for inventing folk tales that were already floating around for quite a while. the same goes for the authors of fairy tales. i would argue that literacy is not necessarily the mark of a "civilized" culture. however, you got me interested in this "literal literacy" thing, i will look at that blog.
thanks for the help everyone!

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Here's an introductory thing on chronology:

http://qa.britannica.com/ebc/article-58750

Here's a translation of the Parian Marble:

http://www.ashmolean.museum/ash/faqs/q004/

I think so too

blackpen said:

this parian marble is so neat!

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I've never read it until now.

Maybe I can find the some Egyptian king lists. The Palermo Stone?

http://www.crystalinks.com/palermostone.html

A list of Kinglists:

http://www.egyptologyonline.com/manetho.htm

But nothing legible.

Legible lists

Sokal said:

I've never read it until now.

Maybe I can find the some Egyptian king lists. The Palermo Stone?

http://www.crystalinks.com/palermostone.html

A list of Kinglists:

http://www.egyptologyonline.com/manetho.htm

But nothing legible.

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Here is something ( the list by Seti I at Abydos, so that's late 18th Dynasty, but the site has other stuff):


http://www.ancientegyptonline.co.uk/abydoskl.html

blackpen, as far as I remember (and it's a good few years ago, now) the accepted chronology for Ancient Egypt and Ancient Greece was based on the reconstruction of papyri listing the names and dates of pharoahs. This was done in the middle of the Victorian period by only a couple of scholars - and after they had published the work, nobody thought to check it. All the scholars after that just accepted them as they stood.
So, yes, names were in the wrong place in the list, there were names missing and extra names put in, stuff like that.
Now, so much work has been done in archaeology that doesn't have to depend on ancient manuscripts or ancient pottery types, that a more realistic chronology can be constructed from the sites themselves - and this leads to the conclusion that the original documents were flawed.