Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

12 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
around 1300 b.c.e. , Pylos around 1200, and Mycenae around 1150.
Of the mainland sites, Athens alone provides evidence of cultural
continuity. The cause of the collapse of the Mycenaean world is
not fully understood. Later Greeks attributed it to an invasion by
a people who swept in from the north. They called this people the
Dorians. Those Greeks who traced themselves back to the Dorians
were subsequently organized into three tribes known as Hylleis,
Dymanes, and Pamphyloi. The original leaders of these tribes were
said to be the sons of Herakles, the greatest of the Greek heroes.
The archaeological evidence for the invasion is, however, negligible.
No distinctively Dorian pottery has come to light, and the
only artifacts that may be attributed to an invader are an iron sword
and a long bronze dress pin. It has been suggested by way of explanation
that the Dorians were a pastoral people whose lifestyle did
not encourage the production of pottery and other artifacts. In fact,
the main evidence for the invasion is based on dialect. The Greeks
spoke in a number of different dialects, Doric and Ionic being the
main ones. The Ionic dialect was spoken by the Ionians, a people
who believed themselves to be autochthonous (i.e., inhabitants of
Greece since time immemorial) and who traced their descent back to
Hellen’s grandson Ion. However, the distribution of Doric and Ionic
falls far short of proving the racial theory, because Doric was also
spoken in southwest Turkey and Crete. Another problem is that the
earliest full account of the Dorian invasion occurs only very late—in
the writings of Diodorus Siculus, Diodorus of Sicily, of the mid-first
century b.c.e.
In light of such inconclusive data, some scholars doubt the existence
of a Dorian invasion altogether. However, a majority favors
an invasion or successive waves of invasions as the most likely
explanation for the collapse of the Mycenaean world. At any rate,
the most important points to grasp are that, first, the Greeks genuinely
believed themselves to be descended from two main groupings,
Ionians and Dorians and, second, they exploited the perceived
ethnic divide for political purposes.
THE DARK AGE
The collapse of the Mycenaean world ushered in the so-called
Dark Age, which lasted several hundred years. The art of writing
was lost, poverty became widespread, communications ceased, and
the arts declined. The period for which there are least archaeological
data lasted from 1025 to 950b.c.e. The pace of recovery varied