10 - Greece in the Early Iron Age: Mobility, Commodities, Polities, and Literacy

Summary

This chapter confronts the systemic divide in modern scholarship that separates Aegean prehistory from Classical archaeology and considers its ramifications. In so doing, the problems of periodization, absolute chronology, and regionality are tackled. The relative chronology of the early Iron Age is based on painted pottery, the most abundantly preserved item of material culture that has been subjected to closest scrutiny. The chapter discusses four critical developments in the history of Greece during the early Iron Age that were to have an impact on the Mediterranean. Among these were overseas travel and settlement, exchange of commodities and the literacy revolution. The contrast between palatial and non-palatial Greece in the Bronze Age mirrors the contrast, in the early Iron Age, between the Greek polis, on the one hand, and the polis-less tribal states based on kinship, on the other. The chapter also presents the schematic language family trees of Naveh and Sass.