24 A Dark Age Descends upon Greece

A Dark Age Descends upon Greece

Around 1200 BCE, Dorian Greeks, who spoke a dialect different from Mycenae Greeks and had been living just north of what is today Greece, began began to move southward into Greece. They bypassed some areas but overran much of the Mycenae civilization that had spread into the central part of the Greek mainland. They looted and destroyed palaces and sent people fleeing, some eastward to Asia Minor, some southeast to nearby islands and to Cyprus.

In the mid-1100s, after decades of respite, came more Dorian invasions. In Ithaca, an island off the western coast of Greece, Mycenae Greeks made common cause with people native to the area, and there the Mycenae were able to maintain a semblance of their way of life. So too were some others who remained on the Greek mainland. The city of Athens and cities in Euboea survived, but the Dorians pushed countless Greeks to a new exodus. Legend tells of a well-organized exodus from Athens to the island of Lesbos off the coast of Asia Minor. Other migrants from Greece fled to Asia Minor and mixed with local peoples, and with this western Asia Minor became a mixture of peoples speaking a variety of Greek dialects.

Mycenae Greeks fled to Crete, and soon the Dorians overran that island, as people were fleeing from there to Cyprus. The Dorians moved eastward to the southwest shores of Asia Minor, island hopping by way of Melos, Thera and Rhodes. On the coast of Asia Minor they destroyed Miletus and other cities, and some Mycenae Greeks migrated from the coast of Asia Minor farther inland.

The Dorian invasions destroyed the prosperity and cohesion of Greece. There was a sharp drop in agricultural production and in population. Greek cities became villages, and writing declined or was lost. Trade between Greece and elsewhere disappeared as the Dorian Greeks had no desire for contact with foreign peoples, believing that beyond them lived only strange people and monsters.

The Dorians

he Dorians were a major division of the ancient Greek people, distinguished by a well-marked dialect and by their subdivision, within all their communities, into the "tribes" (phylai) of Hylleis, Pamphyloi, and Dymanes. These three tribes were apparently quite separate in origin from the four tribes found among the Ionian Greeks. The Dorian people are traditionally acknowledged as the conquerors of the Peloponnese (in the period 1100-1000 Bc). 

In Greek tradition, the Dorians were thought to have gained their name from Doris, a small district in central Greece. According to this tradition, the sons of Heracles, the Heraclidae, were driven from their homeland in the Peloponnese by Eurystheus of Mycenae. The Heraclidae took refuge with Aegimius, the king of Doris. Several generations later, the Heraclid brothers Temenus, Aristodemus, and Cresphontes led the "Dorians" back in a successful invasion of the Peloponnese and thus recovered their heritage. 

In actual fact, the origins of the Dorians are necessarily obscure, but it appears they originated in northern and northwestern Greece, i.e., Macedonia and Epirus. From there they apparently swept southward into central Greece and then into the southern Aegean area in successive migrations beginning about 1100 BC, at the end of the Bronze Age. The invading Dorians had a relatively low cultural level, and their only major technological innovation was the iron slashing sword. The Dorians swept away the last of the declining Mycenaean and Minoan civilizations of southern Greece and plunged the region into a dark age out of which the Greek city-states began to emerge almost three centuries later. 

The migrating Dorians settled chiefly in the southern and eastern Peloponnese, establishing strong centers in Laconia (and its capital, Sparta), Messenia, Argolís, and the region of the Isthmus of Corinth. They also settled the southern Aegean islands of Melos, Thera, Rhodes, and Cos, along with the island of Crete. In fact, the Dorians reached as far east as the cities of Halicarnassus and Cnidus on the coast of mainland Anatolia (now southwestern Turkey). A great wave of renewed colonization beginning in the 8th century BC brought Dorian settlers to the island of Corcyra (modern Corfu), to Syracuse, Gela, and Acragas (now Agrigento) in Sicily, to Taras (now Taranto) in Italy, and to Cyrene in North Africa, as well as to scattered sites in the Crimea and along the Black Sea. Sparta, Corinth, and Argos were among the most important cities of Doric origin.

Doric was one of the major dialects of the classical Greek language, along with the Ionic-Attic, Aioli, and Arcado-Cypriot dialect groups. But because the Ionic-Attic dialect of Athens dominated Greek culture from the 5th century BC, very little remains of ancient writings in pure Doric dialect.

The Dorian peoples had a seminal influence on the later development of Greek art. Indeed, the crowning achievements of Greek art and architecture from the 5th century BC arose from the combination of the art of the Doric peoples (with its restraint, power, and monumentality) and that of the Ionian peoples (with its grace, elegance, and ornateness). The massive and simple Doric order of architecture earned its name from its origin in the Doric-populated cities of the southern Aegean. The choral lyrics in Greek tragedy were also a Doric invention.  Politically, the Dorian centers took two different courses of development. In Corinth, Rhodes, Argos, and various other mercantile-oriented city-states, the Dorian invaders, though at first reserving political power unto themselves, eventually merged with the conquered indigenous peoples of their regions. In Sparta and the island of Crete, by contrast, the Dorians kept power to themselves and constituted themselves into a ruling military class. These militarized Dorian aristocracies deliberately "froze" an archaic form of society (and sacrificed most of their cultural and artistic promise in the process) in order to maintain dominance over a larger population of serfs.

The Dorian invasion was when a group of Greeks from the north invaded

Over 3,000 years ago, a tribe of war-like people swooped down from the north onto the Greek peninsula. The Dorians did not have a written language. They were not into art or music or literature. The Dorians were into war. The Dorians did not build cities. They destroyed them.

It was easy for the Dorians to conquer ancient Greece. Before Dorian rule, the people on the Greek peninsula had stone weapons. The Dorians had metal weapons. The people on the Greek peninsula were scattered all over. They did not work together. The Dorians were organized and well trained. It wasn't even a contest.

There are written records left by the ancient Greeks that tell how they moved their women and children from village to village, to try and save them from the Dorian slaughter. They collected stones and made weapons in preparation for the next battle. But all written records soon stopped. The Dorians had taken over.

For the next 400 years, the Dorians ruled.

Thanks to the Dorians the early Greeks learned to make metal weapons. Thanks to the storytellers, the early Greeks learned to work together to defeat their common enemy. Dorian rule came to an end when the Greeks learned to band together into city-states