Assyrian domination and a century of independence

The middle of the eighth century B.C. marks the initial stage of the Cypro-Archaic I period. This was previously put at the very end of the century, about 700 B.C.., but recent research, based especially on the Greek ceramic material found in Cyprus, has rightly raised the date. Part of this period has been discussed already in CAH III.1, ch. 12, down to the year 709, when Sargon II conquered Cyprus, this event appearing as an appropriate landmark for the end of that chapter.

In this chapter we shall cover a period of about two centuries and the basic evidence will again be archaeological; but for the latest part of the period, from the Egyptian domination onwards (about 560 B.C.), we have information from Herodotus, mainly with regard to the period of Persian rule in Cyprus. We also possess some Assyrian records which throw light on the names of the various kingdoms of Cyprus. In Volume III.1, 533, reference was made to the inscription on the stele of Sargon II, where the names of the seven kings of Yadnana (Cyprus) who accepted his sovereignty are mentioned. The conquest of Cyprus by Sargon (724–705 B.C.) is mentioned also in his ‘Display inscription’ at Khorsabad, which reads as follows: ‘I cut down all my foes from Yadnana which is in the sea of the setting sun.’

Assyrian rule continued firm, and some thirty years after the occupation of Cyprus by Sargon Assyrian domination is mentioned again in the prism-inscription of Esarhaddon, which was written in 673/2 B.C. to commemorate the rebuilding of the Royal Palace of Nineveh.

Some problems of chronology

Every shepherd and every farmer needs to know the details of the seasons and the tally of the years. Although literacy lapsed in the Dark Age, men remained numerate and counted the lunar months, each within his own small group. When these groups coalesced into a community or state, or when they engaged in a joint activity, a common standard of time-reckoning was needed. Each state created its own calendar, naming the months by a number or a deity or a festival and beginning the year wherever it pleased; occasionally a month-name, such as the Carnean month in honour of Apollo Carneus, was common to several states, but usually each state drew its names from its own sources and sometimes even had Mycenaean names. As trade and intercourse developed, the need to label the years within a community was met by naming each year after an ‘eponymous’ official, whether priest or magistrate, and keeping a list of the names, e.g. that of Elatus as the first eponymous ephor of Sparta in 754 B.C. (Plut. Lyc. 7). A system which several states could share was devised at Olympia, where the festival was held once every four years and a sacred truce for its duration was observed by the participating states. The festival years were numbered consecutively and named after each winner of the foot-race (stadion), the first Olympiad in 776 B.C. being that of Coroebus of Elis (Paus. VIII. 26.4). Where an official held office for life, as the priestess of Hera at Argos did, the years of his or her tenure were numbered.

Illyrian and Epirotic tribes in Illyris and west Macedonia

‘Illyris’, a geographical term which the Greeks applied to a territory neighbouring their own, covers more or less the area of northern and central Albania down to the mouth of the Aous. A description of the country has been given in CAH III.1, 619ff and 623.

Within Illyris the people to the north of the Shkumbi valley in Illyria were remarkably conservative in their practices during the period, c. 750–530 B.C., and indeed until the beginning of the Hellenistic period. In the Zadrime plain and in the Mati valley tumulus-burial was practised as in the past, and without diminution until late in the fourth century; thereafter a few tumuli only were added to the existing hundreds. Similarly the local styles of pottery persisted and the influence of Greek pottery was very slight. The tumuli were used for members of the warrior or aristocratic class. They were buried with iron weapons (spearheads up to 70 cm long, cutlasses up to 60 cm, battle-axes, knives, occasionally swords) and sometimes with bronze armour (shield, cuirass, helmet, occasionally greaves). The jewellery and fibulae of bronze in the graves were of Glasinac types, and the beads were mostly of amber. In the area of Kukës on the Drin (ancient Drilon) the majority of the burials in the cemeteries of tumuli at Çinamak, Krume and Këneta were made in the seventh to fourth centuries B.C..

Volume III.I described the emergence of Greece from Dark Ages of depopulation and relative poverty to the acme of its Geometric civilization. The new prosperity and growth of the young city-states led them to look for new frontiers to conquer or settle, to eye each other's prosperity with cupidity, and their rulers and people to give thought to safeguarding their own wealth and status in the new societies of Archaic Greece. Volume in. 3 explores this growth, its causes and course, the dissensions and the faltering steps along the path to political stability.

The first chapter deals with that intercourse with the older civilizations of the east and Egypt which opened Greek eyes to materials, techniques and trading profits denied to them since the collapse of their Bronze Age civilization. This is a story which begins in the ninth and eighth centuries; but in the eighth and seventh the Greeks begin to turn to other Mediterranean areas, and we witness that spread of the Greek city-state to the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean sea, to the sea of Marmara and the Black Sea, which opened a new epoch in the history of western man.

The effects of this expansion, unprecedented in geographical scope, were manifold. The Greeks of the founding states gained greatly in prosperity, because the volume of seaborne trade increased by leaps and bounds and they were still the main exporters of manpower, weapons and finished goods.

It would be heartening to believe that our knowledge of the material conditions of life in ancient Greece improves as attention shifts from the earlier periods to the later. In many respects it becomes the poorer and it is for the earliest settlements and their comparatively simple trappings that we have the fullest evidence. Continuous occupation of the major sites has rendered it difficult to do more than sample the evidence for any given period and it is possible, for instance, still to be unsure whether even Athens had a city wall in the sixth century B.C.: evidence for it is allusive only, in texts, and on the ground there is nothing. Criteria other than acreage have to be applied to determine population numbers and in the Archaic period none inspire confidence. Even relative growth and decline, which might be gauged from the sizes of cemeteries, must depend upon more complete survival and excavation that it has generally proved possible to achieve. While the increasing sophistication of life greatly diversifies the archaeological record it has also meant that the range of possibly relevant evidence has widened to include important classes of objects which have survived irregularly (metalwork) or not at all (parchment, papyri, textiles). True, the figure arts of Greece tell more through detailed depiction of life. This has meant, for instance, that we learn about eighth-century weapons mainly from excavated objects, sixth-century ones from pictures of them or allusions in poetry, and it is not easy to say which period is the more reliably and completely served.

The history of the Greeks in Sicily and southern Italy down to 500 B.C. is hardly at any point a connected story. We have, on the one hand, a number of isolated events, or, at best, episodes, preserved in very varied literary sources from Herodotus to Athenaeus, and, on the other, a constantly growing body of archaeological material, which is richly informative on a restricted range of topics, and which presents the historian with many difficulties in interpretation. T. J. Dunbabin attempted a historical synthesis on the basis of the literary sources and the archaeological evidence then available in his book The Western Greeks (1948), to which the title of this chapter pays tribute. More is known archaeologically today, but in many respects his historical interpretation still dominates scholars in the field.

In the period under discussion the largest quantity of solid historical material about the western Greeks relates to colonization, and so much of this chapter is inevitably about colonization. We have discussed the major foundations in Sicily and southern Italy before 700 in the previous chapter, so our first section concerns the major foundations between 700 and 500. The next discusses the expansion of the Greek colonies, which includes further colonization in addition to the relations with the non-Greek peoples. Then we shall look at the relations between Greeks and Phoenicians in Sicily, which also involve the last major attempts at colonization by the Greeks in the period under review. Finally we shall consider the internal developments of the Greek city-states, and their relations.