Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott

The dark age of Greece lasted roughly from 1,100 to 700 BCE. Many of the palatial centers were abandoned and often physically destroyed and burned; trade was vastly diminished, and writing in the Linear B script disappeared. The causes suggested are multiple and unverified: a Dorian invasion, invasion by mysterious “sea peoples” of the Mediterranean, drought, and perhaps disease. In terms of the culture it is seen as a dark age before the subsequent glories of Greece’s Classical Age. But the oral epics of the Odyssey and the Iliad, as we have noted, date from precisely this dark age of Greece and were only later transcribed in the form in which we have come to know them.