Multiculturalism in the Ancient Greek World

Having completed a chronological overview of the Ancient Greek world, I now want to turn to some important themes & ideas about more specific parts of Greek society that I think still have relevance to how we understand and experience the modern world. The first of these is the multiculturality of the Greek world in Antiquity, which -much like today, was increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse, with countless communities interacting in the Aegean, cementing its place as a crossroads of the world. If I had made this post 2 or 3 years ago, I’d perhaps be talking more about how the Greeks met with and encountered the world, but nowadays I find it far more interesting to think about not how the Greeks expanded or came into contact with other cultures, but about how everybody else impacted the Greek culture and the internal transformations in Aegean society brought about by cultural diversity.

As I’ve touched on in the past, I don’t think we can really talk about Hellenistic culture as being homogeneous, we see far too many local variations as the Greek city states came into contact with other indigenous cultures. We must remember that the Aegean is at the meeting point of three continents; Asia, Africa & Europe. Naturally, there were different routes that exerted major influence in the Aegean, from the Silk Road connecting it to the East, access to the mouth of the Nile connecting it to Africa and Adriatic sea connecting it to wider Europe. All of this considered, Greece really was at the centre of some major cultural, intellectual and environmental pathways that paved the way for some radical forms of exchange and connection.

Throughout Greek history, this theme of the Aegean being a connector and meeting point between great cultural exchange is well known. More than just the Greek mainland however, we must remember that the “Greek World” in actuality stretched from the southern coast of Iberia with the Straights of Gibraltar all the way to Tanais at the Don river delta and the regions beyond the Black Sea. This huge expanse meant that nothing was ever completely uniform, and culturo-ethnic identity was extremely diverse. What constituted “Greek” identity in any given period was a mixture of both indigenous developments and non-Aegean influences.

This cultural coexistence always had implications for the Greeks and their neighbours, whether beneficial in the form of mixing at multiple levels of society, to intermarriage and exchange and it had its issues in the form of colonialism and acculturation, creating 1-way unequal and hierarchical relationships. This type of interaction can be studied from the perspective of exchanging ideas, subjugation, economic trade and countless other angles that hold implications to our current society today. 

When we’re talking about the different faces of interaction between cultures in the Greek world then, we can do so through the lens of colonialism, warfare, trade, art, iconography and technology and ideas and beliefs, and we must ask ourselves whether distinguishing between these is even important to do so.

What we’re really addressing at the heart of this multicultural theme is human agency & movement. How is it that humans and the things we make or do move and leave marks on the world and others? The sheer scale of our human experience includes almost everything that we would consider part of a society. But the narratives and interpretations we have when looking to examine things inherently creates bias. If we were to look at something like traders and pirates, when is a trader a trader and not a pirate? From whose perspective are we looking at things? A lot of the time, the people trading are the same ones performing piracy, and vice versa in many contexts.

The same challenge can be applied to warfare, for example, military vs mercenary. As an example, fragment 16 from a text by Alcaeus of Mytilene around 620-580 BC refers to his brother being a Greek Mercenary all the way in Babylonia, an experience that was probably fairly common for Greek military men. Such mercenaries would not have been hired along ethnic lines. While this was somewhat typical of Greek men, we also have to contend with the wholesale movement by force of other people within a culture, such as refugees and the consequences of displacement. As mercenaries, looting would have been common as a side effect of Greek colonisation, signalling the movement of both artefacts and people in the form of Slavery. 

Oftentimes, movement in the Greek world could also have been down to simply ideas about adventure & competition. The Ionian cities in Asia Minor for example appear mythically and drive settlers to establish names for themselves. In other words, ways in which the Greeks engaged with other cultures and became multicultural themselves was not just through trade & warfare, but through things like gift exchange, intermarriage & political alliances. 

The Late Bronze Age

Returning to my favourite time period, the Late Bronze Age is a great place to examine multiculturality in the Mediterranean world because of its vast and complicated trade networks. From around 1250 BC, the LBA really gives us our first recognisable map of ancient political geography, with different reigns of different empires defining themselves territorially. The Aegean in this period is not entirely clear to us. It is likely mentioned in Hittite texts under the name Ahhiyawa, which is probably a Luwian rendering of what Homer calls the Greeks, the Acheans. The Armana letters however, between Akhenaten & Canaanite city states in the Levant make scarce mention of the Aegean, almost like it's a side project in the corner. 

What the Hittites refer to as Ahhiyawa probably was not a unified political identity. Casting our mind back to the LBA collapse, Greece at this point in time was likely comprised of localised small and independent states centred around Palatial settlements like Mycenae & Knossos

Based on pottery analysis in the Eastern Mediterranean, the Mycenaeans were clearly exporting a huge variety of different types of ceramics to different parts of the world. In Egypt we see a lot of flask type pottery like this, juglets like this seem to be more popular in Cyprus and stirrup styles appear to be more popular in the Levant. What we’re looking at here is a very mercantile way of trading, signalling potentially an export industry. The Mycenaeans are exporting different variations of pottery to different markets based on local tastes and needs. Naturally, don’t think so much about the pottery itself, but what might have been contained in them. Flask type pottery may have been more ergonomic and practical for transporting a certain kind of product like oil or wine, whereas stirrup styles could have been used for another product. So are we looking at a diversity of products being sold here?

There is a huge layer of interpretation here too. Not only are the Mycenaeans sending products back and forth based on regional variety and demand, but the reasoning for doing so can be everything from elite gift exchange to build diplomatic relations, to intermarriage, which we know is going on from other textual sources in the Eastern Mediterranean. So sometimes we aren’t thinking in terms of trade, but in trying to build relations and connections with foreign powers that will feedback and benefit them.  In general the LBA is extremely market oriented and economically savvy for the Greeks.

The other thing that Myceneans did was open a whole new territory of the world to the Eastern mediterranean by creating networks of exchange with Italy. Italy actually then went on to become the stepping stone to central and temperate Europe. Through the Mycenaeans, a connection was formed between the Old World of Europe to the Eastern Mediterranean which was mediated through Italy & the Etruscans. We see a lot of Mycenaean pottery in southern Italy, to the extent that there are now even some debates around whether a process of colonisation was going on. Not only do we see a lot of imported pottery in southern Italy, but we also see indigenous reactions to it in the form of local imitations. Some of these types are incredibly complex and designed by expert artisans, so it’s not entirely clear whether these are immigrants creating them or local, probably Etruscan or Italic artists.

Like the Eastern Mediterranean though, Italy does not react to the Mycenaean imports uniformly though. Southern Italy & Sicily clearly show preferences for certain pottery types that the other ignores, showing that regional variance and need is still present even there. There are some general overlaps, such as Kaylix ware, usually for wine, but for the most part, we are looking at high regionalism differentiated by local demand and cultural practices.

Early Iron Age

As we move into the Early Iron Age things get a little more tricky to trace evidence of foreign culture and multiculturality. A lot of those established pottery styles and traits disappear because of the LBA collapse and the waning influence of city states. While it has been common in the past to assume that it was the LBA kings alone that were driving trade, by the Early Iron Age, we can see this isn’t true. Casting our mind back to the site of Lefkandi in Euboea around 1000 BC you might remember that bronze burial krater from Cyprus that I talked about. The prestige items in the graves at Lefkandi are not from a palatial compound, and the scale is considerably reduced, but they are still clearly village level elites and communities exerting their own identity.

That cremation krater was already 150 years old before it was buried, so likely was passed down or circulated through a local family. In the cemeteries around the heroon there, we also find a large amount of Egyptian imported Faience necklaces depicting Isis and Horus, so we know these international connections are still maintained, at least at the high elite level even in the Iron Age, despite being a bit more modest.

Interestingly, according to a 2017 study by Sarah Murray on the Collapse of the Mycenaean economy that uses a low chronology, those imported materials never really disappeared. In reality, the number of imports each year is variable, but never stops completely. At the end of the LBA for example, we have an average of around 2 imported items a year coming into the mainland, which naturally decreases a little into the early iron age, but picks up again by the early geometric where we find an average of 3.4 imported items a year coming in.

Another interesting example comes from our study of textiles. Textiles are a great source of understanding how people learn & exchange, whether its in the form of patterns and motifs or just weaving styles. In each culture, people design and weave textiles in different ways, which constitutes local traditions and ways of working. Interesting work by Gleba in 2017 studied textile patterns and styles in an effort to understand regional variations in Italy & Greece and trace where generation changes in style may have come from. When examined under a microscope, we can see how certain threads were weaved together, which can indicate different traditions at play, which naturally relate to different cultures.

Sources

Gleba, M. 2017: Tracing textile cultures of Italy and Greece in the early first millennium BC. Antiquity, 91(359), 1205-1222.

Murray, S.C. 2017: The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy: Imports, Trade, and Institutions 1300–700 BCE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reinberger, K. L., Reitsema, L. J., Kyle, B., Vassallo, S., Kamenov, G., & Krigbaum, J. 2021: Isotopic evidence for geographic heterogeneity in Ancient Greek military forces. PLOS ONE, 16(5).

Greco, E. 2011: On the origins of the Western Greek poleis, Ancient West & East 10, 233-242

Burgers, G-J. 2004: Western Greeks in their regional setting: rethinking early Greek indigenous encounters in southern Italy, Ancient West and East 3: 252-82

Hall, J. 2009: Ethnicity and Cultural exchange. Raaflaub, K. A. and van Wees, H. Companion to Archaic Greece, A. Wiley. 604-17. 

Riva C. 2017: Wine production and exchange and the value of wine consumption in 6th-century-BC Etruria, in Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 30.2, 237-261.Morris S. 2007. Greeks and “Barbarians” in S.E. Alcock and R. Osborne (eds) Classical Archaeology, 383-400

Kotsonas, A. and Mokrišová, J. 2019: Mobility, Migration, and Colonisation. In I. Lemos and A. Kotsonas (eds.) A Companion to the Archaeology of Early Greece and the Mediterranean. Chapter 2.5.

Kelder, Jorrit M. (2010). "The Kingdom of Mycenae: A Great Kingdom in the Late Bronze Age Aegean". www.academia.edu. Bethesda, MD: CDL Press.

Kiriatzi, E. and Andreou, S. (2016) ‘Mycenaean and Mycenaeanising Pottery across the Mediterranean: A Multi-Scalar Approach to Technological Mobility, Transmission and Appropriation’, in E. Kiriatzi and C. Knappett (eds.) Human Mobility and Technological Transfer in the Prehistoric Mediterranean. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (British School at Athens Studies in Greek Antiquity), pp. 128–153.

Iacono, F. 2013: Westernizing Aegean of LH III C. in Sabatini, S, Alberti E: Exchange Networks and Local Transformations: Interaction and local change in Europe and the Mediterranean from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. Oxbow Books