Contact with Eastern Mediterranean Civilizations
The participation of Greeks in international trade and in colonization increased their
contact with the peoples of Anatolia, Egypt, and the Near East. They admired and envied
these older civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean for their wealth, such as the
gold of the Phrygian kingdom of
Midas1, and their cultural accomplishments, such as the lively pictures of animals on
Near Eastern ceramics, the magnificent temples of Egypt, and the alphabets of the
Phoenician cities. During the early Dark Age, Greek artists had stopped portraying
people or other living creatures in their designs. The pictures they saw on pottery
imported from the Near East in the late Dark Age and early Archaic Age influenced them
to begin once again to depict figures in their paintings on pots. The style of Near
Eastern reliefs and free-standing sculptures also inspired creative imitation in Greek
art of the period. When the improving economy of the later Archaic Age allowed Greeks to
revive monumental architecture in stone, temples for the worship of the gods emulating
Egyptian architectural designs represented the most prominent examples of this new trend
in erecting large, expensive buildings. The Greeks began to mint coins in the sixth
century B.C., a technology they learned from the Lydians,
who invented coinage in
the seventh century2. Long after this innovation, however, much economic exchange continued to be
made through barter, especially in the Near East. Highly monetized economies took
centuries to develop.
Knowledge of writing was the most dramatic contribution of the ancient Near East to
Greece as it emerged from its Dark Age. The Greeks probably originally learned the
alphabet from the Phoenicians3 to use it for record keeping in business and trade, as the Phoenicians did so
well, but they soon started to employ it to record literature such as Homeric poetry.
Since the ability to read and write remained unnecessary for most purposes in the
predominately agricultural economy of archaic Greece and there were no schools, few
people at first learned the new technology of letters.