Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 9

Having taken a brief survey of the character and range of the “Mycenaean civilisations,” we come to inquire whether any evidence exists, amid these chronicles of stone and clay, of gold and bronze, for determining the periods of its rise, bloom, and fall. In the first place, it belongs to the age of bronze. Men had begun to obtain tin in ample quantities from the far west, from the tinfields of Spain and Britain, to mix it with the copper of Cyprus and make the implements which they required sufficiently cheap to be in general use. On the other hand, the iron age had not begun. Iron was still a rare and precious metal, in the later part of the period; it was used for rings, but not yet for weapons. The iron age can hardly have commenced in Greece long before the tenth century; and if we set the beginning of the bronze age at about 2000 BC, we get the second millennium as a delimitation of the period within which “Mycenaean” culture flourished and declined.

The volcanic upheaval of the earth’s crust which overwhelmed the islands of Thera and Therasia ought to give us, if geology were an exacter science, a valuable date. We have seen that, when the inhabitants of Thera were surprised by the disaster, the Mycenaean earthware which they used was still in an early stage; and if we knew the time of the eruption we should have an important chronological landmark. The approximate date of 2000 BC has been assigned by an explorer, but geologists are not agreed, and they could not dispute the possibility that the eruption may have happened several centuries later.

The art of writing was known to the Cretans, but we can interpret neither their signs nor their language; and so far no written document has been discovered which would be likely, even if we could read it, to help our chronology. But in another land where men had already, for ages past, chronicled their history in a language which does not hide its tale, evidence has been discovered which teaches us in what centuries the potters of the Aegean made their wares and shipped them to distant shores. In the early part of the fifteenth century Mycenaean vases were represented on a wall-painting at Egyptian Thebes. At Gurob, a city which was built in the fifteenth century and destroyed two or three hundred years later, a number of “false-necked” jars imported from the Aegean have been found; and they belong not to the earlier but to the later period of Mycenaean pottery.

But Egyptian evidence is found not only on Egyptian soil, but on both sides of the Aegean. Three pieces of porcelain, one inscribed with the name, the two others with the “cartouche”, of Amenhotep III. of Egypt, and a scarab with the name of his wife, have been found in the chamber-tombs of Mycenae. It is a curious coincidence that a scarab of the same Amenhotep was discovered in the burying-place of Ialysus in Rhodes, while no cartouches or names of other Egyptian monarchs have been found in the regions of the Aegean. The single occurrence of such a scarab in one place might be an unsafe basis for an argument; but the coincidence seems to point to some special epoch of active intercourse between the Aegean and Egypt in this king’s reign. It would follow that in the fifteenth century at latest the period of the chamber-tombs and the vaulted tombs began. Perhaps it was at this time that artists derived from Egypt the idea of the wonderful pattern which they wrought with the chisel at Orchomenus, with the brush at Tiryns. But there is a still earlier testimony to intercourse with Egypt. On an inlaid dagger-blade, found in one of the rock-tombs on the Mycenaean citadel, we see represented a scene from Egyptian life—ichneumons catching ducks in a river which can only be the Nile. The workmanship is Aegean, not Egyptian; but the Aegean artist knew Egypt.

Aegean pottery found its way, as we might expect, to Cyprus as well as to Egypt; and in a tomb found near Salamis imports from Egypt, to which approximate dates can be assigned, have been discovered along with clay vessels from the Aegean. A scarab of Queen Ti and some gold collars which belong to the age of Amenhotep III. and Amenhotep IV fix the fourteenth century as the date of the grave, and thus reinforce the chronological evidence which has come to light in other places. Another grave of the same burying-ground contains Egyptian ware of the thirteenth century along with Mycenaean jars.

The joint witness of all these independent pieces of evidence proves that the civilisation of which Mycenae was one of the principal centres was flourishing from the fifteenth to the thirteenth centuries.

Such was the world which the Greeks had come to share, and soon to transform, on the borders of the Aegean Sea. It was a world created by folks who belonged to the European race which had been from of old in possession of this corner of the earth. Their civilisation, itis well to repeat, was simply a continuation and supreme development of that more primitive civilisation of which we caught glimpses before the bronze age began. There is no reason to suppose that these peoples were designated by any common name; there were doubtless many different peoples with different names, which are unknown to us. We know that there were Pelasgians in Thessaly and in Attica; tradition suggests that the Arcadians were Pelasgians too. But it is probable that all these peoples, both on the mainland of Greece and in the Aegean islands, belonged to the same race—a dark-haired stock—which also included the Mysians, the Lydians, the Carians, perhaps the Leleges, on the coast of Asia Minor. Adventurous speculators in the field of ethnology are inclined to think that this same race was dispersed all over the Mediterranean shores, in Spain and Italy and on the coast of Africa, and that the original centre of dispersion was the region of the Upper Nile.

If we may judge from the ancient names of places, which the Greeks preserved, it would seem that languages closely akin were spoken on both sides of the Aegean and in the isles; the coast-men and highlanders of western Asia Minor called their capes and hills and streams by names which resemble in root and formation those which we find on the coast and in the highlands of Greece, and in islands of the intermediate sea. But the strange thing is that the diffusion of the civilisation which we have been examining stopped short at the margin of the Asiatic shore. It extended to Rhodes, and to the small islands north and south of Rhodes, but it did not, until the days of its decline, touch the opposite continent. It is a fact of importance that Lydia, Caria, and Lycia lay outside the Mycenaean world, notwithstanding the affinities of race which bound the inhabitants of those countries to the folks of the Aegean islands and Greece. South of Troy, which stood quite by itself, there are no palaces or fortresses of the Mycenaean age along the east Aegean coast, nor in the large islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Samos. None, at least, have as yet been found. The relics even of commerce with the western Aegean, though one would expect such commerce to have been brisk and constant, are few and rare. There was therefore an obstinate resistance on the part of the inhabitants of these regions to the reception of the Aegean civilisation. The people who held the whole seaboard from the Maeander to the borders of Lycia were the Leleges. At this period there was no maritime Caria; it was not till a later period that the Carians came down from the highlands and confined the Leleges to a small corner of their land.

There seems little doubt that this prehistoric Aegean world was composed of many small states. Of the relation of these states to one another, of the political events of the period, we know almost nothing, and we can guess little; for the records of stone and bronze and gold cannot be interpreted without some clue. A few facts which seem to emerge, partly from archaeological evidence, partly from tradition, partly from hints in a pictured chronicle of Egypt, furnish us with historical problems rather than with historical information.

The eminent position of “golden” Mycenae herself seems to be established. Her comparative wealth is indicated by the treasures of her tombs which exceed all treasures found elsewhere in the Aegean. But her lords were not only rich; their power stretched beyond their immediate territory. This fact may be inferred from the road system which connected Mycenae with Corinth and must have been constructed by one of her kings. Three narrow but stoutly built highways have been traced, the two western joining at Cleonae, the eastern going by Tenea. They rest on substructions of “Cyclopean” masonry; streams are bridged and rocks are hewn through; and as they were not wide enough for waggons, the wares of Mycenae were probably carried to the Isthmus on the backs of mules. If the glazed clay-ware, so abundantly found at Mycenae, was wrought there, and not, as some think, imported from the islands, then the industry of her potteries may have been a source of her wealth. It is not easy to determine whether Mycenae held sway over the whole Argive plain and especially what was her relation to Tiryns. A road leading southward as far as a small hill which was, in later times, famous for a great temple of Hera, shows that this site was under the domination of Mycenae; and it was a place of some importance, for three vaulted hill-tombs have been found hard by. Tiryns was an older place of habitation than Mycenae; and it has been suggested that it may have been Tirynthian kings who first selected the Mycenaean hill as a strong post at the head of the plain and a bulwark against invaders from the north. But the relations of Tiryns to Mycenae must be left undetermined; and the position of Larisa, the hill of Argos, at this period is hidden from our eyes. In Greek history Argos appears, from the beginning, as what it seems naturally marked out to be, the ruling city of the plain; and it would be rash to suppose that it was not a place of importance in an earlier age, for we cannot argue backward from the absence of prehistoric remains on a site like Argos which has been continuously inhabited.

There was an active sea-trade in the Aegean, a sea-trade which reached to the Troad and to Egypt; but there is no proof that Mycenae was a naval power. Everything points to Crete as the queen of the seas in this age, and to Cretan merchants as the carriers of the Aegean world. The roads of traffic are conservative, and we may be sure that the route to Egypt, which in later days Greek mariners always followed, was fixed in the prehistoric period—from the west of Crete to the opposite shore of Libya and along the Libyan coast to the mouths of the Nile. The predominance of Crete survived in the memories of Minos, whom tradition exalted as a mighty sea-king who cleared the Aegean of pirates and founded a maritime power. The Greeks looked back to Minos as a son of Zeus, who “reigned”, as the poet of the Odyssey mysteriously tells us, “in nine yearly tides”, at Cnosus “the great city”, and held converse with his divine father in the cave of Ida. But Minos, as his name shows, was a figure of Cretan history or myth before the Greeks came; perhaps he was the greatest of the gods worshipped in the island; he was associated with “the bull of Minos”, who was possibly a horned man of primitive Egyptian art.

There were dealings of commerce between the Aegean world and northern Europe; “Mycenaean” influences travelled up the Hebrus and the Danube; amber from the shores of the Baltic was imported to Mycenae. Jars of Aegean manufacture have been found at Syracuse in vaulted tombs; but in Cyprus there were actually Mycenaean settlements. Of relations with Egypt we have already seen indications in the names of the Egyptian monarch Amenhotep and his wife found at Mycenae and Ialysus. This was toward the end of the fifteenth century. Still earlier, we see in a painting of Thebes men who can be recognized as of Aegean type, offering Mycenaean vessels to King Thothmes III; and they are described as “the kings of the country of the Keftu and the isles of the great sea”. It would seem then that in the fifteenth century the relations between Egypt and the Aegean were peaceful, and the small princes of the “islands” were ready to offer their homage to the great monarchs on the banks of the Nile.

It was possibly from Egypt that Aegean artists derived the spiral ornament; and it is probably to them that we owe its introduction into Europe. Moreover, through contact with Libya and Egypt, the Aegean civilisation had received some oriental elements; and thus, through the Aegean peoples whom they subjugated, the Greeks had their earliest glimpses of the Orient. It was perhaps from the peoples whom they conquered that Greek woodcutters learned to use a new kind of axe, with a name which had come from Mesopotamia; for, by a strange chance, Assyria had the privilege of bestowing her word for axe on two far-sundered races of Aryan speech,—on the Greeks in the west and on the speakers of Sanskrit in the east.

Of the power and resources of the Aegean states, the monuments hardly enable us to form an absolute idea. They were small, as we saw; it was an age

When men might cross a kingdom in a day.

The kings had slaves to toil for them; the fortresses and the large tombs were assuredly built by the hands of thralls. One fact shows in a striking way how small were these kingdoms, and how slender their means, compared with the powerful realms of Egypt and the Orient. If Babylonian or Egyptian monarchs, with their command of slave-labour, had ruled in Greece, they would assuredly have cut a canal across the Isthmus and promoted facilities for commerce by joining the eastern with the western sea. That was an undertaking which neither the small primitive states, nor the small Greek states which came after, ever had the means of carrying out.

Having examined the Aegean civilisation of the bronze age and drawn some conclusions which it suggests, we must now consider how far the Greeks may have shared in it.