Oliver Dickinson

Oliver Dickinson, emeritus of the University of Durham (UK) knows what he is writing about, he has numerous publications to his name on Bronze Age Greece, especially the Minoan and Mycenaean periods. In this book he mainly looks at the 'Dark Age' that followed the Bronze Age, from the 12th to the 8th century BCE. For once, that derogatory term (Dark Age) is justified, he writes: it seems as if hardly anything of importance happened in Greece and the Aegean during those 4 centuries, show more especially compared to previous and subsequent periods.
Dickinson delves quite deeply into the many debates that have been and are still being held about this interim period. One of the most thorny is the one from the beginning: the collapse of Mycenaean culture in the 13th and 12th centuries BCE. A very critical Dickinson systematically debunks the various theses (natural disasters, Dorian raids, raids by Sea Peoples). His own suggestion is that internal unrest in the Mycenaean world was the decisive factor, exacerbated by other factors, the most important of which is the serious crisis in the Eastern Mediterranean basin (Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt). But Dickinson emphasizes again and again how little unambiguous source material there is, and therefore how speculative all theses remain. It is a warning that many of his colleagues would do well to heed.
Another additional, important pointer from Dickinson: little or no continuity can be established between Archaic Greece (from the 8th century BCE) and Mycenaean times. The author of the Homeric Epics may refer to that (Mycenaean) heroic age, but the image we get in the Iliad and the Odyssey is an 8th century creation, based on what was thought to have been that heroic age. show less