Bro, YOU are like a candle in the night which is social media. In a world where the average attention span is 3 seconds, you come up with elegant and most of all accurate historical content, without any click bait or sensationalism. Keep doing what you're doing Cy, there are many of us who truly appreciate your labour!
Thanks so much for the feedback, comments like this make my day and motivate me to put out more stuff you all! Will do my best to continue and improve when I can. Thanks so much for watching, really appreciate it!
The influence of Homer in modern culture is still felt; even in modern films, which usually contain one of two types of hero; the lone crazed avenger whose best buddy gets it, so he heads off for the final showdown, and the lovable scoundrel who outwits his foes and goes back home to the girl he left behind him.
At the beginning of the story a prince steals away a wife of a other king. That iniciates a war. At the end a big city burns down. Does it looks familiar, "Game of Thrones" fans?
I am absolutely fascinated by the Minoan, Aegean, Greek and Levant Bronze Age and the so called "Dark Age" that came after it. The "Sea Peoples", the first adoption and then rapid spread of the alphabet and the increased use of iron. The Ancient Greek and other people's writing down of their "myths" (which up to that time were embellished verbal accounts of Bronze Age history really) flowered eg Homer's Iliad and Odysee, the Old Testament etc. Amazing. I hope that one day someone (or AI) will be able to translate Linear A.
You must be familiar with the work of Eric Cline. Was the collapse of the Cretan civilization partly due to a lack of structural and ship-building timber? Thera hurt, but did not kill the Minoans. Linear A would be cool. A lot can be learned from goods lists. Who knows? Maybe stories.
You and me both. Linear A, the Harappan and other scripts being deciphered would be amazing! I'm hopeful that AI can help, though I think we still need the human element in translation. They have started translating some cuneiform documents with AI and while it does help, it cannot translate, let's say, the human emotions or richness of the language, at least not yet. The few Sumerian and Akkadian AI translations I've read make errors due to not understanding the context (the same signs in both can have very different meanings based on the context) and are rather robotic. Hopefully this can be improved. Anyway thanks so much for watching, really appreciate it and stay tuned for more!
Whoever the guy was who re-invented a Greek writing system must have been a genuis, a true Greek hero. Like a Galileo or Issac Newton type. And to think...we have no idea who he (or she) was
So much would-be lost things only survive because of individual weirdos with the right combination of luck, skill, and foresight to preserve it. Historical records, pieces of media, computer programs, etc.
I presume you mean "adapted from Phoenician writing"? Also doubtful that it was a single person, no more than *one* clever Phoenician came up with their writing system. They all grew organically and evolved from, well, accounting symbols, really. Like, famously, the letter A (or alpha) which came from the symbol for a cow or ox (a bovine head).
I'm reading on ancient Greece now. One of the things I find most curious is how, despite the dark age of Greece suggesting much of the population's social order being broken and lost in time somehow, Greece was able to come back and find its way once more, and stronger and more sophisticated even after the dark age. The city states, politics, art, culture, was in a way just biding its time to come back. The classical age is what most people think of when they think Greece, but the politics and city-state styles of democracy started thousands of years prior. It's like the people of Greece just knew they had something worth holding onto, and so the social structures were simply lying dormant in the dark age.
The hypothesis of the "Dorian invasion" comes with the question of what an invasion is. It could be a whole people migrating in and displacing, slaughtering or admixing with the former inhabitants, or it could be an army taking control of the existing structures and replacing the ruling/taxing class while leaving the food producing populace as it was but altering the system that had made former monumental constructions possible. It seems similar to the rule of former parts of the Roman empire by the elite of Germanic tribes. The evolution of the "basileus" function from a civil servant to a king or nobleman fits such a narrative too.
No ancient Greeks historians never wrote about an "Dorian invasion". Everyone is talking about "comeback". Let's not forget the eruption of the Thira-Santorini volcano and the devastation it caused. The eruption is chronologically synchronous with the destruction of the Mycenaean settlements. We also need geological knowledge and not only archaeological knowledge to understand the disaster. Some left because it was impossible to cultivate and live off the land and returned. The eruption of the Krakatoa volcano gives us an idea of the magnitude of the disaster. The Santorini eruption was three times more powerful.
Great work Cy, congratulations, this is not an obvious topic of Greek history and you clearly nailed it. For anybody who is interested: overlooking my village (Galaxidion, Central Greece) is a newbuilt christian church surrounded by a wall of the geometric era, of an oval shape. It can be clearly seen in Google Maps or Google Earth. The coordinates are 38.36657, 22.36085.
Not as bad as many thought? I hear this often now, but when you lose 3/4 of your entire population, I would say it was pretty bad. A huge mystery to be sure.
I think that the loss of population is due to immigration for other places more promising and fertile...Consider that Greece is an 80% mountainous country with small valleys between...
@@ΕυαγγελοςΣωτηροπουλος-λ6βand yet the population severely contracted everywhere in the Med and Middle East. If you assume that all of these people who vanished packed up and immigrated elsewhere, we’d have evidence for that. However the only evidence we have implies a massive die off.
I think that's a good point...I believe the population decline was rather gradual over a few generations which makes me think that it wasn't necessarily due to violence, disease or famine, more likely lower birthrates, higher infant mortality and emigration abroad. Just my thoughts, thanks for watching!
Your appreciation of the art and architecture really shines through. The scope and quality of your artifact images can not be found elsewhere online and you give us information on each object you show. What it is, where it was found and where it is now. You have done prodigious research and this subscriber appreciates it greatly.
Very interesting. It seems to me that the start of the Greek dark age was very cataclysmic; the end of Mycenaean civilisation, writing and at least one strata of society. Many elements of classical Roman civilisation also survived the European dark ages but no one disputes that it was a catastrophic collapse of civilisation. I guess the distinction is between merely cataclysmic and total permanent destruction.
@jerrycornelis5p86 There WAS a cataclysm that has induced the end of the bronze age, migrations of populations, political anarchy in nearly all states and cultural extinction due to the interruption of commercial links around the Mediterranean : all these changes and the dark age was due to the explosion of one volcano ( probably Thera) with destruction of structures, followed by darkness, cold ,arrest of vegetal growth, famine, migration of entire populations and extinction of cultures in the whole sud mediterranean bassin , Syria, Mesopotamia, Indus civilisation, Egypt, Grece, Italy... The explosion was between 6500 and 1200 ± 800 BC. No trace of an other volcano than Thera has been found. cf The Bronze Age Collaps.
21:10 Well, what would be the frame of reference? Dark Age does not mean that everyone returned to living cave dwelling hunter-gatherers. It describes a reduction in documentation and a decline in complexity regarding the society. And I would argue that the disappearance of 3/4 of your population and the abandonment of most old centers of power, speaks for a major upheaval. (By the way, the same is true for the Dark Ages between the fall of the Roman Empire and the medieval time; not everyone perished, not everything was lost, but it still was a rather chaotic time.)
Really it was remarkable and informative work about the Dark Age of Helen's ( ancient Greek 🇬🇷 civilization) shared by an amazing ( history with Cy) channel.
High praise to you Cy. 400 years on a text book page one digests in a gulp. You help make it real. Your channel is sooooo good. Thank you for all the work you do...I would love to stumble upon you some year hence, somewhere in Anatolia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran...my good man, I stumbled upon you on RU-vid. Perhaps one of these days we both will be lost in Armenia. I love this channel :)
Thanks so much for the kind words and so happy that you are enjoying the content! One day I will visit Armenia, hopefully in 2025 or early 2026. There's a lot I want to see there and several museums I'd like to visit. Thanks for watching, really appreciate it!
Thank you so much for this video. Not enough is written for the public about the dark age of Greece. I think I have learned something that helps me understand even the collapse itself. Given that only a very small number of people were living in these former cities, where presumably there had been good agricultural land,, and lacking evidence of an extreme change in climate. I'm glad to give more credence to the volcanic eruption idea.
Thanks, Cy. You might be my favorite channel on RU-vid 👏 👍 You said the dark age probably wasn't as dark as once assumed, but I dunno. I'm sure it was relatively ok after things eventually settled down, but you said the population was reduced by 2/3rds? By Odin's eye patch! If our population was reduced 2/3rds..it would be dark times, indeed. 😮
Reduction of population might be gradual and can indicate that people are having less children instead of more people dying. Does not necessarily mean reduction through violent means. As he said, society produced less food, meaning people were less inclined to try having as many children as they had, let's say 2 generations ago, since they would not be able to sustain such large households.
Thanks, I'm honored! Yeah the term "Dark Age" is more due to our lack of knowledge about the period than anything else. Hmmm... peaceful, gradual population decline may not have been a bad thing because a few centuries later, Greece became so overpopulated that many emigrated to other parts of the Mediterranean in search of new plots of land to settle and farm. It was definite a fascinating time for sure. Thanks again for watching, really appreciate it and stay tuned for more!
After watching your new video on Archaic period Greece, I decided to come back to this one. Dark ages are seldom as complete as they initially appear. Having said that, I do hope we manage to translate Linear A one day! Thank you for yet another excellent video! God be with you out there, everybody. ✝️ :)
This is some of the most obscure stuff to try and cover, and your animations, maps, and just overall visualization of what is, by nature, and obscure and hard to visualize period, was really excellent. Another fabulous video, thank you so much for what you do, I think it’s so important that this fascinating content be available for curious minds, and the production value is just ✨👌🏽❤️😊
Thanks so much for the feedback, really appreciate it and I'm so glad that the rather simple animations and maps were helpful. They're a bit minimalist, but I do my best to make them as accurate as possible. More Greek history coming up end of this month or beginning of next, stay tuned and thanks for watching!
@@HistorywithCy Keep it up, my man!! I genuinely consider what you’re doing as a service to mankind, making this history accessible and at least as understandable as one can understand giant gaps in recorded history; you provide the right amount of disclaimers, citations, and you are transparent when you wander into personal speculation. This is so valuable to have available, so thank you again and hope you are having an awesome day!
One of my favorite things about historians and their disagreements is that almost always, there is a big popular group who tries to slander the past people saying they didnt know nothing and that there was no "blank". Then a few years go by and unequivocal proof shows up that says the ancient people knew what they were talking about. Look at how people for 1000+ years were convinced there was no troy until someone listened to what the ancient text said and then troy was found that year. Its almost like we are less intelligent than we want to pretend, and that the ancient people were smarter than we give them credit for
This makes me think of the time periods after mass extinctions where I used to think of life as being devastated and struggling, where in reality a lot of it was starting to thrive in new ways to fill all the newly empty niches.
I took a course from the late Walter Ong, who maintained that the invention of the vowel (18:40 ff.) was one of the greatest inventions in history simply because it made texts easier to understand. Hebrew and Arabic didn’t use them, which is why much of the Koran is nearly incomprehensible.
I did not know about the Ionian migration or that the Greek mainland was so depopulated at that time. It's sad that there are virtually no Greeks left in Anatolia when it contributed so much to their culture
@@HistorywithCy Indeed. Such content is both informative and always pleasure to learn something new or just refresh the existing knowledge. And always relaxing in the evening, after the work. Thank You and sincere regards.
"Doroi" was also an ancient Greek word for "Serfs". Assuming a volcanic eruption at about 1050BC, in Iceland was responsible for several years of bad yields in the crops all across the mediterranean, an outright rebellion to the Achean kings, which also doubled as sacerdotes (Agamemenon personally sacrificed his daughter to set sail to Troy) and migration with the Sea People of many form the warrior caste, opened the way for an uprising from below. Vengeans could also explain the determination of the Lakcedaemons to subjugate the Messenians living around Pylos, another of the great palaces in the Peloponnese area with Tirynth and Mycenae, if the two populations fought on different sides. It was not heard before (or after) of Greeks enslaving other Greeks, meaning something deep was running between the two factions.
The oldest oracle and sanctuary of ancient Greece was that of Dodoni. It was respected and visited from all over Greece. This sanctuary dates from the 8th century BC. and surely its beginnings are in the dark ages. Because it refers to the worship of Zeus we can say that it is related to the first signs of worship of the twelve gods.
The European Dark Age was also a characterized as such out of our ignorance. It was much more dynamic and cultured than it was known to be in the past.
Very interesting video, as very few information can be found about this topic. How about another Video about the Greek dark age in relation to the whole European / Mediterranian situation of the same time period?
i think it's become fashionable to deny 'dark age' as a concept. i can imagine some future historian after a nuclear holocaust knocks us back into the 15th century claiming there was no true dark age and it wasn't as bad as all that 😋
The idea that we are not necessarily progressing forwards at all times, and that we have actually regressed almost as many times as we’ve progressed, is scary to some people and perceived by some as a threat to social order and stability.
@@cmt6997 True, in the 21st century the technology has progressed, but the society and morality has actually regressed comparing to the late 19th/early 20th century.
@@konstantinrebrov675massively agreed. Social layers have been stripped out like there’s no tomorrow over the course of the twentieth century and early 21st, to the point there’s almost nothing left
@@catholicconvert2119 Individualism has created atomization of society, the person VS the government. All social layers have been replaced with beurocracy, government or private owned. There should be families, tribes, villages, regional unions in between the individual and the government. The folk must be owners of schools, hospitals, farms, food facilities, police, construction, utilities. There should be tribal and national owned all facilities, instead of beurocratic, meaning state and private owned. Why in the past architecture used to be so beautiful because they were built by the folk, that's why it's called folk architecture, like traditional Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Scandinavian buildings.
I agree, some of Greek societies and famous people back then stated there was a non Greek first civilisation before the Greeks arrived and they were the Pelasgians
You describe early Greek rule was done with Chieftains. Rome, too, was ruled by Kings. Then by 400 BC -- several Greek City states are Republics or Democracies. Rome is a Republic. Carthage is a Republic. WTF was going on?? Why the move towards democratic or at least oligarchic governments?? I always found it interesting that the two powers of the Mediterranean, Rome & Carthage, were both Republics. When reading about the 2nd Punic War it is humorous how both Scipio Africanus and Hannibal were subverted by their Senates. Both had to deal with political rivals back home. Both were accused of committing crimes of some kind against their states. For instance, Carthage refused aid to Hannibal in Italy. After Scipio won the honor of going to Carthage for final victory, his enemies saddled him with the shamed legions of loss at Cannae. How can that not be interesting???
I need to watch the Greek playlist. I tried reading Herodotus twice and couldn't get into it but I got through Josephus alright. I know what it is, I've watched all of Cy's mesopotamian playlist and it made the book easier to get into. Thx for reading all the books and then making videos. I never could have done it in that order.
I've started reading "The History of the Persian War" but haven't gotten past the story about the King of Sardis who love his wife so much that he insisted that his best friend and body-guard hide in the King's bed-chamber so he could see the King's wife naked. Things did not turn out so well for the King of Sardis. His wife was rather pissed.
It would be quite interesting if you could make a video dedicated to a trial of interpetation of the homeric poems. I mean, trying to link them to historic events or periods. The poems themselves reveal some things, like Nestor refering to the chariots being used in battle, but not recalling how. Its pretty interesting since, as you mention, the poems helped to create the sense of Panhellenism.
Omg I’m not early. But still early for me. Love this! You doing basically history channel retrograde. You know b4 the THEORIES! @Miniminuteman just did an amazing talk at a university in Virginia. Keep bringing the records to light
It sort of makes sense that when you have so many Greek leaders and troops fighting in Troy for so long, turmoil arises back in Greece. And upon the return of the troops to Greece more turmoil....Those guys were gone for a very long time and folks back home would have evolved in separate ways perhaps. Maybe they did not have much of an idea what to expect from the war far away anyway...or even heard much about it. Their internet and news media were offline at the time 😁
The discontinuities in Greek history is fascinating. How can the Classical Greeks know so little about their Bronze Age ancestors? How could the Greeks forget writing their unique Linear A system? How can a lowly title such as Basileus (butler) come to overall Wanax (king) ?? Why didn’t the Greeks keep better historical records like the ancient Chinese who display more continuity??
The reason is that greeks did not exist at that time.The forced hellenisation of history is still in progress leading to numerous hypothesis and speculations but not to the truth.I find your comment very mindful.Greetings!
Really interesting period. I have been researching the late Bronze Age and Dark Age period for a few years now. Evidence points to a climate change event linked to a change in Atlantic weather patterns. It lowered temperatures, reduced regional rainfall in several regions of the northern hemisphere and created 'aridification' events in lower latitudes. This shows up as lower average temperatures in Northern Europe and Western Siberia and drought conditions in Central Asia, the Near East and the Mediterranean. The effects probably built gradually at first before a collapse of substance farming occurred. Central Asia and Indus Valley also suffered from shifts in weather systems. The collaspe of the BMAC and the IVC cultures probably occurred due to reductions in average rainfall levels over a couple of hundred years. If you look at the climate patterns of the whole Bronze Age you can see that regional cultural collaspes and the fall of empires linked to century long reductions of average rainfall levels. The climate change in the Mediterranean and Near East was powerful enough to change to types of plants that remained could exist in the region. Prior to the climate event the region could support many species currently found to the north of the the Near East and Med. The types of flora and fauna we see in the region today are likely the result of the late Bronze Age climate change. Earlier than this the region was on average wetter and cooler. Taking a long view the climate changes that occurred during the Bronze Age could be linked to a general trend after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). Not sure of the reasons but it could be linked to long term fluctuations and cycles in the temperature of the sun and perhaps even subtle changes or cycles in the Earth's orbit caused by Jupiter and other planets or even our systems interaction with the whole Milky Way Galaxy.
Surely the same sort of thing happened to the western Roman empire after the fall of Rome and transference of the capital to the East. And perhaps for the same reasons - invasions by outsiders being one of them and these outsiders didn't have the know how to continue with the standards of the previous culture. Then there may have been other factors too like climatic changes and natural disasters.
There's no society stays at the top of its game forever. To survive it sometimes has to downsize, get lean and mean. Maybe a lesson for us in the present.
Haha sounds something like what Thanos would say! I'm kidding, but yes I think since the decline was over a few generations, it may have just been people having less children overall and emigrating abroad and less due to disease, famine or something similar. Just my thoughts, thanks for watching!
I appreciate the sober approach of these videos. Even some actual academics are reticent to out and out say that Homer is myth when it clearly is. Maybe it is myth based more or less loosely on something depending on the changes within the vagaries of time, but it is clearly not a historical document in any way.
Is there any indication of disease striking the region that led to the dark ages? It seems that if there was a large drop in population, disease might've been a factor.
They should call it the Dork Age and the Doric Invasion. The people didnt read and write because it was dark and they couldnt see but Homer was blind so he didnt know it was dark
When Hephaestus crafted a shield for Achilles he presented several scenes. Could these scenes be vignettes of life at the time of Homer? The development of the Polis?
You see this in many cultures. We may be seeing it in Western culture, now. There are several factors that could create such dark ages: plague, war, famine, political disputes within a nation... Have civil wars in people that used to be unified could result in a scattering of people fearful of one another. They could be overwhelmed by nomadic people's not native to the area and disappear with little evidence of their passing.
Did many Myceneans de camp and leave with the Sea Peoples abroad? Why did the Greeks adopt a Phoenecian script? Unless Greek descendents of Levantine based Sea Peoples went back home.
I'm pretty sure Greece relied upon Egyptian food imports to maintain its population long before the Dorian invasion or the Mycenaean collapse. So the collapse of trade networks after the see people invasions is a pretty obvious cause of the depopulation of Greece. I thought this ancient Greek reliance upon trade networks to feed its population was well known, to be honest.
Personally I think, just as with the British 'Dark Ages' which weren't actually as 'dark' as portrayed, these times for the Greeks should probably more accurately be called the 'POOR Ages'. As it strikes me that it is actually the supply of MONEY which dried up (for whatever reason), forcing destitution, hardship and famine on the once proud Mycenaean societies. In Britain, it was almost certainly the curtailment of coinage from the Western Roman Empire which impoverished the nation, after it's abandonment by the empire around 410. Surely there is some correlation here?
15:55 "geometric period", nah, this is the Egyptian period. Another documentary called how Art made the World shows how Egyptian influence was why Statues started being built after first contact with Egyptians was established and Greeks settled there, not to mention the Mycenians clearly have Egyptian influences of their own. Furthermore, the deciphered Linear B texts shows that this was an Ealy Middle Eastern group, this is well backed by Genetics considering the so called 'Near Eastern Farmer' migrations in antiquity.
The latest scholarship I'm aware of calculates the collapse to 1176 BCE. Or at least that's when the societal system collapses became systemic and irreversible.
The Phoenician alphabet is part of Hellenism and therefore not adapted, but actually brought back from a place founded by Phoenix (Φοίνιξ), who was after all also a Greek. Nice video and very precise besides the fact that's mentioned above. Thank you!
