Homer's World: Dark Age Greece (handout)

For reasons that are still unclear to us, the Mycenaean civilisation fell around 1200 BC. After that, life was relatively grim in Greece – a lot of important skills, including literacy, were lost and Greece seems to have had less contact with the outside world. In this lecture Dr Gillian Shepherd looks at this intriguing period between the Bronze Age and the Classical period: occasionally, however, we see a glimmer of light in the Dark Age Greece, such as the extraordinary finds from Lefkandi and flashy 9th century BC burials in Athens. In the 8th century BC - sometimes called the “Renaissance” of ancient Greece – we see an explosion in the archaeological record after the relative paucity of the Dark Ages: more burials, more settlements and more religious activity. The Greeks started venturing abroad, and founded settlements overseas. The 8th century also saw reading and writing reappear – but this time in a new form, an alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians.

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