Customer Reviews

Early Greece: Second Edition

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On the whole Oswyn Murray's book is a superb treatment of Early Greece. In sixteen chapters with titles such as "Myth, History, and Archaeology," "The Orientalizing Period," "Colonization," "Tyranny," and "The Coming of the Persians," Murray touches on all the salient aspects of early Greek history. Using the principal Greek sources of Homer, Hesiod, Herodotus, and Thucydides, combined with Near Eastern sources (Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and the Hebrew Bible) and the wealth of modern archaeological knowledge, Murray is able to glean a great deal of information about early Greece and present it in a conservative, plausible narrative.
One of the delights of the study of ancient Greece is finding corroboration (or correction) of the written historical and literary sources in new archaeological and manuscript discoveries, and Murray's book is replete with fascinating examples. Inscriptions and other "hard evidence" must always be given proper weight in any modern account of ancient history.
Of course the written sources are quite limited for sub-Mycenaean, Dark Age, and Geometric Greece, but through a judicious use of Homer and archaeology, Murray is able to shed some light on these formative years. Employing the rich archaeological finds at Lefkandi on the western coast of the island of Euboea, Murray is able to demonstrate continuity of habitation from the Mycenaean to the Geometric periods (1200-ca. 700 B.C.), and draw parallels to the warrior chieftan burials of such societies as the Scythians, Vikings, Mongols, and indeed the Mycenaeans themselves (e.g., H. Schliemann's excavations).
The excavations of the Greek emporion (trading post) at Al Mina at the mouth of the Orontes River on the north Syrian coast demonstrate an important Greek presence in the Near East since at least 800 B.C. The "Orientalizing" influence of the Near East on Greek culture was fundamental, and can be seen in Greek art (especially vase painting), technology (iron smelting), and the adoption of the alphabet (from the Phoenicians, but with the revolutionary Greek innovation of written vowels).
Murray's section on the early Greek economy is excellent, and offers a welcome corrective to Moses Finley's view that the ancients were incapable of sophisticated economic conceptualization. Murray shows that early Greece had a complex, diversified economy, with areas producing wine and olives as well as wheat and barley; animal husbandry producing meat and milk, and also wool and leather; manufacturing of cloth, metalwork, stonecutting, vases, and charcoal. Many of these products were produced for export, both locally and internationally, and thus a sophisticated trading network is assumed. Of course, anybody with even a glancing knowledge of ancient Greek importation of grain from south Russia and Egypt, with the attendant insurance contracts and impressive logistics such activity entails, can tell the Greeks were economically advanced.
The Greeks also had an important trading emporion at Naucratis in the Nile Delta. The Greeks paid for Egyptian grain with silver, and the Egyptian rulers then used the silver to hire Greek mercenaries, with their superior hoplite battle tactics. Anyone who has read Herodotus can readily see how the Greeks were awed by Egypt and its great antiquity. Here Murray offers a valuable observation: "The Greeks themselves were enormously impressed with Egypt, its great antiquity, its highly stratified society, its powerful religion and its massive monuments: they naively confused what was earlier than their own civilization with its possible origins. They attributed primacy to Egyptian gods over Greek ones, they ascribed to the Egyptians the origins of writing and most of the arts, and they asserted that many Greek thinkers had visited Egypt (for instance Homer, Lykourgos, Solon, Thales and Pythagoras), and taken their ideas from there. In fact, in contrast to the Greek debt to the East (of which the Greeks were almost totally unaware), archaic Greek culture owed very little to Egypt; the basic reason for this is of course that Egyptian influence was not exerted until Greek culture was already formed. It is in art that the influence was strongest (pg. 235-6)." And indeed, in art the significant Egyptian influence is readily apparent in such Greek forms as the stance, proportion, and general style of the early Kouros sculptures (large statues of standing young nude males often used in funerary and votive contexts) and monumental stone temple architecture.
In terms of political history, Murray shows the importance of the development of the hoplite citizen warrior class in the formation of the archaic Spartan constitution. In Athens, the "lawgiver" Solon in the early 6th c. helped break the power the landed aristocrats, and Kleisthenes in the late 6th. c. helped bring about the fall of the tyrants, and aristocratic families such as the Peisistratidai and the Alkmeonidai. There has never, before or since, been a system as rational and egalitarian as the Kleisthenic Athenian democracy. Murray makes the important point that this Kleisthenic system was not electoral representative democracy (as in the modern USA and UK), but direct rule by the citizens in which the governing officials were not elected but chosen by lot, and in which the assembly of the male citizens made all the crucial decisions.
Murray's "Early Greece" is a rewarding, often subtle read. However, it would seem to me to require at least a minimal knowledge of Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides. He sometimes assumes that the reader is familiar with sections of narrative from these respective works. However, a virtue of Murray's text is that he often quotes from the documents he is discussing, and these documents provide the material for his often cogent analyses.
Ideally I would rate Murray's "Early Greece" 4.5 stars. This is because at times Murray's diction and phraseology can be somewhat obscure. He is best when he stays away from sociological and anthropological "theory" and concentrates on the hard historical evidence.

A wonderful synthesis, learned but not wordy, of the kind that only a very senior historian could write. Effectively conveys his views as to many complicated problems of early Greece, while giving due regard to the positions of others.

I found "Early Greece" to be a great book, that really helps the reader to understand the context of the development of the classical Greek civilisation, how it was influenced by the surrounding cultures, but at the same time started its unique path.
The writer does an excellant job of keeping us engaged in his work. I found it to be an easy and enjoyable read. I was challenged by the writer's work to look beyond the accepted wisdom of our understanding of how much we have been influenced by the Greeks, especially his analysis of the clash between Greek and Asian cultures, in his understanding of the Persian wars.
Great book!

this book is held in high honors by historians, but in contempt by archaeologists - and for good reason. if you want to understand a period of human history from which the literary evidence is virtually non-existent, you must incorporate other sources of evidence in your treaty. murray does not, and his vision of archaic greece is thus vastly different to the view of robin osbourne, whose "greece in the making" is a much better treatment of the archaic period than this. oswyn murray, although a vastly skilled historian and a wonderful scholar, just does not get it right.

if you have no idea of what is going on during the 7th and 6th centuries BC and have this book at hand, by all means read it - but please keep in mind that there are much better treatments of the period available.

This book was used in part, for a class on the in Classics on the Age of Homer. This book describes early Greek life and culture in depth, yet at the same time seemed to be way over my head. The text is very longwinded and confusing for someone who has not met the material before, and would not recommend it as a book to read in your pasttime. Rather, the book is very thorough, and would make for great refernce material, giving an in depth perspective to early Greek culture.