From roughly 1,200 to 800 BCE, Greek city-states disintegrated in an era known as the Dark Age. When literacy reappeared it no longer took the old form of Linear B but was an entirely new script borrowed from the Phoenicians. It was not as if all Greek culture disappeared in the interim. Instead, it took oral forms, and we owe both the Odyssey and the Iliad, later transcribed, to this period.
