Читать книгу The Herodotus Encyclopedia - Группа авторов - Страница 838

As evidenced by pottery finds on and around the Acropolis, Athens has been inhabited continuously since the Neolithic period (3000–2800 BCE). Despite the pride later Athenians took in being autochthonous, or “sprung from the soil,” non‐Greek toponyms and archaeological finds suggest that these indigenous inhabitants were not Greek. Substantial changes in material culture suggest that Greek‐speakers did not arrive in Attica until around 2000 BCE, with many Bronze Age Mycenaean sites on the Attic peninsula dating from 1400 onward. By 1250 the Acropolis at Athens was fortified with a huge circuit wall of polygonal blocks so massive that later Athenians imagined they were built by Cyclopes, or giants, suggesting the presence of a Mycenaean palace like those described in HOMER and found at MYCENAE, PYLOS, and TIRYNS. Tradition holds that around this time the mythical king THESEUS effected a political unification of Attica, or synoecism (Plut. Thes. 24; Hall 2014, 243–55). The lack of contemporaneous FORTIFICATIONS at any of the other Bronze Age sites in Attica leads Camp (2001, 16–19) to speculate that the other palaces had indeed become politically subordinate to Athens.