Orientalizing Period

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In the cultural and artistic history of ancient Greece, during the later part of the 8th century BCE, and for about a century, the prevailing Geometric Style began to give way to a different sensibility, which was informed by the art of Syria and Phoenicia, the Orientalizing Period. Cultural interchange in the Aegean world was perhaps as intense as in the Late Bronze Age

The cultural background saw Assyrian advances to the Mediterranean coast, accompanied by Greek mercenaries, who were also active in the armies of Psammeticus in Egypt, and displacing Greek merchants. Phoenicians settled in Cyprus and the West, while Greeks established trading colonies in Syria (Al Mina), and in Ischia. The Greeks entered into a period of intensive borrowing and adapting of cultural features of the Semitic east. (Burkert 1992:128 et passim).

Massive imports of raw materials, including metals accompanied the transfer of craft skills into Greece, effected by the mobility of foreign craftsmen. "With bronze reliefs, textiles, seals, and other products, a whole world of eastern images was opened up which the Greeks were only too eager to adopt and adapt in the course of an "orientalizing revolution" (Burkert 1992:128); many Greek myths originated in attempts to interpret and integrate foreign icons in terms of Greek cult and practice. The Phoenician alphabet encouraged a spectacular leap in literacy, and the oral traditions of the epic in their final phase began to be transcribed into leather scrolls, and some Greek myths reflected Mesopotamian literary classics. Burkert (1992:41-88) has argued that migrating seers and healers transmitted their skills in divination and purification ritual along with elements of their mythological wisdom and has suggested direct literary Eastern influence at the beginning of Greek literature.

In Attic pottery, the distinctive style known as proto-Attic was marked by floral and animal motifs; it was the first time descernibly Greek religious and mythological themes were represented in vase painting. The bodies of men and animals were depicted in silhouette, though their heads were drawn in outline; women were drawn completely in outline.

At the other important center of this period, Corinth, the orientalizing influence can also be observed, though the tendency there was to produce smaller highly detailed vases in the so-called proto-Corinthian style which prefigured the black-figure technique.

Cultural predominance of the East soon gave way to thorough Hellenization of imported features in the Archaic Period that followed.

[edit] References

• Payne, H., Protocorinthian Vase-Painting, 1933
• Boardman, J., Early Greek Vase Painting: 11th-6th centuries BC, 1998
• Burkert, W. The Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Influence on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Age, 1992.