The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
Magnesia on the Hermus. Though counted to Ionia, it was not of Ionian origin, for it was founded by the Magnetes, who seem to have been among the earliest Greek settlers in Thessaly. While the greater part of Ionian territory was won from Lydia, the Maeandrian towns and Miletus were founded on Lelegian soil.
Settlers from Euboea and Boeotia took part in the colonisation of Ionia, as well as the Ionians of Argolis and Attica. In the regions of the Maeander, and southward from that river, the Greeks were brought into association with another race. The Leleges were now exposed to foes on the land side as well as on the sea side, for Carian highlanders came down from the hills and began to occupy their lands. The Carians were of the same race as the Lydians, and in some places, at Miletus for example, they mixed with the Greek strangers.
Meanwhile the Greek colonisation of the Aegean islands was going on at the same time. And it is just possible that some curious records which have been discovered in distant Egypt bear upon the occupation of the islands. We learn that the throne of Mernptah was shaken by a joint invasion of Libyans and the peoples of the north. A generation later another invasion is recorded in the reign of Ramses III; the peoples of the north threaten Egypt from the east. The Egyptian records mention the names of some of the northern peoples in both invasions, but the names teach us little. There is not much likelihood in the view that some of the invaders were Greeks. The day was to come when Greeks would fight in Egypt as mercenary soldiers; a day, more distant still, was to come when Egypt would be ruled by Grecian lords; but the twelfth century is too early an age to find Greek adventurers on the shores of Africa. But there are certain significant words in the record of the second invasion: “The islands were unquiet”. It is certainly not unnatural to refer this to islands of the Aegean. And if so, the Libyan invasion of Egypt is an echo of the Greek conquest of the islands. But it is not the Greek conquerors who sail to Libya; it is the islanders whom they conquer and dispossess. It would be unwise, however, to build any historical theory upon the Egyptian notices, even though we consider it tolerably certain that people from the regions of the Aegean are referred to. Perhaps the best commentary on the question is a passage in the Odyssey, which suggests that it was not an uncommon event for Cretan freebooters to make a descent on the Egyptian coast and carry off plunder.
The Greek settlers brought with them their poetry and their civilisation to the shores of Asia. Their civilisation is revealed to us in their poetry, and we find that it is identical in its main features, and in many minor respects, with the civilisation which has been laid bare in the ruins of Mycenae and other places in elder Greece. The Homeric poems show us, in fact, a later stage of the civilisation of the heroic age. The Homeric palace is built on the same general plan as the palaces that have been found at Mycenae and Tiryns, at Troy and in the Copaic lake. The equipment of the Homeric heroes and the man-screening Homeric shield receive their best illustration from Mycenaean gems and jars. The scene of the leaguered city on the silver beaker is an admirable illustration of the siege which was represented on the shield of Achilles; and that shield assumes the art of inlaying, of which some dagger-blades discovered at Mycenae show us brilliant examples. The blue inlaid frieze in the vestibule of the hall of Tiryns proves that the poet’s frieze of cyanus in the hall of Alcinous was not a fancy; and he describes as the cup of Nestor a gold cup with doves perched on the handles, such as one which was found in a royal tomb at Mycenae. There is indeed one striking difference in custom. The Mycenaean tombs reveal no trace of the habit of burning the dead, which the Homeric Greeks invariably practised; while, beyond what is implied in a single mention of embalming, the poems completely ignore the practice of burial. In later times both customs existed in Greece side by side. It has been supposed that, in the period of migration to Asia, the Achaean and Ionian settlers, not having yet won their new homesteads, and wishing to preserve the ashes of their dead instead of leaving them in a strange place, adopted the usage of cremation; and, having once adopted it in this time of emergency, continued to practise it when the need had passed.
The circumstance that no remains of Aegean civilisation have been found in Ionia or Aeolis like those which have been discovered in Greece and the islands, has been already observed; and the inference was drawn that this civilisation did not gain a footing in these coast-lands before the time of the Greek settlements. But it must be said that the argument from the absence of such remains applies equally to the Greek settlers, and proves that they cannot have brought a civilisation of this kind to Asia Minor. For the sites on which the Greeks established themselves were continuously occupied throughout history, and therefore we cannot expect to find such archaeological remains as we find in sites which decayed or were deserted at the end of the heroic age. But one exceptional discovery confirms our inferences from the Homeric poems as to the nature of Ionian civilization. Under Mount Mycale, not far from the gathering-place of the Ionians, there has been found a graveyard, which archaeologists designate as “late Mycenaean”. It clearly belongs to the early period of the Greek settlements.
Two important conclusions follow. One is that by the twelfth century the Greeks had assimilated and were participators in the civilisation of the Aegean; and it is to be presumed that among the settlers who carried that civilization to the Asian coast there were many who though they had learned Greek speech did not belong to the Greek race. The other conclusion which emerges is that, whatever fate befell the Mycenaean civilisation in the mother country, it cannot be said to have died either a sudden or a slow death; for it continued without a break in the new Greece beyond the seas, and developed into that luxurious Ionian civilisation which meets us some centuries later, when we come into the clearer light of recorded history. New elements were added in the meantime; intercourse with Phrygia and Syria, for example, brought new influences to bear; but the permanent framework was the heritage from the ancient folks of the Aegean.
The question will be asked, whether the Greeks accepted anything beyond the outward forms of material civilisation from the folks with whom they mingled in the Aegean lands. Did those folks contribute anything to the religion or the social organisation of the Greek people which grew out of their own fusion with the invaders? We shall see presently that the political institutions of the invaders prevailed; and their great Aryan god, Zeus, the heavenly father, was exalted supreme in all the lands where they settled. But it is possible that some of the Greek gods were originally not the deities of the invaders, but of the old inhabitants of the land. The prehistoric tombs of Greece and the Aegean islands, both the tombs of the third millennium and those of the second, have preserved small idols in stone, in lead, in bronze, and in gold of a goddess, who was probably a goddess of nature, similar in character to the Babylonian Istar—the Phoenician Astarte—though there is no reason to suppose that she came from Babylonia. She was, we need not doubt, a native goddess of the Aegean peoples. The spirit of this divinity, associated with the fertility of nature, appears under many a name in Greece; in some places she is worshipped as Aphrodite, in some as Hera, elsewhere as Artemis. It should never be forgotten that originally these goddesses and many others had the same motherly functions; the division of labour in Olympus and the differentiation of the characters of the celestials were a comparatively late refinement. While Hera and Artemis appear to be genuine Greek names, Aphrodite has never been explained from the Greek language, and may possibly be the old Aegean name of the goddess of nature, recast in Grecian mouths. At all events it is not improbable that the worship of Aphrodite was an Aegean growth, afterwards promoted and influenced by the Phoenician cult of Astarte. The invaders may have often associated divinities of their own with the native cults; and traces of such fusion may sometimes be preserved in double names.
But there are clear enough memories of conflict and conciliation between the gods of the invaders and the older deities of the land. The legend of the war of the gods and the giants can hardly be anything else than a mythical embodiment of the conflict of religions; the giants, or earth-born beings, represent the older gods whom the gods of Greece overthrew. And we can hardly be wrong in regarding Cronos, whom Zeus dethroned, as one of those older gods. But Zeus, who dethroned him, became his son; that was the conciliation. In Crete it was somewhat otherwise. The god Minos had to make way for Zeus; he was reduced to the estate of a king; but he became the son and the speech-fellow of the god who displaced him.
SECT. 6. THE LATER WAVE OF GREEK INVASION
The colonisation of the Asiatic coasts and islands extended over some hundreds of years, and it was doubtless