<< Chapter < Page Chapter >> Page >

The Thera volcano was not the only cataclysmic occurrence of this period. There were earthquakes all over the Mediterranean and even northern Europe while volcanoes erupted in Italy and the Sinai and seismic tidal waves "caused the sea to recede from the land and even sucked out the rivers"

Herm (Ref. 91 ), page 87
. After 1,100 B.C. the Dorian Greeks, who had charged down the Greek peninsula, crossed over to Crete to repopulate it and become the ancestors of its present population. (Ref. 127 ) Rhodes was also colonized by Dorians from Argos in the 11th century B.C. (Ref. 38 )

Greece

Mycenaean power was dominant in the Mediterranean at least after 1,400 B.C.

Grant (Ref. 75 ) writes that the Mycenaean civilization started at 1,700 B.C.
and their pottery was popular from Italy to the Turkish coast. They used many slaves, especially women who were used in the textile and bronze industries, as well as in private households. Some were captured in war, many were bought. Houses had flushing lavatories and bath rooms supplied with terra cotta pipes and sloping gutters. (Ref. 213 ) In the 14th century B.C. a giant mound covering a stone tomb was constructed at Mycenae which was 48 feet in diameter, 43 feet high to the tip of the dome and had a doorway topped with a lintel made of a 100 ton stone.

At about the 13th century B.C. at the height of their power and when the Mycenaeans controlled the Aegean world, they suddenly began to fortify all their cities and strengthen their defences, indicating a premonition of disaster. Other Greek speaking tribes had begun to drift down into the Greek peninsula by about 1,500 B.C. but it was not until about 1,300 that they were sufficiently strong to begin to usurp the Mycenaean power, so that by the end of that century the Mycenaean cities and fortresses were in ruins, the art degenerated and the written language (Linear B) had been forgotten. (Ref. 215 , 176 ) 1,250 B.C. is usually given as the traditional date of the Trojan War, with complete collapse of Mycenaea by 1,200, but Cotterell (Ref. 41 ) gives the latter date as 1,150 B.C.

There were three main tribes of the new, invading Greeks, each with its own variation of the Greek language - lonic, Aeolic and Doric. The Dorians, descending from the upper Balkans about 1,200 B.C. are generally credited with the actual destruction of the Mycenaean Kingdom. They took the best lands with the less favored regions left to the other tribes. Attica became Ionian, along with a group of cities across the Aegean in the central section of the Asia Minor coast, and from these people came the master institution of Greek civilization, that is, the polis. Physically the polis consisted of a town or city with an area of farm and pasture land surrounding it. Politically it was a community governed by magistrates and laws. All of the invading warriors had ancestral ties with central Asia nomads and still lived a similar life, eating sheep, goat and wild hog. Still another tribe, the Thessalians, entered Greece in the province which now carries their name, sometime before 1,000 B.C. (Ref. 215 , 136 , 211 )

Get Jobilize Job Search Mobile App in your pocket Now!

Get it on Google Play Download on the App Store Now




Source:  OpenStax, A comprehensive outline of world history. OpenStax CNX. Nov 30, 2009 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10595/1.3
Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google Inc.

Notification Switch

Would you like to follow the 'A comprehensive outline of world history' conversation and receive update notifications?

Ask