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Archaeology & Anthropology 2018 Global Journal of Research and Review
ISSN: 2393-8854 Page 37
October 01-02, 2018
London, UK
1 st Edition of international Conference on
Archaeology and
Anthropology
T his presentation will first sketch a major but hidden current
historical problem, and then set out a possible route of
reaching an answer to it. The problem, presented by literary
sources that are scanty and, in many ways unreliable, is that of
modelling the transformation of pre-classical Athens in the 6th
century BCE from being a society labouring under serious social
tensions to one that was wealthy and powerful enough to resist
Persian invasion in the 490s and 480s and then to aim for primacy
in the Aegean and in Greece. The route towards the answer is
indirect. It has five components. One, to be described briefly, is
archaeological, comprising the various excavations of the city and
its surroundings, and especially that of the Acropolis of Athens in
the 19th century. The focus here will be on the mass of destroyed
buildings andmonuments and other debris that was cleared away
after the Persian sack of the Acropolis in 480-479 BC in order
to start afresh. The second component is largely art-historical.
Again briefly, this will report two of the great collective scholarly
achievements that used the mass as prime material evidence,
first the establishment of a reliable chronology of Archaic-period
sculpture in stone and bronze, and secondly the creation of a
reliable system of classifying and dating many thousands of
fragments of painted ceramic vessels that Athenian potters and
vase-painters had created in the 6th and 5th centuries BC: both
achievements being effectively complete by the 1950s. A third
component is partly art-historical, partly epigraphical. This was
the creation of a reliable catalogue in 1949 for all the inscribed
dedicatory monuments of the 7th, 6th and early 5th centuries that
had been set up on the Acropolis, together with the scrupulous
re-edition of all the relevant inscriptions in 1994. That re-edition
in turn has allowed a fourth essential component to appear.
Athens before 480 BC was unique in Greece for the extent to
which its inhabitants, women as well as men, made their own and
others’ names known in public: on the dedicatory inscriptions, on
gravestones, on painted ceramics, and on the ‘votes’ for ostracism
that began in 487. Scattered and hard to find for years, all those
names and many more from all periods of Athenian history have
now been gathered together in the 21 volumes (1994-2012) of
a biographical dictionary: and a parallel publication in active
progress is listing attestations of personal names from all other
regions of theGreekworld. Finally, a fifth component, now in active
preparation, will be a catalogue of early Athenian coinage that will
give us a newly updated estimate of its bulk. These components
– historical, archaeological, art-historical, epigraphic, onomastic,
and numismatic -- can now be put together to create a far more
detailed human, social, and economic portrait of Athenian society
before 480 BC than has ever been possible until now. In particular,
it will show how wealth gradually accrued far more widely than
within the handful of seigneurial families known from the literary
sources.
John K Davies
University of Liverpool, UK
Glob J Res Rev 2018, Volume 5
DOI: 10.21767/2393-8854-C1-003
Athens before 480BC: the emergence of a wealthy civil
society