The grave, which dates to about 1000 bce, contains the (probably cremated) remains of a man and a woman. A grave, rich by the standards of any period, was uncovered at a site called Lefkandi on Euboea, the island along the eastern flank of Attica (the territory controlled by Athens). 1075–900 bce), which takes its name from the geometric shapes painted on pottery. In 1981 archaeology pulled back the curtain on the “darkest” phase of all, the Protogeometric Period ( c.
One example, chosen for its relevance to the emergence of the Greek city-state, or polis, will suffice. One is bound to notice, however, that archaeological finds tend to call into question the whole concept of a Dark Age by showing that certain features of Greek civilization once thought not to antedate about 800 bce can actually be pushed back by as much as two centuries.
The Dark Age itself is beyond the scope of this article. Phenomena such as the tension between Dorians and Ionians that have their origins in the Dark Age are a reminder that Greek civilization did not emerge either unannounced or uncontaminated by what had gone before. So extreme was this hostility that Dorians were prohibited from entering Ionian sanctuaries extant today is a 5th-century example of such a prohibition, an inscription from the island of Paros. Equally important to the understanding of this period is the hostility to Dorians, usually on the part of Ionians, another linguistic and religious subgroup, whose most-famous city was Athens. That is a surprisingly abstract way of looking at the subdivisions of the Greeks, because it would have been more natural for a 5th-century Greek to identify soldiers by home cities. Thucydides casually but significantly mentions soldiers speaking the “Doric dialect” in a narrative about ordinary military matters in the year 426. Important for the understanding of the Archaic and Classical periods, however, is the powerful belief in Dorianism as a linguistic and religious concept. The most famous of these was the “ Dorian invasion,” which the Greeks called, or connected with, the legendary “return of the descendants of Heracles.” Although much about that invasion is problematic-it left little or no archaeological trace at the point in time where tradition puts it-the problems are of no concern here. This surely implies that Greece was settling down after something.) Thucydides does indeed display sound knowledge of the series of migrations by which Greece was resettled in the post-Mycenaean period. (He does, however, speak of Greece “settling down gradually” and colonizing Italy, Sicily, and what is now western Turkey. Thucydides, the great ancient historian of the 5th century bce, wrote a sketch of Greek history from the Trojan War to his own day, in which he notoriously fails, in the appropriate chapter, to signal any kind of dramatic rupture. It was a time about which Greeks of the Classical age had confused and actually false notions. The period between the catastrophic end of the Mycenaean civilization and about 900 bce is often called a Dark Age.
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