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 In a world where the average attention span is 3 seconds, you come up with elegant and most of all accurate historical content, without any click bait or sensationalism.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!

Another banger from Cy (I am one nanosecond into the video)

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

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.

Cys channel is easily my favorite channel on UKposts.

Great video on one of my favorite topics!

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.

A really obscure period of antiquity that you illuminate; and out of which classical Greece arose! Well done cy and be safe!

I love these dives into more obscure periods of history, excellent video Cy!

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.

I've always wanted to see a video on this! Great work, your ancestors are surely proud!

Oi Ciro! Que bom receber a notificação de um vídeo seu! Eu estava com saudades!

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.

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 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.

Thank you, Cy. Very much enjoyed. ❤

Thank you, Cy. This was great, it's appreciated.

Another excellent post, thanks a bunch for sharing with us Cy Guy!

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 UKposts. Perhaps one of these days we both will be lost in Armenia. I love this channel :)

Thanks, Cy. You might be my favorite channel on UKposts 👏 👍 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. 😮

CY I am back to yourchannel. It is just that your work is really nice. And meaningful. And not biased

Thank you for your work. I thoroughly appreciate these videos.

Always love your work 🙌🏼

Appreciated. 👍

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.

És um poço de sabedoria!👏 Andava à anos à espera de deste tema! Obrigado

Well told, a few brilliant extrapolations, contained in your theory. I need to watch it again.

Fascinating. Thank you

Love your stuff and style🎉😊

Thanks for posting this

Or as professor in an online lecture Said about the man in the lefkandi tomb : “He was a high ranking person in the local citystate in that area “.

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.)

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?

Amazing as always Cy

Great work

Glad to have discovered this channel. Subscribed.

Thank you! 🫡🙏

love your vids

Excellent.

I don't think we should abandon the Dorian invasion hypothesis so quickly.

Really good points re Homer

The really important classics of my 1950s childhood have already been removed from the librarys as having been unread and so trashed.

EXCELLENT!

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 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.

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 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??

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.

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.

Thanks

hey where do you get all the cool music for your videos from? love all of your stuff btw.

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.

Hell of a lesson - the internet doing what it should teaching and training the world....

ah yeaaa

There's a really good book called "Citadel to City State" that covers this period

great

I love this channel! Subscribed

14:41 i am confused: are the relicts on the left sides some kind of swords? I have never seen those and never though that such estoc like weapons might have already in use in the ancient time

one mentions the 776 was not the first Olympic games, but the first who started to counting

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???

Love me some Cy-fi!

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.

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.

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.

❤👍👍

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?

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

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.

Always the highest quality. Thank you Cy

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 😁

Great civilizations rise and fall 🥺

Intro Musik name ? 🤍

When an eye of the ancient world blinked

What happened is later writers saw no point in copying and preserving what to them were irrelevant and unimportant documents. The same thing has happened in our own history. Only a tiny fragment of the writings of the people in the early American period has survived. Most of what is left is moldering forgotten in some rarely visited archives. Like in ancient times, the Vandals and agenda/ narrative driven book burners are happily burning the few books left. Did the late Roman era Vandals (an actual invading tribe) get a bad rap? I wasn't there so don't know :)>

@2:25 why is it a Dark Age,when there was a hardly identifiable Greek society before 1100 bce?

The powers that be like then and now really know how to dictate history!

Volcano eruption on Santorini?

👍👍👍

Perhaps there were popular revolutions that overthrew kings that brought about a more egalitarian social structure durimg this period.

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.

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.

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.

An ad showed. A ‘brother’ dressed like a dentist in this tooth product commercial cannot even say “sensitivity”. Stay away from my mouth ❤😂

Babe! New History with Cy video just dropped!!

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!

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.

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?

Isn't the imprition of the homer myths represent for the dark age greeks? Not only an attempt to create the early coherent sense of green but also exclude and limit the groups that later on reached society sofistication couldn't claim greekness due to not be mentioned in Homer texts as tribes present in the conflicts?

Ξέρω τους φίλους μου και μάλλον θα γύριζα και θα έτρεχα…

I shall indeed, as you have requested, stay tuned. like the "dark age" that succeeded the disintegration of the western Roman empire, people still went about their daily lives, doing all the things that they did before the onset of said age of a lack of illumination. it wasn't dark to them, just to us.

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

Engagement comment

Yay cy

funny how you pronounce during as "dooring"

🙂🙃🙂🙂🙃🙃🙂

Interesting that both the Greeks and the Israelis believed they are descendants of foreign inovadors, while the scientific knowledge shows they are not. 🤔

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.

U didnt even mention luwians or any other west anatolian civiziations...

Hi Cy. I think that your assessment of the Greek speaking dark age seems logical, but to be honest, I just don't believe any of it. You're imagining that the Greek speaking world was parochial and limited in a similar way to what it is today, but, the Greek language comes from Central, North or East Asia, probably even from as far as northern China (today) but these peoples were hit by a series of devastations which caused them to migrate and flee over large distances West and South and probably over an extended period of time too. The end result of that is that Europe was populated by these peoples and their language has come to be known as proto Indo European, but in fact, it was just very basic Greek characterised by its use of the case system mostly but by certain words and phrases which come from the same source. Basic Greek. Tne original migration of Greek speaking peoples, must have taken place around 5000BC , and because of this it is when they first start appearing in South Eastern Anatolia and working with the Rassunai who themeselves had migrated from Sumeria (later becoming the Etruscans) but they only reached the coasts of Anatolia in the first Greek migration, but no further. The second and more devastating migration came around 2600BC and these Indo Europeans who settled in Southern Europe are generically known as the Lacedaemonians and they brutalised even the first phase of Indo European Greek speakers, who by the time of their migration had become integrated with what has been referred to as the Minoans, but were probably peoples driven out of their central European homeland sometime before 2600BC by these Indo Europeans migrating from the East. And they escaped this violence by sailing across the sea and settling in Crete, followed by bands of marauding Lacedaemonians whoi also settled there. The invasion of the Dorians was a secondary migrationn of Indo Europeans who had settled in Central, Eastern Europe and the Balkans displacing the peoples who were living there (see above). It's possible that they were Finnish/Hungarian peoples because some elements of Linear A is not Greek but a basic Hungarian language based upon the words used for basic foods, items and actions. However, these Dorian Greeks are more closely identified with the northern Europeans Indo Europeans through weaponry, dress and habits since they were the same peoples as the Lacedaemonians. Consequently, you can imagine that it would have been a full on devastating war for a long time for dominance. Let's not forget the biggest volcanic eruption in history which would have destroyed evcerything and polluted the land for hundreds of years, or more. The violence and brutality of all Lacedaemonians is grossly underestimated, but this aggression seems to have been motivated by some historic trauma in the East Asian lands from whence they came. It's suggested that their women folk were thought to be so polluted by rape and human annexation (probably by giants) that they were abandoned in search of new lands and new women, hence the different racial elements of Indo Europeans. It has always been stated that Greek is not a nationality, but a culture only, and that culture was thought to be that sense of civilisation which builds bigger and better things quickly and efficiently and creates wealth and more culture, partly because without women, you are motivated to do everything extremely rapidly in order to survive, hence the violence and aggression. The Lacedaemonian colonies across the Mediterranean Sea and all the way into the Atlantic and to the South of France only tells a part of the Greek story. Lacedaemonian colonies almost filled Italy, but after the Thera devastation ,colonies have been found as far north as Southern Switzerland and there would have been more Greek speakers in Italy than anywhere else. Over time, with the new alphabet introduced by the youngest son of Odysseus of Ithacca, LATINOS, the language fixed and diversified, as all languages do when you use a different alphabet and adopt new words and phrases based upon local experience and dialect. Anyway, Cy, you can see that Greece never existed as a single nation until 1907, when the Russians and the Austrians decided that a small group of Greek speakers in what is now Greece, should constitute the location of that entire ethnicity, completely ignoring the presence of millions of other Greek speakers scattered around the Roman World in Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Southern Italy, Asia Minor, the Levant in North Africa and even further afield in Afghanistan. I'll leave it like that for the time being, because there's so much more to be uncovered which I don't know about and can't conceive of, but the Greeks have educated the whole world with their culture and civilisation and have been known by a number of names over the years and are called different names by different peoples. But THEY are the basic Indo Europeans known by yet another name.

we need a dark age so that we can get rid of all of the ugly stuff going on in the west and rebuild