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The collapse and regeneration of complex society in Greece, 1500-500 BC

The collapse and regeneration of complex society in Greece, 1500-500 BC

Morris, Ian

Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics, December (2005)

Abstract

Greece between 1500 and 500 BC is one of the best known examples of the phenomenon of the regeneration of complex society after a collapse. I review 10 core dimensions of this process (urbanism, tax and rent, monuments, elite power, information- recording systems, trade, crafts, military power, scale, and standards of living), and suggest that punctuated equilibrium models accommodate the data better than gradualist interpretations.



Greece between 1500 and 500 BC is one of the best known cases of the collapse and regeneration of complex society. In the 1870s, Heinrich Schliemann showed that a Mycenaean culture had preceded Greece’s Classical civilization, and in 1890 Flinders Petrie published Mycenaean pottery from Egypt correlating the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces with the Egyptian Nineteenth Dynasty, around 1200 BC. Their work created a wholly new framework for early Greek history. After three generations of fieldwork and analysis, Anthony Snodgrass systematized a new consensus in his magisterial Dark Age of Greece: a period of sophisticated palaces (c. 2000-1200 BC) gave way to a depressed Dark Age (c. 1200- 700), only to be replaced by new and brilliant Archaic (c. 700-480) and Classical (c. 480- 323) civilizations.

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