The Greek Dark Ages and the Rise of the Polis
After the fall of the Mycenaean palaces, Greece loses writing and slowly regathers into city-states.
The Mycenaean palaces perish, and with them go the Linear script, the palace economy and the long-distance trade; the population thins and grows poorer. For three or four centuries there are almost no inscriptions—hence the name Dark Ages—though life goes on: Greeks settle the coasts of Asia Minor, master iron, and compose oral poetry. By the ninth and eighth centuries BCE a new form emerges—the polis, a small community with a common sanctuary, a marketplace and an assembly of citizens, where decisions are no longer made in a palace. In the same age the Greeks take the alphabet from the Phoenicians and add signs for the vowels.
Sources
Scholarship
- Greek authors: Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch — the Greek memory of the “age of heroes” and of the migrations
- archaeology of the Aegean world — the impoverishment of the finds after the palaces fell; the alphabet and the polis by the eighth century
Basis: documents and evidence.