Introduction
Around 1200 BCE came the Dorian invasions. The Dorians overran the country and mixed with the Achaean population, which shaped the Greek type of the First Millennium. A period of decline followed with the invasion of those known as the Sea Peoples: the so-called Dark Age, covering the eleventh to the eighth centuries BCE, also known as the Geometric period, when Mycenaean art was replaced by Protogeometric. Attica, along with Aegina and Kos, would consolidate this tendency. In Arcadia and Achaea, the invaders abandoned the country.
By the Geometric period the first temples were being built, using an extremely simple architecture.
The end of the Geometric period
After the end of the Geometric period came the emergence of art and other cultural transformations that would in time amount to the greatness of Hellas:
- Introduction of the alphabet and recovery of literature, with Mycenaean and Eastern elements.
- Birth of the city with its defensive acropolis, its walls and its political organisation.
- Appearance of a new religiosity with panhellenic sanctuaries, incipient temples, heroes and local cults.
- Economic awakening with the development of craftsmanship, trade and a strong impulse towards colonisation.
Alphabet and writing
In the Near East and in Egypt there were two main writing systems:
- Pictographic: representation of objects through drawings, later reduced to ideograms expressing concepts and sounds.
- Signs with syllabic value; refined, this was the system used by the Phoenicians.
Linear A
It is so called because it is composed of signs rather than ideograms, even though it derives from them. Only a minimal part has been deciphered. It was created out of the need to administer different activities: trade, agriculture and livestock, industry (ceramics and textiles) — that is, the same needs that arose in the Mesopotamian world.
Clay tablets were used initially, but as these were impractical, other materials such as papyrus or parchment were adopted, so far as we can deduce. Nothing of either survives, owing to the fires suffered by the buildings where they were kept.
Linear B
After almost half a century in which scholarship searched the monuments, fruitlessly, for the writing of Mycenaean culture, the conclusion was reached that the people of those times had had no writing at all. But almost nobody noticed that it was not possible for a society as culturally developed as that of Mycenae, the forger of a state, to lack any form of accounting.
With the catastrophe of around 1450 BCE, Linear A disappeared. It is likely that, after the disaster suffered by the palaces, only the one at Knossos was rebuilt, which raises the possibility that Linear B was created from Linear A, and that it was at Knossos, in the years following the Mycenaean occupation of Crete, that Cretan scribes created the alphabet.
In the middle of the twentieth century an archive of more than 900 clay tablets was discovered at Pylos, and 39 at Mycenae, all written in Linear B. Further finds at Mycenae testified to the wide spread of literacy achieved by the Achaeans.
At Knossos some 3,000 tablets were found. Because of this Cretan find, it was believed that Linear B, like Linear A before it, belonged to Cretan culture. This script, which transmits words and sounds in archaic Greek, was used by the Achaeans who predominated in Crete towards the middle and end of the thirteenth century BCE — a fact attested by the presence at the palace of Knossos of the archive of tablets written in Linear B.
The best-excavated area of the palace at Knossos lies beside a series of rooms adjoining the king's apartments. Many tablets written in Linear A have been found there, carrying information about tributes, grain acquisition, exports and so on. Those tablets remain incompletely deciphered.
Next to these rooms were storerooms for oil, wine or cereal, kept in ceramic containers — large jars whose contents probably came from taxation.
It is at the Mycenaean palace of Pylos that the most important archive of Linear B texts would be found: almost 1,500 clay tablets and various fragments with texts far longer than those of Knossos, which is what made decipherment possible.
At other Mycenaean centres of mainland Greece, clay tablets have been found in smaller quantities, and also on ceramic vessels.
These are texts incised on clay, and they owe their survival to the fact that the fire which destroyed the palaces reached the archives, baking and hardening the clay. The rubble produced by the fires, together with damp, made it possible for the tablets to survive more than three thousand years.
The return of writing
The wave of destruction that ended the Mycenaean centres around 1200 BCE likewise meant the end of this script. The Greek world became illiterate once more, with the exception of the marginal island of Cyprus, where a syllabic script of Cretan descent remained in use until the third century BCE.
Three hundred years later, around 900 BCE, the Greeks would learn to write again on the model of Phoenician script. They adapted it to create the alphabet, which entails distinguishing between vowels and consonants — and thereby made a contribution of the first order to the cultural history of humankind.
If you are interested in how other writing systems were born, you can go on to the origins of cuneiform script, to the Iberian script and its translation difficulties or to the Rosetta Stone, the find that opened up ancient Egyptian. And for the discipline that studies these inscriptions, an introduction to epigraphy.