The Old European Civilizations

Chapter 3

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As the Neolithic revolution became more widespread and larger fixed settlements began to spring up, it became inevitable that these Old Europeans and Proto-Nordic types would start establishing formal societies. Then so called “Old European” civilizations came into being, laying much of the groundwork for the later development of Classical Greece and Rome. Although these Old European civilizations were in fact quite distinct from the latter, they are often mistakenly thought as one and the same thing.

The crucial difference is however that the Old European civilizations were created by the original continental Europeans while the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome received their impetus from Indo-European or Nordic invasions which had started around 5000 BC.

The continental Old European civilizations in the Aegean were the Cretan civilization, centered at Knossos on the island of Crete; the city state of Troy situated adjacent to the Dardanelles in Asia Minor; certain smaller city states on the Greek mainland; and the Etruscans in Italy.

Crete

The island of Crete, situated to the south of Greece, was the home to the Cretan civilization, also known as the Minoan civilization (named after Minos, in legend, the most powerful of the Cretan kings).

By the year 3000 BC Crete had contact with the budding Egyptian civilization, and many Cretan religious customs and social habits were taken directly from Egypt. Being an island state, it would be fairly logical that the Cretans would possess well-developed seafaring skills.

The Cretans were governed by a priest king who had his residence at Knossos. This palace rose several stories high and was the ultimate in luxury at the time.

The city of Knossos itself appears to have been destroyed by an earthquake – the result of the titanic volcanic eruption which destroyed the neighbouring island civilization of Santorini. However, enough artifacts have survived. Most of the walls in the palace were of painted plaster, decorated with elaborate frescoes, with the most famous being of a Cretan national sport, “bull-jumping” – where brave athletes would grab a charging bull by the horns and somersault backwards over the length of the bull’s body.

Minoan art provides fascinating insights into the nature of the society at the time – men and women dressed for the warm climate, with women bare breasted and men beardless. Ancient Cretans followed the Egyptian artistic convention of painting males with red skins and females with white skins. Flowers, plants, sea creatures and dolphins feature prominently in their art forms indicating that their society was advanced and wealthy enough to concern itself beyond just basic survival activities.

One interesting original produced by the Cretan palace of Knossos was a running water sanitation system – the first “flushing” toilet in the world.

The exact date of the collapse of the Cretan civilization is unfortunately not recorded, but it stopped functioning as a cultural unit when the island was invaded by an Indo-European Nordic tribe, the Mycenaeans, around the year 1500 BC.

In 1900, a British archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, rediscovered Knossos and found baked clay tablets with two types of writing, dating from around 2000 BC. These are called Linear A and Linear B scripts, possibly the oldest identifiable forms of European continental writing (if the “writing stone” found at the Caves of Mes d’Azil in France is discounted).

The City of Troy

Around the year 750 BC, two great epics, the Illiad and the Odyssey, were set down and attributed to the blind poet Homer. The Illiad describes the war between the Greek city states and the city of Troy, while the Odyssey tells of the adventures of an Ionian kind Odysseus, during his return journey home after the war with Troy ended.

For many years the city of Troy was thought to exist only in Homer’s poems and was associated with the famous story of the Wooden Horse. The city of Troy was, however, actually discovered in 1870 by an amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann. Instead of discovering just one city, Schliemann unearthed a total of nine cities, all built on top of one another, indicating a whole period of history about which very little is known.

The earliest city on the site dates from about 3000 BC and the various cities (called Troy I – IX) were alternatively destroyed by earthquakes, fire or war, as recounted in Homer’s poems. It is difficult to state for sure how much of the wooden horse story is true (where Greek soldiers are supposed to have infiltrated the city of Troy hidden in a trick wooden horse after unsuccessfully having besieged Troy for nearly ten years) but it is likely to have some basis in fact as Troy and many Greek City States were at war with one another around the year 1200 BC.

The last Trojan city, number IX, appears to have been a Greek and later a Roman city known as Ilium. As with Crete, the date of the exact end of Troy has also been lost with the passage of time.

The Etruscans

The Etruscans were one of the original Mediterranean and Proto-Nordic peoples living in the Italian peninsula. Originally called the Villanovans (after a place where they lived), the Etruscans appeared to have penetrated Italy from somewhere north of the Alps and seem to have had close contact with some of the Old European civilizations in the Aegean Sea, as they adopted Greek characters for writing their language.

Villanovan grave sites have revealed lots of impressive worked metal armor and personal artifacts, some dating from 1000 BC, the time when iron working first became widespread in Italy.

With the advantage provided by iron weapons, the Etruscans quickly subdued other original Mediterranean peoples in Italy, and established a state running from the North in the Po River valley to about a third of the way from the end of the Italian peninsula.

Their most notable achievement was, however, the settlement of some towns and concentrated urban areas, one of which was later to become the city state of Rome.

With the arrival of new invading Indo-European tribes – in this case the most important being the Latini – the Etruscans were absorbed into the new Roman state, with the last official Etruscan kind being expelled from Rome in 509 BC.

After a few hundred years, the assimilation process between the Etruscans and the Indo-European Latini tribe – the Romans – had reached the point where the Romans offered the Etruscans full Roman citizenship by 100 BC. By this time the Etruscan heritage had been completely taken up into the new power which was to dominate the known world in a way not seen before: the Roman Empire.

Vocabulary work

Read and memorize the following words and expressions, suggest their Russian equivalents:

Date: 2015-12-24; view: 795