The Illusory Greek Dark Age
The present chronology for the ancient world has succeeded in giving a broad sequence which allows the interplay between different cultures to be understood. Nevertheless, certain stages are plagued by inexplicable anomalies. The most notorious of these points is the ‘Dark Age’ which descended on the Old World after the fall of the Bronze Age civilization. It forms the focus of a vast range of long-standing, and as yet unresolved, historical puzzles.
Why, for instance, would the 8th-century Greeks have borrowed an alphabet from Phoenicia that was 300 years out of date? How could the Cypriots and the Babylonians have left virtually no evidence of writing for 300 years, after which they continued to use basically the same scripts?
Why do bronzes made in Cyprus during the 12th century BC frequently occur elsewhere in 9th-century or later deposits? How is it that the objects of Egyptian pharaohs from the 10th to 9th centuries are always found abroad in contexts 100-200 years later? What caused the gap in the apparently continuous tradition of Eastern Mediterranean ivory-working between 1175 and 850 BC? Why indeed have the Iron Age levels of Israel produced nothing reflecting the ‘Golden Age’ of King Solomon?
The questions do not end there. Did the Phoenician colonization of the West occur in the 12th or the 8th century BC? How is it that archaeologists cannot agree on a date for the earliest remains at Rome, traditionally founded around 750 BC? Where are the archaeological remains of the native Sicilians who were expelled by Greek colonists in the 8th century BC?
Even more intractable puzzles surround how the Hittite kings and civilization of Syria could have sprung from ancestors who vanished without trace nearly three centuries earlier. And what really happened to the people of Nubia, who supposedly vanished only to return with the same material culture 250 years later? Did the Trojans and Elamites also disappear and reappear in their homelands over the same period? Where is the archaeological evidence for the arrival of the Israelites in Palestine?
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There can be no real doubt that in many parts of the Old World there was a dramatic collapse of civilization at the end of the Late Bronze Age. The centralized economies controlled from the palaces disintegrated, the old trading markets broke up, diplomatic contacts were lost and major settlements were abandoned. However, the cause or causes behind these momentous changes are unclear…
Even where a collapse of civilization is evident, one must also ask why the subsequent recession lasted so long and was so widespread. It is sometimes suggested that the depth of the breakdown in political structures meant that they took centuries to build up again. Such assertions need to be carefully examined in each case, for there can be no general rules concerning the tempo of social development. If the conditions are right, states and even empires can be built within a single lifetime. Invasion theories have again been used here, the assumption being that ‘simple’ barbarians took no interest in such matters. In reality, it is more usual for barbarian invaders to adopt imperial trappings in order to claim a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the conquered population. One has only to think of the speed with which the Mongol warlord Kublai Khan, after his conquest of China, assumed traditional titles and ruled as a Chinese Emperor. Others have argued that newcomers such as the Phrygians, sometimes thought to have precipitated the fall of the Hittite Empire, opted for a nomadic lifestyle in the region they had conquered. Against this interpretation is the fact that it is based merely on silence—the lack of any settlement remains for hundreds of years.
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All these disputes can now be seen in a fresh light. The irony is that both sides in most of these cases were to some extent correct. It was the overall framework within which they were arguing that was wrong.
With the lower chronology proposed here, in which the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean ends around 950 rather than 1200 BC, the problems are solved and an entirely new understanding emerges.
Beginning with Egypt, the theory of Sothic dating should no longer be used to calculate the chronology of the New Kingdom. If the Third Intermediate Period is not stretched to an unreasonable length by Sothic dates, then the 22nd and 23rd Dynasty pharaohs whose finds are so often out of place abroad will have reigned much later. This in turn means that the objects bearing their names become contemporary with the deposits in which they occur.
Outside Egypt, a lowering of New Kingdom dates would remove any need to postulate the desertion of Nubia. The long ignored evidence for rulers during the supposed Dark Age instead shows that after less than a century the place of the Egyptian viceroys had been taken by local kings.
By redating the beginning of the Iron Age in Palestine from the early 12th century BC to the late 10th, a completely new interpretation of the archaeology of Israel can be offered: one which is in perfect harmony with the biblical record. The search for the riches of Solomon’s reign can be brought to an end—they have already been found, but simply not recognized, in the material remains of the Late Bronze Age. By shortening the early Iron Age a cultural hiatus in Palestine can be closed. A reduction in the dates for the later Iron Age, as argued by the evidence of the Lachish Letters, removes a second Dark Age in the Babylonian and early Persian period.
With respect to the important question of ivory-working, one of the latest objects from the LBA cache at Megiddo belongs to the reign of Ramesses III, who on our provisional redating of Egyptian history invaded Palestine around 925 BC. The closure of the deposit might then fall around 900 BC, only two generations before the next datable ivories in 850 BC. In short, there was no real interruption between the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age ivory-carving traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean.
New finds demonstrate that the Neo-Hittite kings of Syria can finally be linked with the last Hittite emperors, a connection supported by the evidence from archaeology, radiocarbon dating and sculptural comparison. The Hittite Empire did not die out in 1200 BC but instead gradually broke up during the 10th century BC, leaving local rulers to claim authority over their own lands the same fashion as the Nubian chiefs.
By removing the ghost dynasties of Assyrian history, continuity can be restored between the art of the Middle and Late Assyrian periods. In step with this, the extended period of ‘illiteracy’ in Babylonia and Elam during post-Kassite times is transformed into a much shorter phase in which texts were scarce but not wholly absent. Likewise, the ‘occupational enigma’ in the Persian Gulf can be resolved and the hiatus in settlement evidence closed.
The disappearance of writing in Cyprus and Greece and its reappearance 300 years or more later loses its status as one of the great mysteries of ancient times. Redating the Byblite inscriptions means that the supposedly 11th-century Levantine alphabet copied by the Greeks properly belongs to the 9th century BC (confirmed by the Assyrian date for Tell Fakhariyah inscription); its arrival in Greece during the 8th century is therefore no longer a surprise. Equally, the massive gap in the use of the Cypriot script shrinks dramatically. The long-standing Black-on-Red Ware problem is resolved by harmonizing Palestinian and Cypriot stratigraphy.
The emergence of Archaic Greek city-states in the 8th century BC has presented many puzzles, with the signs of continuity from the Mycenaean palace centers ignored because of the impossibility of their influence persisting for so long. The Mycenaean world did collapse, but in the mid-10th century BC, with civilization reviving soon after to flourish even more vigorously.
In the Balkans, the ties between the Balkan pottery complex and the Mycenaeans at one end and Geometric material at the other do not have to be seen as incompatible alternatives. In the revised chronology presented here, the Balkan Complex neatly bridges the period between the two, rather than being stretched out over four and a half centuries can be largely closed. The famous War of the Greeks against the city (if we follow the usual association with the destruction of Troy VIIA) would have taken place in the mid-10th rather than early 12th century.
An overlap between the supposedly separate Proto-Villanovan and Sub-Apennine cultures in central Italy makes good sense of the archaeological evidence. In the new dating scheme this interpretation becomes perfectly feasible, as is a lower date for the earliest remains at Rome.
In Sicily there is no need to develop unlikely hypotheses involving the abandonment of the coast on two separate occasions. The traditional chronology has been spread out to fill the gap between the Mycenaeans and Greek colonists. If the Late Bronze Age is lowered in date, then the unnecessary phases in the Sicilian Iron Age, represented only by burials, can be dispensed with.
Over the last century chronology has provided the focus of some of the most protracted and troublesome debates in a wide variety of fields, from European prehistory to biblical archaeology. All these can now be seen as the product of a common cause—a misplaced faith in the immutability of the established framework. The resulting Dark Ages and all their ramifications really amount to a gigantic academic blunder, perpetuated by the convenience of a seemingly reliable time-scale, as well as the sheer complexity of the issues involved. Our investigation shows that these controversies have been largely unnecessary. With the lower chronology proposed here, many simply disappear, along with the illusory Centuries of Darkness.
-excerpted from “Centuries of Darkness” by Peter James (1993)