The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age. John Bagnell Bury
history of the Greeks should begin with a picture of the life of these first conquerors of northern Greece. We would fain see them at work as they forged the legends, and made the songs, which became the groundwork of the national religion and national literature of their race. We would fain go back still further and visit them in their older, unknown and forgotten home among the mountains of Illyria. But these chapters of the story are lost; we can only guess at them from the results. On the other hand, we know that when the Greek conquerors came down to the coasts of the Aegean they found a material civilizations more advanced than their own; and it has so chanced that we know more of this civilisations than we know of the conquerors before they came under its influence.
SECT. 1. EARLY AEGEAN CIVILISATION (3rd millennium B.C.)
In Greece, as in the other two great peninsulas of the Mediterranean, we find, before the invader of Aryan speech entered in and took possession, a white folk not speaking an Aryan tongue. Corresponding to the Iberians in Spain and Gaul, to the Ligurians in Italy, we find in Greece a race which was also spread over the islands of the Aegean and along the coast of Asia Minor. The men of this primeval race gave to many a hill and rock the name which was to abide with it for ever. Corinth and Tiryns, Parnassus and Olympus, Arne and Larisa, are names which the Greeks received from the peoples whom they dispossessed. But this Aegean race, as we may call it for want of a common name, had developed, before the coming of the Greek, a civilizations of which we have only very lately come to know. This civilizations went hand in hand with an active trade, which in the third millennium spread its influence far beyond the borders of the Aegean, as far at least as the Danube and the Nile, and received in return gifts from all quarters of the world. Ivory came from the south, copper from the east, silver and tin from the far west, amber from the regions of the north. The Aegean peoples therefore plied a busy trade by sea, and their maritime intercourse with the African continent can be traced back to even earlier times, since at the very beginning of Egyptian history we find in Egypt obsidian, which can have come only from the Aegean isles. The most notable remains of this civilisation have been found at Troy, in the little island of Amorgos, and in the great island of Crete.
At the time when the kings of the Twelfth Dynasty were reigning in Egypt, Crete was a land of flourishing communities and was about to become, if it had not already become, a considerable sea power. It was now fulfilling, more fully than it was to fulfill in future ages, the role which geography might seem to have imposed upon it, of forming a link between eastern Europe and the African continent. The intercourse of Crete with Libya was more than a mere interchange of wares, or the goings and comings of merchants. It would seem that men from Crete made settlements on the African coast, and that men from Libya took up their abode in the Aegean island. The Libyans and Cretans may have been bound together by a remote brotherhood of race, whereof neither could be conscious; at all events, wherever the Libyans settled they were soon amalgamated and became one race with the native Cretans.
But there seems to have been an inflow of settlers from the north as well as from the south. The Phrygians, a race of Aryan speech, which had planted itself in the south-eastern corner of Europe along with their brethren the Thracians, were already passing across the Hellespont into the north-western corner of Asia. And some of them seem to have ventured still farther south. They ventured to Crete; it is possible that they ventured to Greece, and perhaps to Africa. In Crete they left memorials of their settlement by such local names as Ida and Pergamon; but they too, like the Libyans, seem to have amalgamated with the natives. Thus by the beginning of the second millennium Crete was already an island of mixed population. Phrygian and Libyan elements were blended with the original Cretan stock; only in the eastern corner there was no mixture, and the pure-blooded natives of this region were distinguished in later times as the True Cretans.
The Cretans hold a distinct place in the history of civilisation by inventing the first method of writing that was ever practised in Europe. We find indeed that two modes of writing were used in the island in the third millennium. One of these was a system of picture-writing, in which every word was represented by a hieroglyph; and this system seems to have been used by the original inhabitants. The other was in use throughout the whole island, and it was not entirely of native origin. It consisted of linear signs, of which each probably denoted a syllable; and, although some of these signs may have been indigenous, the system was certainly improved and supplemented by symbols borrowed from Libya and Egypt. The influence of Egypt made itself felt in the ceremonies of religion as well as in the art of writing; and a table of drink-offerings, which was discovered in the Dictaean cave—afterwards associated with Zeus,—copied from similar Egyptian tables and inscribed with Cretan writing, is a striking proof at once of the intercourse of Crete with Egypt, and of the use of writing within the borders of Europe, in the third millennium.
In the same period, at the other extremity of the Aegean, near the southern shore of the Hellespont, a great city flourished on the hill of Troy. It was not the first city that had been reared on that illustrious hill, which rises to the height of about 160 feet, not far from the banks of the Scamander. The earliest settlement, fortified by a rude wall of unwrought stone, can still be traced; and some of its primitive earthware and stone implements have been found. An axe-head of white nephrite seems to show that in those remote days there was a line of traffic, however slow and uncertain, between China and the Mediterranean; for this white jade has been found only in China. On the ruins of this primeval city arose a great fortress, girt with a wall of sun-baked brick, built on strong stone foundations. There were three gates, and the angles of the walls were protected by towers. The inhabitants of this city lived in the stone and copper age bronze was still a rarity. Their pottery was chiefly hand-made. The art of the goldsmith had advanced far, if a treasure of golden ornaments really belongs to this settlement, as would seem to be the case from the place of its discovery, and was native work. But the most important point to be noted is the outline of the palace in this ancient city. Here at the very outset of Aegean civilisation we find the general plan of the main part of the house exactly the same as that which is described, perhaps fifteen hundred years later, in the poems of Homer. From an outer gate we pass through a courtyard, in which an altar stood, into a square preliminary chamber; and from it we enter the great hall, in the centre of which was the hearth.
It is possible that the people of the oldest city, it is extremely probable that the people of the great city, were Phrygians, who had crossed over from Europe. We cannot tell how long this city flourished; but the absence of bronze implements makes it improbable that it endured much later than the beginning of the second millennium. An enemy’s hand destroyed it by fire; and its fall may supply an explanation for early Phrygian settlements in Crete; the men who lost their homes in the Trojan land might have gone over the sea seeking new abodes.
SECT. 2. LATER AEGEAN CIVILISATION (2nd millennium B.C.)
Dynasties fell and rose in the land of the Nile; three cities were reared and perished on the ruins of the great brick city of Troy; tin came in larger abundance from the far-off west, and the folk of the Aegean islands were able to give up the old tools of stone, as bronze became plentiful and cheap; potters grew more skilful in mixing their clay, in using their wheel, in decorating their wares; and at the end of six or seven hundred years we find an advanced civilisation in possession of the Aegean. The shiftings and changes which may have taken place during that long period—invasions, or displacements in the centres of power and trade—are quite withdrawn from our vision but about the middle of the second millennium we find this civilisation in full bloom on the eastern side of the Peloponnesus. Its records are, the monuments of stone which have remained for more than three thousand years above the face of the earth or have been brought to light by the spade; and the objects of daily use and luxury which were placed in the houses of the dead and have been unearthed, chiefly in our days, by the curiosity of Europeans seeking the origins of their own civilisation.
Nowhere have more abundant and significant records been found than in the plain of southern Argos,—at Mycenae, which keeps guard in the mountains at the northern end of the plain, and at Tiryns, its lowlier fellow close to the sea. The richest and strongest city on the coasts of the Aegean seems at this time to have been Mycenae; the memory of its wealth survived in the epithet “golden” which distinguishes it in the Homeric poems.