Prehistory and the Minoan-Mycenaean Age

The Neolithic and Early Bronze Age

The measurement of epochs from the eighth century BC onwards is made in centuries or even decades, but before this lie four dark centuries and then some eight centuries of Bronze Age high civilization. And another thousend years to the Early Bronze Age, and the Neolithic extends over more than three millenia. The Upper Palaeolithic, which then spans more than 25,000 years; there are indications of religious continuity stretching from the Lower Palaeolithic.

Pottery shards can be collected and identified. The period following the discovery of ceramics, is was this which has been determined the demarcation and chronology of the individual cultures. The modes of behavior, to say nothing of the ideas, of early man can be comprhended only indirectly. There is increasing wariness of over-hasty interpretation: It is no longer acceptable to call everything that is not understood religious or ritual, and to explain it by means of some tenuously drawn analogy.

Many of the elements of religion such as processions and dances, garlands and masks, sacraments and ritual, may leave behind not the slightest rmaining trace. Occasionally, early pictorial art may help, but this brings its own problems of interpretation.

Another path into prehistory is language itself. Greek belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, and the scholarly recunstruction of 'Proto-Indo-European' postulates the existence of an Indo-European people in the fourth or third Milennium. But, the problem which this presents, of establishing an unequivocal relationship between the results of linguistic research and the findings of archeology, seems quite insoluble: Neither the Indo-European homeland, nor the migration of the Indo-European Greeks into Greece, nor even the very much laterhistorically attested Dorian Migration can be identified conclusively on the basis of excavation finds, ceramics, or burial forms.