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Statues from Ancient Greece before Troy WarClues about ancient Cycladic civilization |
By Stefan Anitei, Science Editor
2nd of January 2007, 08:38 GMT
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Ancient Greeks gave birth to the most magnificent ancient European civilization, but like most modern Europeans, they were late migrants of Indo-European roots in the current Greece.
Before them, 4500 years ago, a sophisticated pre-Indo-European civilization, speaking a language perhaps related to modern Basque, inhabited Greece.
They had no written language, so mysteries about them persist.
Now, Keros, a tiny rocky barren islet from the Cyclades islands, could explain us something about the mysterious Cycladic people.
They formed a network of small, sometimes fortified farming and fishing settlements that traded with mainland Greece, Crete and Asia Minor.
They left behind the elegant figurines: mostly naked, elongated figures with arms folded under their chests.
This culture flourished in 3200-2000 B.C., then was absorbed by Crete and Mycenaean Greece.
More than half of all documented Cycladic figurines worldwide were found on Keros.
A recent Greek-British dug has found a cache of prehistoric statues,
all deliberately broken, that may shed some light on the pre-Greek civilization.
The white marble shards were jumbled close together like a pile of bleached bones.
If the artwork was religious, the island must have been an important religious site.
"What we do have clearly is what must be recognized as the earliest regional ritual center in the Aegean," said Colin Renfrew, excavation leader.
Close by is the sacred islet of Delos, the birthplace of ancient Apollo, god of music and light, but the Keros discoveries are 1,500 years older than the beginning of Apollo's cult on Delos.
The Cycladic culture did not show signs of worshipping the Indo-European Greek gods of Mount Olympus, who first appeared with the Greeks in the 2nd millennium B.C., but the pre-Greek religion is still unknown as no sanctuaries older than 2000 B.C. have been dug.
Some experts think the islanders probably had a fertility cult tied to the mother-goddess of Neolithic times, found throughout all pre-Indo-European Europe, whose worship entered in the Greco-Roman pantheon as Gaia, as many of the Cycladic statues depict pregnant women.
All the figurines seem to have been deliberately smashed around 2500 B.C.
"We've got hundreds of marble bowl fragments and many dozens of figurine fragments, which don't seem to fit together," said Renfrew, an emeritus professor of archaeology at Cambridge University and former director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
"You have a head here, a single foot here, a torso there, some thighs here - and all very deliberately broken. Pieces have been deliberately broken again into small pieces."
Some similar broken figurines are known from private collections formed after looting.
For the first time, scientists can now try to piece a story together from the subtle clues that looters destroyed.
The new discoveries reject the idea that the artifacts came from cemeteries: no human bones were found; or were broken by modern vandals.
"We can say that the breakages are definitely old," Renfrew said.
"(The figurines) weren't smashed there because (then) you'd find the bits together. And there's differential weathering, which suggests that not only were they broken elsewhere and brought there, but some of them became weathered elsewhere."
The figurines may have come from sanctuaries throughout the Cyclades and pottery finds point the place could have attracted worshippers from mainland Greece.
Only 40 % of 1,400 figurines are of known origin, since looters destroyed evidence of the rest.
"Maybe at some point in some life cycle, the figurines were ritually smashed and taken to Keros in some ceremony," he said.
The purpose of the figurines, which were painted in bright colors and highly prized in the early Bronze Age Cyclades, is still unknown: were they depicting gods or venerated ancestors, served as replacements for human sacrifice, or were just grave goods, even children's toys?
"So there's a lot we have yet to learn," said Renfrew.
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| Comment #1 by: adnan on 23 Feb 2008, 14:19 GMT |  reply to this comment | what is this story about.about the Greeks and Troys battle.what does Illiad and the Oddessy. I want every information about the Greeks and Troys battle,the two poems of Illiad and the Oddessy. |
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