[This brief paper is meant to illustrate the potential use of the xhtml+heml schema.]
Human inhabitation of Greece extends back in time many thousands of years before the first traces of the Greek language. Scholars divide this vast range of time into periods defined largely by the manner in which humans make use of their environment. The three earliest periods, the Paleolithic ('Old Stone'), Mesolithic ('Middle Stone') and Neolithic ('New Stone') ages, were so-named by modern archaeologists who observed that these peoples made little use of metals, manufacturing their tools and weapons out of stone. Though the term 'stone age' may call to mind a completely primitive way of life, by the end of the Neolithic period many of the hallmarks of human civilization, including agriculture, animal husbandry and city-dwelling, had been worked out.
A single site, the Franchthi Cave, was inhabited nearly continuously from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic period. The changes in diet, industry and living arrangements for the successive millenia are recorded in the levels of its soil, providing many clues to the development of human culture in this region. H
Evidence of late-Neolithic civilization can be found at the fortified city of Dimini in Northern Thessaly. H The settlement was defended by a set of concentric circuit walls, apparently forming a sort of maze for would-be invaders. At the centre of the town was a courtyard and a large building similar in shape to the 'megaron' typical of the later Mycenaean architecture.
The two periods following the Neolithic, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age, begin as each of these metals was introduced into the region of the Aegean Sea and people learnt to make use of them in farming, city life and warfare. The two most important Bronze Age Aegean civilizations are the Minoans of Crete and the Mycenaean on the Greek mainland. The fall of the latter roughly coincides with the beginning of the Iron Age.
The Greeks of later years recounted myths of a King Minos, who ruled from the southern Aegean island of Crete. Excavations at Knossos undertaken by Arthur Evans in the early twentieth century uncovered a wealthy and extensive Bronze Age culture. H. Named 'Minoan' after the mythical king, the height of this civilization was at Knossos during the time modern researchers call the 'New Palace Period', from about 1650 BC to 1450 BC.H The remnants of Minoan life are engaging and charming. Palace frescos depict scenes of the verdant out-of-doors or of city festivals, sometimes with young people apparently leaping over bulls. Ceramic art luxuriated in flowing nautical images.
The Minoans left written records in a script known as 'Linear A'. Still undeciphered, it appears mostly on clay tablets and on the rare graffiti.
On the mainland of Greece, a quite different culture was taking hold. Its earliest, and in some senses most spectacular, manifestation is the contents of two Grave Circles at Mycenae. In contrast to the art of the Minoans, the treasure with which these people were buried evokes a culture of hunting and war.H Because these people were first discovered at Mycenae, we refer to them as the 'Mycenaean Greeks', but Mycenaean fortress-towns appear all over the Greek mainland, and there is no reason to believe that Mycenae was in any sense a capital.
Later, these same people built monumental structures, including massive 'beehive', or Tholos, tombs and, most importantly, fortress-towns with a palace complex at their centre. The palace at Pylos, used in the fourteenth century BC, is the best-preserved H
Pylos is among the Mycenaean sites which have yielded collections of clay tablets inscribed with a writing system known as 'Linear B'. This system is so-called because at Knossos on Crete it succeeds and replaces the earlier Linear A, H although it shares some of the latter's symbols. It seems likely, then, that Linear B represents an attempt to express a new language using a script devised for the Minoan language. The identity of that new language was to remain a mystery until 1952, when a British architect named Michael Ventris demonstrated that the language encoded in Linear B was, in fact, a very early form of Greek.H This fact, alongside noticeable changes in art and architecture, leads scholars to believe that the Minoans of Crete were overtaken by the Mycenaean Greeks sometime in the fifteenth century.
Nature in its most violent form also put its mark on the Bronze Age Aegean. Around 1628 BC, the island of Thera was largely obliterated by a volcanic eruption, leaving behind only a crescent-shaped shell of its former self. To the inhabitants of the island, the effect was devastating, the eruption must have put a strain on all dwelling in the region. Its effects on vegetative growth across Europe can be traced even today in the fossils of trees which were alive at the time.H Some time ago, scholars believed that the Thera eruption took place a century later. If that were true, It would be sensible to attribute the decline of the Minoans to the consequent devastation, which would have disturbed their way of life. Now that it is believed that nearly two centuries separate the eruption and the decline of the New Palace Period, Thera's effects do not seem to be a sufficient explanation.
'Greek history' usually refers to the study of a culture whose most basic feature was a common language. We, borrowing a term from the Romans, refer to this language -- and its modern descendant -- as 'Greek', but they called it hellenike. It seems that this was not the first language spoken in this region, since remnants of a non-Greek language can be found in the Greek words for some plants and locations. Thanks to the decipherment of the Linear B writing system of the Mycenaeans, we also know that the Greek language was used by the dominant culture on the Greek mainland at least as early as the second half of the second millennium BC.
The date at which these first Greek-speakers arrived therefore poses an alluring but difficult problem for the prehistorian, whose direct evidence is mute bones, pots, housing and other material. On one end of the scale, these first Greeks have been identified with the first peoples to bring the skill of farming to the region, replacing the native hunter-gatherers at some point earlier than 6,000 BC. H The most famous proponent of this approach is Colin Renfrew, and he argues for it most accessibly in the book Archaeology and Language
Another well-expressed position is that of Robert Drewes, who in his book The Coming of the Greeks argues that it was through military, not agricultural, technology, that the Greek-speaking people dominated the Balkans, and that this took place just before the appearance of the shaft-graves in Mycenae, or about 1600 BC. H
Whenever it was that the Greek speaking peoples arrived, by the end of the second millennium BC their Mycenaean culture was in decline. This comes at a time of apparent political and military trouble throughout the Mediterranean, and it is tempting to associate these events with one another. For instance, the Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses III records in two places that he was victorious over those whom he calls the 'Sea Peoples'. Though one of the documents lists the peoples who composed the Sea Peoples, these can be assigned to known ancient peoples only tentatively, due to the problems of transcribing one language's names in another's writing system. One group is, however, called the Akaiwasha, a name that might be cognate with the early Greeks' name for themselves, the Achaeans. If this is accurate, then we might surmise that some former inhabitants of the Mycenaean centres became part of the culturally heterogeneous Sea Peoples H
Whenever it was that the Greek-speaking peoples arrived in the Balkans, by the first millennium their culture had spread to Asia Minor (the modern-day Turkish coast), forming new cities their similar to the mainland models. Though cities like Miletus provide possible evidence of an early phase of colonization by the Mycenaeans during their acme, probably more of the hellenization of Asia Minor took place later, when Mycenaeans from the mainland fled the rapid decline of their civilization and as refugees sought new lives elsewhere.
By the tenth century BC, Mycenaean civilization collapsed so completely that its writing system, palaces and trading patterns all were abandoned. Though the Greeks themselves thought that the 'heroic' civilization preceding theirs had been destroyed by invaders from the north (so-called Dorians), modern scholarship -- aware of the continued importance of some principal Mycenaean sites such as Athens and of the continued use of the Greek language -- infers a fall of the Mycenaean palace culture, with the lower strata of society farming as they had before and relying on oral traditions to understand their past.
At the same time, iron tools replaced bronze, perhaps out of necessity due to the collapse of distant trading networks on which a supply of tin (necessary for forming bronze) relied. This was a gradual change, and one that may not have had the social and military impact implied by the terms 'Bronze Age' and 'Iron Age'. It seems most likely that the skill of iron-working entered the Greek-speaking world from the East (where experiments had been conducted for centuries) at Cyprus. By the middle of the eleventh century, Cypriot Greeks were fully engaged in the fully range of uses for this material.H
In general, the first centuries of the Iron Age in Greece offer rustic and simple cultural products. However, a remarkable burial site that came to light in 1981 at Lefkandi on the island of Euboea shows that, on that island at least, a small minority were able to amass wealth and enjoy the . The two graves -- one for a man, one for a woman -- were accompanied by weapons and armour and placed within a 50m long wooden 'house' dated to around 1000 to 950 BC.H Whether this is evidence of the old Mycenaean elites adapting their to new times or of a new elite emerging from the chaos of the end of the Bronze Age is open to debate. In any case, it was to take two more centuries of gradual improvement in living conditions and trade before the Greek alphabet would enter into use and reveal to us the Greeks' political and cultural realignment around the city-state, or polis.