Greek Dark Ages

Although Thebes and Eleon had an important reoccupation pattern even in Late Helladic IIIC Middle, c. 1170–1100 BC, when other minor sites around also began to rise, palaces had ceased to exist along with art and burial customs.

[8] On the other hand, in the island of Euboea, the site of Lefkandi grew up in an accelerated way in this Postpalatial period (1200–1050 BC) to become a preeminent place as it has a double bay with sea traffic.

However, Greek-speaking people arrived in Cyprus, in the late 13th to 11th centuries BC, but did not colonize the island, they integrated into society as "economic and cultural migrants from the periphery to the core.

"[10] There were four centres in the following Prehistoric or Early Iron Age (1050–800 BC), with more than 1000 individuals: Lefkandi, Athens, Argos, and Knossos, which also featured sociopolitical complexity, hierarchies manifested locally though not in a wider area.

But archaeologist Alex Knodell considers that artifacts, in the Early Iron Age, from excavations at Lefkandi on the Lelantine Plain in the island of Euboea in the 1980s "revealed that some parts of Greece were much wealthier and more widely connected than traditionally thought, as a monumental building and its adjacent cemetery showed connections to Cyprus, Egypt, and the Levant as markers of elite status and authority, much as they had been in previous periods,"[5] and this shows that significant cultural and trade links with the east, particularly the Levant coast, developed from c. 900 BC onwards.

Though life was harsh for the Greeks of the Dark Ages, and one major result of the period was the deconstruction of the old Mycenaean economic and social structures, along with the strict class hierarchies and hereditary rule forgotten, a gradual replacement with new socio-political institutions eventually allowed for the rise of democracy in 5th century BC Athens.

Notable events after the Dark Ages period that mark the transition to Classical Antiquity include the first Olympics, in 776 BC, and the composition of the Homeric epics the Iliad and the Odyssey.

[17] Tholos tombs are found in Early Iron Age Thessaly and in Crete but not in general elsewhere, and cremation was the dominant rite in Attica but nearby in the Argolid, it was inhumation.

[19] Some regions in Greece, such as Attica, Euboea, and central Crete, recovered economically from these events faster than others, but life for common Greeks would have remained relatively unchanged as it had for centuries.

Together with distinctively Greek Euboean ceramic wares, it was widely exported and is found in Levantine sites, including Tyre and far inland in the late 11th and 10th centuries.

It is likely that at the dawn of the historical period two or three hundred years later, the main economic resource for each family was the ancestral plot of land of the Oikos, the kleros or allotment.

[30][page needed] Lefkandi on the island of Euboea was a prosperous settlement in the Late Bronze Age,[31] possibly to be identified with old Eretria.

[32] It recovered quickly from the collapse of Mycenaean culture, and in 1981 excavators of a burial ground found the largest 10th century BC building yet known from Greece.

In one were placed four horses and the other contained a cremated male buried with his iron weapons and an inhumed woman, heavily adorned with gold jewellery.

[citation needed] Exports of Greek pottery demonstrate contact with the Levant coast at sites such as Al-Mina and with the region of the Villanovan culture to the north of Rome.

Renewed Mediterranean trade brought new supplies of copper and tin to make a wide range of elaborate bronze objects, such as tripod stands like those offered as prizes in the funeral games celebrated by Achilles for Patroclus.

[citation needed] Other coastal regions of Greece besides Euboea were once again full participants in the commercial and cultural exchanges of the eastern and central Mediterranean and communities developed governance by an elite group of aristocrats, rather than by the single basileus or chieftain of earlier periods.

The ceramic Euboean artifact inscribed with a few lines written in the Greek alphabet referring to "Nestor's Cup", discovered in a grave at Pithekoussae (Ischia), dates from c. 730 BC.