The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy

The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy
Author: Sarah C. Murray
Publisher:
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2017
Genre: Bronze age
ISBN: 9781316954874

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This book provides a comprehensive treatment of change in long-distance exchange systems during the collapse of Mycenaean Greece

The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy

The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy
Author: Sarah C. Murray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2017-04-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1316949532

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In this book, Sarah Murray provides a comprehensive treatment of textual and archaeological evidence for the long-distance trade economy of Greece across 600 years during the transition from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age. Analyzing the finished objects that sustained this kind of trade, she also situates these artifacts within the broader context of the ancient Mediterranean economy, including evidence for the import and export of commodities as well as demographic change. Murray argues that our current model of exchange during the Late Bronze Age is in need of a thoroughgoing reformulation. She demonstrates that the association of imported objects with elite self-fashioning is not supported by the evidence from any period in early Greek history. Moreover, the notional 'decline' in trade during Greece's purported Dark Age appears to be the result of severe economic contraction, rather than a severance of access to trade routes.

Trade, Imports, and Society in Early Greece

Trade, Imports, and Society in Early Greece
Author: Sarah C. Murray
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2013
Genre:
ISBN:

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This dissertation engages in the current debate on whether there was more continuity or more discontinuity in Greece after the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces by investigating the evidence for changes in international trade and exchange between 1300 and 900 B.C.E. While most assessments of trade in the Greek Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age have relied on impressionistic accounts based on bits and pieces of the evidence, I present a precise accounting of the material evidence for trade from before and after the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces. For the first time, my dissertation provides quantitative documentation that the number of imports in Greece declined by about half after the end of the Late Bronze Age, and that the number of imports reached a nadir precisely in what is traditionally thought to have been the darkest part of the Dark Age (the 11th century). However, I also demonstrate that the number of known imports in Greece tracks very closely with trends in population and evidence for complexity of productive systems. This covariance between import quantities, population, and economic complexity suggests that the decline in the number of imports, usually seen as evidence for the isolation of Greece during the Early Iron Age, is rather more likely to have been an epiphenomenon of an overall decline in population and economic complexity that occurred in the Early Iron Age. In addition to assessing import quantities, I produce a close reading of the imported artifacts themselves. I show that the nature of the objects that Greeks were importing changed dramatically after the Mycenaean collapse. Late Bronze Age trade goods consisted primarily of bulk materials, such as metals and foodstuffs, or administrative objects, such as seals. In the Early Iron Age, however, imported objects consisted mostly of prestige items meant for personal adornment or individual enrichment, such as metal vessels or pieces of glass jewelry. The changes observed in the archaeological evidence fit well with the textual evidence. While Linear B texts from Mycenaean Greece suggest that commodities were of great interest to the palatial states, characters in the Homeric poems, thought to give us some sense of Dark Age social systems, trade fancy metal vessels and other fine finished goods amongst themselves. Taken together, the evidence in my dissertation shows that Greece was not particularly isolated during the Early Iron Age, but that trade and the economy changed in a variety of thoroughgoing ways over the period from 1300 to 900 BCE. For Greek history, there are two major implications. First, the economic developments I observe are likely to be related to deep and broad changes in social and political realities, suggesting that historical Greece has its structural roots in the Early Iron Age rather than in the Mycenaean states of the Late Bronze Age. Second, the argument that Greek intellectual history (e.g. the invention of democracy) arose in a vacuum in the Early Iron Age is no longer tenable, since the evidence does not support a view in which Greece was ever totally cut off from the rest of the Mediterranean.

How the World Made the West

How the World Made the West
Author: Josephine Quinn
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 609
Release: 2024-09-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 0593729811

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An award-winning Oxford history professor overturns the way the West thinks about itself, tracing its innovations and traditions to societies from all over the world and making the case that the West is, and always has been, truly global. “Superb, refreshing, and full of delights, this is world history at its best.”—Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of The World: A Family History of Humanity In How the World Made the West, Josephine Quinn poses perhaps the most significant challenge ever to the “civilizational thinking” regarding the origins of Western culture—that is, the idea that civilizations arose separately and distinctly from one another. Rather, she locates the roots of the modern West in everything from the law codes of Babylon, Assyrian irrigation, and the Phoenician art of sail to Indian literature, Arabic scholarship, and the metalworking riders of the Steppe, to name just a few examples. According to Quinn, reducing the backstory of the modern West to a narrative that focuses on Greece and Rome impoverishes our view of the past. This understanding of history would have made no sense to the ancient Greeks and Romans themselves, who understood and discussed their own connections to and borrowings from others. They consistently presented their own culture as the result of contact and exchange. Quinn builds on the writings they left behind with rich analyses of other ancient literary sources like the epic of Gilgamesh, holy texts, and newly discovered records revealing details of everyday life. A work of breathtaking scholarship, How the World Made the West also draws on the material culture of the times in art and artifacts as well as findings from the latest scientific advances in carbon dating and human genetics to thoroughly debunk the myth of the modern West as a self-made miracle. In lively prose and with bracing clarity, as well as through vivid maps and color illustrations, How the World Made the West challenges the stories the West continues to tell about itself. It redefines our understanding of the Western self and civilization in the cosmopolitan world of today.

Oil, Wine, and the Cultural Economy of Ancient Greece

Oil, Wine, and the Cultural Economy of Ancient Greece
Author: Catherine E. Pratt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 425
Release: 2021-03-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 1108835643

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Provides a diachronic account of the changing roles of surplus oil and wine in the economies of pre-classical Greek societies.

Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World

Maritime Networks in the Mycenaean World
Author: Thomas F. Tartaron
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2013-05-27
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1107067138

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In this book, Thomas F. Tartaron presents a new and original reassessment of the maritime world of the Mycenaean Greeks of the Late Bronze Age. By all accounts a seafaring people, they enjoyed maritime connections with peoples as distant as Egypt and Sicily. These long-distance relations have been celebrated and much studied; by contrast, the vibrant worlds of local maritime interaction and exploitation of the sea have been virtually ignored. Dr Tartaron argues that local maritime networks, in the form of 'coastscapes' and 'small worlds', are far more representative of the true fabric of Mycenaean life. He offers a complete template of conceptual and methodological tools for recovering small worlds and the communities that inhabited them. Combining archaeological, geoarchaeological and anthropological approaches with ancient texts and network theory, he demonstrates the application of this scheme in several case studies. This book presents new perspectives and challenges for all archaeologists with interests in maritime connectivity.

The Missing Thread

The Missing Thread
Author: Daisy Dunn
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 497
Release: 2024-07-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0593299663

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A dazzlingly ambitious history of the ancient world that places women at the center—from Cleopatra to Boudica, Sappho to Fulvia, and countless other artists, writers, leaders, and creators of history Around four thousand years ago, the mysterious Minoans sculpted statues of topless women with snakes slithering on their arms. Over one thousand years later, Sappho wrote great poems of longing and desire. For classicist Daisy Dunn, these women—whether they were simply sitting at their looms at home or participating in the highest echelons of power—were up to something much more interesting than other histories would lead us to believe. Together, these women helped to make antiquity as we know it. In this monumental work, Dunn reconceives our understanding of the ancient world by emphasizing women's roles within it. The Missing Thread never relegates women to the sidelines and is populated with well-known names such as Cleopatra and Agrippina, as well as the likes of Achaemenid consort Atossa and Olympias, a force in Macedon. Spanning three thousand years, the story moves from Minoan Crete to Mycenaean Greece, from Lesbos to Asia Minor, from the Persian Empire to the royal court of Macedonia, and concludes with Rome and its growing empire. The women of antiquity are undeniably woven throughout the fabric of history, and in The Missing Thread they finally take center stage.

Societies in Transition in Early Greece

Societies in Transition in Early Greece
Author: Alex R. Knodell
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 382
Release: 2021-05-25
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520380541

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A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. Situated at the disciplinary boundary between prehistory and history, this book presents a new synthesis of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece, from the rise and fall of Mycenaean civilization, through the "Dark Age," and up to the emergence of city-states in the Archaic period. This period saw the growth and decline of varied political systems and the development of networks that would eventually expand to nearly all shores of the Middle Sea. Alex R. Knodell argues that in order to understand how ancient Greece changed over time, one must analyze how Greek societies constituted and reconstituted themselves across multiple scales, from the local to the regional to the Mediterranean. Knodell employs innovative network and spatial analyses to understand the regional diversity and connectivity that drove the growth of early Greek polities. As a groundbreaking study of landscape, interaction, and sociopolitical change, Societies in Transition in Early Greece systematically bridges the divide between the Mycenaean period and the Archaic Greek world to shed new light on an often-overlooked period of world history.

Communication Uneven

Communication Uneven
Author: Jan Driessen
Publisher: Presses universitaires de Louvain
Total Pages: 228
Release: 2021-01-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 2390610870

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The aim of this volume is to measure acceptance of, and resistance to, outside influences within Mediterranean coastal settlements and their immediate hinterlands, with a particular focus on the processes not reflecting simple commercial routes, but taking place at an intercultural level, in situations of developed connectedness.