Greek Dark Ages

The **Greek Dark Age**, also called **Greek Dark Ages**, **Homeric Age** (named for the fabled poet, Homer) or **Geometric period** (so called after the characteristic Geometric art of the time), is the period of Greek history from the end of the Mycenaean palatial civilization around 1100 BC to the first signs of the Greek poleis, city states, in the 9th century BC.

The archaeological evidence shows a widespread collapse of Bronze Age civilization in the Eastern Mediterranean world at the outset of the period, as the great palaces and cities of the Mycenaeans were destroyed or abandoned. Around then, the Hittite civilization suffered serious disruption and cities from Troy to Gaza were destroyed. Following the collapse, fewer and smaller settlements suggest famine and depopulation. In Greece, the Linear B writing of the Greek language used by Mycenaean bureaucrats ceased. The decoration on Greek pottery after about 1100 BC lacks the figurative decoration of Mycenaean ware and is restricted to simpler, generally geometric styles (1000–700 BC).

It was previously thought that all contact was lost between mainland Hellenes and foreign powers during this period, yielding little cultural progress or growth, but artifacts from excavations at Lefkandi on the Lelantine Plain in Euboea show that significant cultural and trade links with the east, particularly the Levant coast, developed from c. 900 BC onwards. Additionally, evidence has emerged of the new presence of Hellenes in sub-Mycenaean Cyprus and on the Syrian coast at Al Mina.

## Fall of Mycenaeans

The Mycenaean civilization started to collapse from 1200 BC. Archaeology suggests that, around 1100 BC, the palace centres and outlying settlements of the Mycenaeans' highly organized culture began to be abandoned or destroyed, and by 1050 BC, the recognizable features of Mycenaean culture had disappeared, and the population had decreased significantly. Many explanations attribute the fall of the Mycenaean civilization and the Bronze Age collapse to climatic or environmental catastrophe, combined with an invasion by Dorians or by the Sea Peoples, or to the widespread availability of edged weapons of iron, but no single explanation fits the available archaeological evidence.

## Mediterranean warfare and Sea Peoples

Around this time large-scale revolts took place in several parts of the eastern Mediterranean, and attempts to overthrow existing kingdoms were made as a result of economic and political instability by surrounding people, who were already plagued with famine and hardship. Part of the Hittite kingdom was invaded and conquered by the so-called Sea Peoples, whose origins, perhaps from different parts of the Mediterranean such as the Black Sea, the Aegean and Anatolian regions, remain obscured. The 13th- and 12th-century inscriptions and carvings at Karnak and Luxor are the only sources for "Sea Peoples", a term invented by the Egyptians themselves and recorded in boastful accounts of Egyptian military successes. For these so-called "Sea Peoples", there is little more evidence than these inscriptions.

The foreign countries... made a conspiracy in their islands. All at once the lands were on the move, scattered in war. No country could stand before their arms…. Their league was Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh.
A similar assemblage of peoples may have attempted to invade Egypt twice, once during the reign of Merneptah, about 1208 BC, and again during the reign of Ramesses III, about 1178 BC.

## References

1. ↑ "The History of Greece". Hellenicfoundation.com. Retrieved 2016-01-04.
2. ↑  "Greek Dark Age". Ancient History Encyclopedia. Retrieved 2016-12-06. Sandars (1978).
3. ↑ Sandars (1978).
4. ↑ Edgerton and Wilson (1936), pl 46, p. 53; and J. Wilson, "Egyptian Historical Texts" in Pritchard, *Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament* (3rd ed., 1969).