“Unraveling the Mysteries: What Sparked the Dawn of Ancient Greece?”
It should also be noted that this was a violent society. Chiefs led raiding parties on other villages to steal livestock or take slaves. The combatants under the chiefs in these raiding parties were farmers. Any man who was able bodied would fight to preserve and enrich the demos. There was a heavy level of competition between quite literally everyone. Between farmers, between villagers to be chief, and between chiefs themselves.
During this time, the Greeks forgot Linear B. What is the point in using a script centered around records if there was nothing so significant to record? Instead, we’ll talk about something just as interesting as administrative records, pottery… Listen, it was called the dark age for a reason. The term comes from art history to describe the sudden downturn in quality of Greek crafts after the Mycenaean age. The craftspeople at first continued to create Mycenaean-like pottery and crafts, but of significantly lower quality. Pottery did play an important part in funerary services and everyday life, so it wasn’t going to disappear during this time though. Pottery’s presence was always felt and that is why art historians and archaeologists will spend significant time talking about Greek pottery. Eventually, Dark age pottery would be revived into the proto-geometrical and then geometrical styles of pottery when the technology, economy, and culture picked up. They were able to produce more intricate art as time went on because of an important development during the dark age: Greece’s unwilling entering of the Iron age.
