Aegean civilization

“ They crushed a civilization already hard hit; and it took two or three centuries for the artistic spirit, instinct in the Aegean area, and probably preserved in suspended animation by the survival of Aegean racial elements, to blossom anew. On this conquest seems to have ensued a long period of unrest and popular movements, known to Greek tradition as the Ionian Migration and the Aeolic and Dorian ``colonizations''; and when once more we see the Aegean area clearly, it is dominated by Hellenes, though it has not lost all memory of its earlier culture. ”

“ Long before the Homeric poems were composed, love of adventure, quickened perhaps by pressure from the North, had driven the Achaeans and other kindred tribes forth from the mainland of Greece to find fresh homes in the islands and on the eastern shores of the Aegean. Other tribes, Aeolians, Ionians, Dorians, followed, and for centuries the stream of colonization flowed eastwards, carrying Greek civilization to every part of the Aegean. This civilization gathered fresh life from contact with the East. ”

“ Man in Hellas was more highly civilized before history than when history begins to record his state; and there existed human society in the Hellenic area, organized and productive, to a period so remote that its origins were more distant from the age of Pericles than that age is from our own. We have probably to deal with a total period of civilization in the Ægean not much shorter than in the Nile Valley. ”

“ There was a great variety of dialects in Greece, almost every city having its own output of literature. [171] The Doric apparently constituted{v1-302} the last and most powerful wave of the migration. These Hellenic tribes conquered and largely destroyed the Ægean civilization that had preceded their arrival; upon its ashes they built up a civilization of their own. They took to the sea and crossed by way of the islands to Asia Minor; and, sailing through the Dardanelles and Bosphorus, spread their settlements along the south, and presently along the north borders of the Black Sea. ”

“ It has remained for the present day, when the earth has been all but completely overrun and when men have found a dearth of new worlds to conquer, that we have had the time and the interest to turn back to Greece, sweep away the rubbish of ages, and give back to the light of day the palaces of Agamemnon, the strongholds of Tiryns, and the hoary old labyrinth of Minos. On the fringes of Magna Græcia, where the empire was in touch with the unceasing tides of western civilization, as in Sicily and at Corfu, the remnants of the older days fared but ill. ”

“ A good deal of anthropometric investigation has been devoted to human remains of the Aegean epoch, especially to skulls and bones found in Crete in tombs of Period II. The result of this, however, has not so far established more than the fact that the Aegean races, as a whole, belonged to the dark, long-headed Homo Mediterraneus, whose probable origin lay in mid-eastern Africa—a fact only valuable in the present connexion in so far as it tends to discredit an Asiatic source for Aegean civilization. ”

“ One land, however, has eclipsed all others in the Aegean by the wealth of its remains of all the prehistoric ages, viz. Crete, so much so that, for the present, we must regard it as the fountain-head 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 ”

“ A. Distinctive Features.—The fact that Aegean civilization is distinguished from all others, prior or contemporary, not only by its geographical area, but by leading organic characteristics, has never been in doubt, since its remains came to be studied seriously and impartially. The truth was indeed obscured for a time by persistent prejudices in favour of certain alien Mediterranean races long known to have been in relation with the Aegean area in prehistoric times, e.g. ”

“ Annals.—From these and other data the outlines of primitive history in the Aegean may be sketched thus. A people, agreeing in its prevailing skull-forms with the Mediterranean race of N. Africa, was settled in the Aegean area from a remote Neolithic antiquity, but, except in Crete, where insular security was combined with great natural fertility, remained in a savage and unproductive condition until far into the 4th millennium B.C. In Crete, however, it had long been developing a certain civilization, and at a period more or less contemporary with Dynasties XI. and XII. (2500 B.C.?) ”

“ The ships were run ashore and pulled a few feet out of the water, and then they were pushed out to sea again whenever the sailors were ready.
Adventurous spirits have always turned towards the West, and it was westwards across the Mediterranean that the civilization we have inherited slowly advanced. The early Mediterranean civilization is sometimes given the general name of Aegean, because its great centres were in the Aegean Sea and on the adjoining mainland. ”

“ The Athenian community, through its political eminence, its intellectual character, so original and diversified, its culture,—such that almost every citizen was qualified for civil office,—has no parallel in history. It is the elevation, not of a select class of the citizens, but of the whole society, which gives to Athens its unique distinction. Public spirit and enterprise, which made her navy dominant in the Aegean and over the sea-coast of Asia Minor, went hand in hand with delight in eloquence and in the creations of genius. ”

“ Hence its people were early tempted to a sea-faring life. The shores of the Mediterranean and the Euxine were dotted with Hellenic colonies. Intercourse with the old civilizations of Egypt and Phoenicia stirred the naturally quick and versatile Greek intellect to early and vigorous thought. The islands strewn with seeming carelessness through the AEgean Sea were "stepping-stones," which invited the earliest settlers of Greece to the delightful coast countries of Asia Minor, and thus blended the life and history of the opposite shores. ”

“ It was the first form of a civilized nation, that of a city surrounded by enough farming territory to supply its citizens with food, each city ready to break into war with any other, and each race of people viewing all beyond its borders as strangers and barbarians, to be dealt with almost as if they were beasts of prey instead of men and brothers.
The cities of Greece were not only thus isolated, but each had its separate manners, customs, government, and grade of civilization. Athens was famous for its intellectual cultivation ”

“ Corinth and Tiryns, Parnassus and Olympus, Arne and Larissa, are names which the Greeks received from the peoples whom they dispossessed. But this Ægean race, as we may call it for want of a common name, had developed, before the coming of the Greek, a civilisation of which we have only very lately come to know. This civilisation went hand in hand with an active trade, which in the third millennium spread its influence far beyond the borders of the Ægean, as far at least as the Danube and the Nile, and received in return gifts from all quarters of the world. ”

“ With a few trifling exceptions, all the islands of the AEgean, and all the Greek cities, which in that age fringed the coasts of Asia Minor, the Hellespont, and Thrace paid tribute to Athens, and implicitly obeyed her orders. The AEgean Sea was an Attic lake. Westward of Greece, her influence though strong, was not equally predominant. She had colonies and allies among the wealthy and populous Greek settlements in Sicily and South Italy, but she had no organized system of confederates in those regions; and her galleys brought her no tribute from the western seas. ”

“ Hence the great extent of country in Asia and Europe to which the Greek language [pg 195] was familiar, and still more the arts which made Athens the centre of a new civilization. Some of the most noted philosophers and artists of antiquity were born in these colonies. The power of Hellas was not a centralized empire, like Persia, or even Rome, but a domain in the heart and mind of the world. ”

“ The Greeks have always been a maritime people, and the real centre of the national life is now, as in antiquity, the Aegean Sea or Archipelago. Thickly studded with islands and bordered by deeply indented coasts with sheltered creeks and harbours, the Aegean in the earliest days of navigation invited the enterprise of the mariner; its shores, both European and Asiatic, became covered with Greek settlements and its islands, together with Crete and Cyprus, became Greek. True to their maritime instincts, the Greeks rarely advanced inland to any distance from the sea ”

“ Still farther away are seen the natural products of the overflow of a thriving modern town—suburbs clustering around isolated mills or wine-presses. The present population is not far from a hundred thousand persons, so that Athens to-day is not an inconsiderable place. The population is chiefly the native Greek, modified no doubt by long submission to Turkish rule and mingled with a good deal of Turkish blood, but still preserving the language, names, and traditions that bespeak a glorious past. ”

“ Wachsmuth, in his Historical Antiquities of the Greeks, published over sixty years ago, says that "numerous traditionary accounts, of undoubted authenticity, describe them as a brave, moral, and honourable people, which was less a distinct stock and tribe than a race united by a resemblance in manners and the forms of life." Professor Keane fitly calls these "remarkable words," in view of the recent discoveries in prehistoric Greece, which warrant us in ascribing to the Pelasgians the development of culture in the Ægean Sea. But in what island, or on what part of the mainland? ”

“ The geographical position of Athens is worthy of notice. In the march of civilization from east to west, she stood nearly midway, and extended her open palm to receive and impart the physical and intellectual wealth of nations. Her people united the hardihood of the mountaineer with the elasticity of maritime tribes, and never had a country of such diversified physical qualities, elicited such varied excellences of mind. ”

“ Besides this, the Lacedæmonians laid their schemes for sending envoys to the Persian king, and to other barbaric powers,—a remarkable evidence of melancholy revolution in Grecian affairs, when that potentate, whom the common arm of Greece had so hardly repulsed a few years before, was now invoked to bring the Phenician fleet again into the Ægean for the purpose of crushing Athens. ”

“ Athens was now an Empire and was recognized as such. The island states in the Aegean as well as the Ionian cities on the mainland of Asia Minor were bound to her by ties of allegiance. The heart of the Empire was Athens, and settlers from many different places were welcomed there, if they brought with them something that contributed to the welfare of the city: the sculptor, the worker in gold, silver or other metals, the potter, the dyer, the leather-worker, and the merchant who brought costly wares from distant lands, all these and many more were welcomed. ”

“ Time is certain to remove the objection of the comparative isolation of Greece still more than it has done at this writing, no doubt. It is still true that Greece is, to all intents and purposes, an island, despite its physical connection with the mainland of Europe. The northern mountains, with the wild and semi-barbaric inhabitants thereamong, serve to insulate the kingdom effectually on the mainland side, just as the ocean insulates it on every other hand, so that one is really more out of the world at Athens than in Palermo. ”

“ It is now admitted by the majority of scholars that the Aegean civilisation cannot have originated with the Achaeans; but there is still great difference of opinion as to the nature of its relations with this people. Some hold that the prehistoric civilisation of Crete was non-Achaean—and indeed non-Greek—until its fall, and yet believe that Mycenae and the other cities of the mainland were always Achaean. ”

“ Anarchy unnerved it. The bad reputation of the Cretans at Athens was also due to the jealousy of the Athenians who could never forgive Crete a short supremacy on the sea. When the poets wished to please the Athenians they abused Minos and the Cretans. Nothing is more dangerous to good fame with posterity than to have for enemy a witty nation.b
BELOCH’S ACCOUNT OF GREEK COLONISATION
The scene of Grecian primitive history is practically limited to the countries bordering the Ægean Sea. But in the period which gave rise to the great epic poems the geographical horizon had already begun to expand. ”

“ The far-seeing policy of Themistocles had made Athens stronger on sea than on land, and by the time of Pericles, the salvation of Athens lay in her navy. She was increasing her sea-power in all directions and establishing herself as mistress all over the Aegean and on the shores of the Euxine. This policy was not only dictated by the greed of power, but by the {291} absolute necessity that if Athens were to live, she should control all the trade routes by which corn reached Greece. Without the corn from the shores of the Euxine, Athens would starve. ”

“ The aliens who had gained a competence as merchants or as bankers, found their sons welcomed in the ranks of the oldest families of Athens; strangers flocked thither from distant countries, not only from the isles of Greece, and from the coasts of the Ægean, but, as Hellenic culture made its way through the far East, students even of the Semitic race were glad to enrol their names upon the College registers, where we may still see them with the marks of their several nationalities affixed. ”