'Aegean civilization' is a general term for the
Bronze Age civilizations of
Greece and the
Aegean. There are in fact three distinct but communicating and interacting geographic regions covered by this term:
Crete, the
Cyclades and the Greek mainland. Crete is associated with the
Minoan civilization from the Early Bronze Age, while the Cyclades and the mainland have distinct cultures. The Cyclades converge with the mainland during the
Early Helladic ("
Minyan") period and with Crete in the Middle Minoan period. From ca. 1450 (Late Helladic, Late Minoan), the Greek
Mycenaean civilization spreads to Crete.
Periodization
Mainland
Main articles: Helladic period
★ Early Helladic EH 2800-2100
BCE
★ Middle Helladic MH 2100-1500
BCE
★ Late Helladic LH 1500-1100
BCE
Crete
Main articles: Minoan civilization
★ Early Minoan EM 3650-2160
BCE
★ Middle Minoan MM 2160-1600
BCE
★ Late Minoan LM 1600-1170
BCE
Cyclades
Main articles: Cycladic civilization
★ Early Cycladic 3300-2000
BCE
★ Kastri = EH II-EH III (ca. 2500-2100)
BCE
★ Convergence with MM from ca. 2000
BCE
Commerce
Commerce was practised to some extent in very early times, as is proved by the distribution of
Melian obsidian over all the Aegean area. We find Cretan vessels exported to
Melos,
Egypt and the
Greek mainland. Melian vases came in their turn to Crete. After 1600 B.C. there is very close commerce with Egypt, and Aegean things find their way to all coasts of the Mediterranean. No traces of
currency have come to light, unless certain axeheads, too slight for practical use, had that character. Standard weights have been found, as well as representations of ingots. The Aegean written documents have not yet proved (by being found outside the area) to be
epistolary (letter writing) correspondence with other countries. Representations of ships are not common, but several have been observed on Aegean gems, gem-sealings,
frying pans and vases. They are vessels of low free-board, with
masts and
oars. Familiarity with the sea is proved by the free use of marine motifs in decoration.
Discoveries, later in the twentieth century, of sunken trading vessels round the coasts of the region have brought forth an enormous amount of new information about that culture.
Evidence of Aegean civilization
For details of monumental evidence the articles on
Crete,
Mycenae,
Tiryns,
Troad,
Cyprus, etc., must be consulted. The most representative site explored up to now is
Knossos (see
Crete) which has yielded not only the most various but the most continuous evidence from the
Neolithic age to the twilight of classical civilization. Next in importance come
Hissarlik, Mycenae,
Phaestus,
Hagia Triada, Tiryns,
Phylakope,
Palaikastro and
Gournia.
Internal evidence
★ 'Structures';
Ruins of
palaces, palatial
villas, houses, built dome- or cist-
graves and
fortifications (
Aegean islands,
Greek mainland and northwestern
Anatolia), but not distinct
temples; small
shrines, however, and temene (religious enclosures, remains of one of which were probably found at
Petsofa near Palaikastro by J. L. Myres in
1904) are represented on
intaglios and
frescoes. From the sources and from inlay-work we have also representations of palaces and houses.
★ 'Structural Decoration'; Architectural features, such as
columns,
friezes and various
mouldings;
mural decoration, such as fresco-paintings, coloured
reliefs and
mosaic inlay. Roof tiles were also occasionally employed, as at early Helladic
Lerna and
Akovitika,
[1] and later in the
Mycenaean towns of
Gla and
Midea.
[2]
★ '
Furniture'; (a) Domestic furniture, such as
vessels of all sorts and in many materials, from huge store jars down to tiny
unguent pots; culinary and other implements;
thrones,
seats,
tables, etc., these all in stone or plastered
terra-cotta. (b) Sacred furniture, such as models or actual examples of
ritual objects; of these we have also numerous pictorial representations. (c)
Funerary furniture, e.g.
coffins in painted terra-cotta.
★ 'Art products'; E.g. plastic objects, carved in
stone or
ivory, cast or beaten in metals (
gold,
silver,
copper and
bronze), or modelled in
clay,
faience,
paste, etc. Very little trace has yet been found of large free-standing
sculpture, but many examples exist of sculptors' smaller work.
Vases of all kinds, carved in
marble or other stones, cast or beaten in metals or fashioned in
clay, the latter in enormous number and variety, richly ornamented with coloured schemes, and sometimes bearing moulded decoration. Examples of painting on stone, opaque and transparent. Engraved objects in great number e.g. ring-bezels and
gems; and an immense quantity of clay impressions, taken from these.
★ '
Weapons,
tools and implements'; In stone, clay and bronze, and at the last
iron, sometimes richly ornamented or inlaid. Numerous representations also of the same. No actual body-
armour, except such as was ceremonial and buried with the dead, like the gold breastplates in the circle-graves at Mycenae or the full length body
armour from
Dendra.
★ 'Articles of personal use'; E.g.
brooches (fibulae),
pins,
razors,
tweezers, etc., often found as dedications to a deity, e.g. in the Dictaean Cavern of Crete. No
textiles have survived other than impressions in clay.
★ 'Written documents'; E.g. clay tablets and discs (so far in Crete only), but nothing of more perishable nature, such as skin,
papyrus, etc.; engraved gems and gem impressions;
legends written with
pigment on
pottery (rare); characters incised on stone or pottery. These show a number of systems of script employing either
ideograms or syllabograms (see
Linear_B).
★ 'Excavated
tombs'; Of either the pit,
chamber or the
tholos kind, in which the dead were laid, together with various objects of use and luxury, without cremation, and in either coffins or loculi or simple wrappings.
★ 'Public works'; Such as paved and stepped roadways, bridges, systems of drainage, etc.
External evidence
★ 'Monuments and records of other contemporary civilizations'; E.g. representations of alien peoples in Egyptian frescoes; imitation of Aegean fabrics and style in non-Aegean lands; allusions to
Mediterranean peoples in
Egyptian,
Semitic or
Babylonian records.
★ 'Literary traditions of subsequent civilizations'; Especially the Hellenic; such as, e.g., those embodied in the
Homeric poems, the legends concerning Crete, Mycenae, etc.; statements as to the origin of
gods,
cults and so forth, transmitted to us by Hellenic antiquarians such as
Strabo,
Pausanias,
Diodorus Siculus, etc.
★ 'Traces of
customs,
creeds,
rituals, etc'; In the
Aegean area at a later time, discordant with the civilization in which they were practised and indicating survival from earlier systems. There are also possible
linguistic and even physical survivals to be considered.
Mycenae and
Tiryns are the two principal sites on which evidence of a
prehistoric civilization was remarked long ago by the
classical Greeks.
The discovery of Aegean civilization
The curtain-wall and towers of the Mycenaean
citadel, its gate with heraldic lions, and the great "
Treasury of Atreus" had borne silent witness for ages before
Heinrich Schliemann's time; but they were supposed only to speak to the
Homeric, or, at farthest, a rude Heroic loser beginning of purely
Hellenic civilization. It was not until Schliemann exposed the contents of the graves which lay just inside the gate, that scholars recognized the advanced stage of
art which prehistoric dwellers in the Mycenaean citadel had attained.
There had been, however, a good deal of other evidence available before
1876, which, had it been collated and seriously studied, might have discounted the sensation that the discovery of the citadel graves eventually made. Although it was recognized that certain tributaries, represented e.g. in the XVIIIth Dynasty tomb of Rekhmara at
Egyptian
Thebes as bearing vases of peculiar forms, were of some
Mediterranean race, neither their precise habitat nor the degree of their civilization could be determined while so few actual prehistoric remains were known in the
Mediterranean lands. Nor did the
Aegean objects which were lying obscurely in museums in
1870, or thereabouts, provide a sufficient test of the real basis underlying the Hellenic myths of the
Argolid, the
Troad and
Crete, to cause these to he taken seriously. Aegean vases have been exhibited both at
Sèvres and
Neuchatel since about
1840, the provenience (i.e. source or origin) being in the one case Phylakope in
Melos, in the other
Cephalonia.
Ludwig Ross, the
German archaeologist appointed Curator of the Antiquities of
Athens at the time of the establishment of the Kingdom of
Greece, by his explorations in the Greek islands from 1835 onwards, called attention to certain early
intaglios, since known as Inselsteine; but it was not until
1878 that C. T. Newton demonstrated these to be no strayed
Phoenician products. In
1866 primitive structures were discovered on the island of Therasia by quarrymen extracting pozzolana, a
siliceous volcanic ash, for the
Suez Canal works. When this discovery was followed up in
1870, on the neighbouring
Santorin (Thera), by representatives of the French School at
Athens, much pottery of a class now known immediately to precede the typical late Aegean ware, and many stone and metal objects, were found. These were dated by the
geologist Ferdinand A. Fouqué, somewhat arbitrarily, to 2000 B.C., by consideration of the superincumbent eruptive stratum.
Meanwhile, in
1868, tombs at
Ialysus in
Rhodes had yielded to
Alfred Biliotti many fine painted vases of styles which were called later the third and fourth "Mycenaean"; but these, bought by
John Ruskin, and presented to the
British Museum, excited less attention than they deserved, being supposed to be of some local Asiatic fabric of uncertain date. Nor was a connection immediately detected between them and the objects found four years later in a tomb at Menidi in
Attica and a rock-cut "bee-hive" grave near the Argive Heraeum.
Even Schliemann's first
excavations at Hissarlik in the
Troad did not excite surprise. But the "Burnt City" of his second stratum, revealed in
1873, with its fortifications and vases, and a hoard of
gold,
silver and
bronze objects, which the discoverer connected with it, began to arouse a curiosity which was destined presently to spread far outside the narrow circle of scholars. As soon as Schliemann came on the Mycenae graves three years later, light poured from all sides on the prehistoric period of
Greece. It was recognized that the character of both the fabric and the decoration of the Mycenaean objects was not that of any well-known art. A wide range in space was proved by the identification of the Inselsteine and the Ialysus vases with the new style, and a wide range in time by collation of the earlier Theraean and Hissarlik discoveries. A relationship between objects of art described by
Homer and the Mycenaean treasure was generally allowed, and a correct opinion prevailed that, while certainly posterior, the civilization of the
Iliad was reminiscent of the Mycenaean.
Schliemann got to work again at Hissarlik in
1878, and greatly increased our knowledge of the lower strata, but did not recognize the Aegean remains in his "Lydian" city of the sixth stratum. These were not to be fully revealed until Dr. Wilhelm Dorpfeld, who had become Schliemann's assistant in
1879, resumed the work at Hissarlik in
1892 after the first explorer's death. But by laying bare in
1884 the upper stratum of remains on the rock of
Tiryns, Schliemann made a contribution to our knowledge of prehistoric domestic life which was amplified two years later by Christos Tsountas's discovery of the palace at Mycenae. Schliemann's work at Tiryns was not resumed till 1905, when it was proved, as had long been suspected, that an earlier palace underlies the one he had exposed.
From 1886 dates the finding of Mycenaean
sepulchres outside the Argolid, from which, and from the continuation of Tsountas's exploration of the buildings and lesser graves at Mycenae, a large treasure, independent of Schliemann's princely gift, has been gathered into the
National Museum at
Athens. In that year tholos-tombs, most already pillaged but retaining some of their furniture, were excavated at Arkina and
Eleusis in Attica, at
Dimini near
Volos in
Thessaly, at Kampos on the west of Mount
Taygetus, and at Maskarata in
Cephalonia. The richest grave of all was explored at
Vaphio in
Laconia in
1889, and yielded, besides many gems and miscellaneous goldsmiths' work, two golden goblets chased with scenes of bull-hunting, and certain broken vases painted in a large bold style which remained an enigma until the excavation of
Cnossus.
In
1890 and
1893 Staes cleared out certain, less rich tholos-tombs at Thoricus in
Attica; and other graves, either rock-cut "bee-hives" or chambers, were found at Spata and Aphidna in Attica, in
Aegina and
Salamis, at the
Argive Heraeum and
Nauplia in the Argolid, near
Thebes and
Delphi, and not far from the
Thessalian Larissa. During the
Acropolis excavations in
Athens, which terminated in
1888, many potsherds of the Mycenaean style were found; but Olympia had yielded either none, or such as had not been recognized before being thrown away, and the temple site at
Delphi produced nothing distinctively Aegean (in dating). The
American explorations of the Argive Heraeum, concluded in
1895, also failed to prove that site to have been important in the prehistoric time, though, as was to be expected from its neighbourhood to Mycenae itself, there were traces of occupation in the later Aegean periods.
Prehistoric research had now begun to extend beyond the Greek mainland. Certain central Aegean islands,
Antiparos,
Ios,
Amorgos,
Syros and
Siphnos, were all found to be singularly rich in evidence of the middle-Aegean period. The series of Syran built graves, containing crouching corpses, is the best and most representative that is known in the Aegean. Melos, long marked as a source of early objects but not systematically excavated until taken in hand by the
British School at
Athens in
1896, yielded at Phylakope remains of all the Aegean periods, except the
Neolithic.
A map of
Cyprus in the later
Bronze Age (such as is given by J. L. Myres and M. O. Richter in Catalogue of the
Cyprus Museum) shows more than twenty-five settlements in and about the Mesaorea district alone, of which one, that at
Enkomi, near the site of
Salamis, has yielded the richest Aegean treasure in precious metal found outside Mycenae. E. Chantre in
1894 picked up lustreless ware, like that of Hissariik, in central Phtygia and at Pteria, and the
English archaeological expeditions, sent subsequently into north-western
Anatolia, have never failed to bring back ceramic specimens of Aegean appearance from the valleys of the Rhyndncus, Sangarius and Halys.
In
Egypt in
1887 W. M. F. Petrie found painted sherds of Cretan style at
Kahun in the
Fayum, and farther up the
Nile, at
Tell el-Amarna, chanced on bits of no fewer than 800 Aegean vases in
1889. There have now been recognized in the collections at
Cairo,
Florence,
London,
Paris and
Bologna several Egyptian imitations of the Aegean style which can be set off against the many debts which the centres of Aegean culture owed to Egypt. Two Aegean vases were found at
Sidon in
1885, and many fragments of Aegean and especially Cypriote pottery have been turned up during recent excavations of sites in
Philistia by the
Palestine Fund.
Sicily, ever since P. Orsi excavated the Sicel cemetery near Lentini in
1877, has proved a mine of early remains, among which appear in regular succession Aegean fabrics and motives of decoration from the period of the second stratum at Hissarlik. Sardinia has Aegean sites, e.g. at Abini near Teti; and
Spain has yielded objects recognized as Aegean from tombs near
Cadiz and from
Saragossa.
One land, however, has eclipsed all others in the Aegean by the wealth of its remains of all the prehistoric ages— Crete; and so much so that, for the present, we must regard it as the fountainhead of Aegean civilization, and probably for long its political and social centre. The island first attracted the notice of archaeologists by the remarkable archaic Greek bronzes found in a cave on
Mount Ida in
1885, as well as by
epigraphic
monuments such as the famous law of Gortyna. But the first undoubted Aegean remains reported from it were a few objects extracted from Cnossus by Minos Kalokhairinos of Candia in
1878. These were followed by certain discoveries made in the S. plain Messara by F. Halbherr. Unsuccessful attempts at Cnossus were made by both W. J. Stillman and H. Schliemann, and A. J. Evans, coming on the scene in
1893, travelled in succeeding years about the island picking up trifles of unconsidered evidence, which gradually convinced him that greater things would eventually be found. He obtained enough to enable him to forecast the discovery of written characters, till then not suspected in Aegean civilization. The revolution of
1897-98 opened the door to wider knowledge, and much exploration has ensued, for which see
Crete.
Thus the "Aegean Area" has now come to mean the
Archipelago with Crete and
Cyprus, the Hellenic peninsula with the
Ionian islands, and Western
Anatolia. Evidence is still wanting for the
Macedonian and
Thracian coasts. Offshoots are found in the western
Mediterranean area, in
Sicily,
Italy,
Sardinia and
Spain, and in the eastern Mediterranean area in
Syria and
Egypt. About the
Cyrenaica we are still insufficiently informed.
Notes
1. Joseph W. Shaw, The Early Helladic II Corridor House: Development and Form, ''American Journal of Archaeology'', Vol. 91, No. 1. (Jan., 1987), pp. 59-79 (72)
2. Ione Mylonas Shear, “Excavations on the Acropolis of Midea: Results of the Greek-Swedish Excavations under the Direction of Katie Demakopoulou and Paul åström”, ''American Journal of Archaeology'', Vol. 104, No. 1. (Jan., 2000), pp. 133-134
See also
★
Minoan civilization
★
Mycenaean Greece
★
Aegean Sea
External links
★
Jeremy B. Rutter, "The Prehistoric Archaeology of the Aegean": chronology, history, bibliography
References
★
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