CHAPTER XXXVIII - GREEK SETTLEMENT IN THE EASTERN AEGEAN AND ASIA MINOR

Summary

The great kingdoms of the earth crumbled or fell in the century or two before the close of the second millennium. The Hittite empire in Asia Minor vanished. Scarcely even a memory remained of its central power; and the western principalities, such as Arzawa, Assuwa and the Shekha River Territory, passed into so total an oblivion that fifty years of research on the imperial archive of Khattusha has not availed to fix their positions with certainty on the map of ancient Anatolia. Theirs was an age of which the moralist might have said, ‘Omnes quae usquam rerum potiuntur urbes quaeque alienorum imperiorum magna sunt decora, ubi fuerint, aliquando quaeretur.’

In the Aegean the following centuries constitute the Dark Age that preceded the Greek Renascence of the later eighth century. On the west coast of Asia Minor the people that set the pace was the Greeks. Seeking new lands, they crossed the Aegean; and settling on a coast which was probably underpopulated and certainly lacking in political organization, they cherished their old traditions and invented new modes of rational thought, urban civilization and poetry. It was not till the seventh century, long after they had consolidated their possession of the coastlands, that the Greeks of Asia began to meet opposition to their inland penetration. The beginnings of their settlements lie beyond the threshold of recorded history. The knowledge of writing had been lost in this quarter of the ancient world; and the main Greek prose traditions of the migrations, though they may enshrine historical fact, constitute a schematic tableau coloured by the sentimental attachments or political pretensions of a subsequent age.