Download Ostracism - Archaeology Education Outreach

Greek Colonization
and Migration
Why Colonization?
• The lack of natural resources in Greece
– lack of metals (tin, copper, sliver)
– timber
– food (grains and fish)
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fights between Greek states
looking for good agricultural lands
expanding trade routes
Persian Empire
Phoenician colonization
Emigration
– economic
• trade with remote areas
– the colonization of conquered areas
» use of its inhabitants as slaves.
– political reasons
• banishing of political enemies
• Most emigrants left the Greek area and only slaves
entered
– Not like American Colonies of England
Emigration from the Greek cities.
• The leader of a banished group of political
dissidents would lead them away from the
Polis to found a colony elsewhere.
• Themistocles is ostracized
Ostracism
• Athenian democracy
– a procedure under which a prominent citizen could be expelled
from the city-state of Athens
• Sometimes is was a way to express popular anger at the
victim
• Usually it was a way of defusing major confrontations
between rival politicians
– removing one of them from the scene
• neutralizing someone thought to be a threat to the state,
• or exiling a potential tyrant.
• There was no charge or defense, and the exile was not
in fact a penalty
– a command from the Athenian people “be gone for ten years”.
Ostraka
•
potsherds or pieces of broken pottery were used as voting tokens
– Broken pottery, abundant and virtually free, served as a kind of scrap paper
– papyrus, which was imported from Egypt was expensive
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Each year the Athenians were asked in if they wished to hold an ostracism.
In a roped-off area of the agora, citizens scratched the name of a citizen on
an ostraka and deposited them in urns
The presiding officials counted the ostraka submitted
– minimum of six thousand votes for the ostracism
– : the officials sorted the names into separate piles
– the person receiving the highest number of votes was exiled for ten years.
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The person nominated had ten days to leave the city
– if he attempted to return, the penalty was death.
– the property of the banished was not confiscated and there was no loss of status.
•
After ten years
–
allowed to return without stigma
Voted into a 10 year exile
Remains of a 2,500-year-old Greek
ship are recovered off Sicily, Italy,
on July 28, 2008.
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At a length of nearly 70 feet (21 meters) and a width of 21 feet (6.5 meters), it is the largest recovered ship built in a manner first depicted in Homer's Iliad, which is
believed to date back several centuries earlier.
The ship's outer shell was built first, and the inner framework was added later. The wooden planks of the hull were sewn together with ropes, with pitch and resin used as
sealant to keep out water.
"Greek sewn boats have been found in Italy, France, Spain, and Turkey. Gela's wreck is the most recent and the best preserved," Beltrame said.
"The vessel was a mercantile sailer, probably used to sail short stretches along the coast, docking frequently to load and unload," said Rosalba Panvini, head of the
Cultural Heritage Department of Sicily, who directed the raising operations.
Recovered artifacts�including cups, two-handled jars called amphoras, oil lamps, pottery, and fragments of straw baskets�reveal details of the ship's journey before it
sank, Panvini said.
"The vessel stopped in Athens, then in the Peloponnese Peninsula," Panvini said. "It sailed up the western coast of Greece, crossed the Otranto Channel, coasted along
Italy, and pointed to Sicily."
The ship was headed for Gela, then a Greek colony. About a half mile (800 meters) off the coast, a storm probably tilted the ship. The ballast broke the hull, and the
vessel went down, where it lay on the muddy seabed for 25 centuries.
In 1988 two scuba divers discovered the remains and informed the Sicilian Cultural Heritage Department.
It took 20 years to recover the whole vessel, which will now be sent to Portsmouth, U.K., to be restored before it returns to Gela. Officials hope to display the restored ship
in a planned new sea museum.
A Sewn Boat
Beltrame, of the Universit� Ca' Foscari, said the ship�"part of a family of archaic Greek vessels"�is something of a missing link in the evolution of naval engineering.
"It shows a mix of sewing and mortise-and-tenon joints�a different technique that later prevailed in shipbuilding," Beltrame said, referring to joints in which a protrusion in
one piece of wood inserts into a cavity in another.
Roberto Petriaggi of the Italian Central Institute for Restoration said Greeks were not the only people in the region to build ships using the sewing method.
"Technical knowledge spread easily around the Mediterranean Basin," he said. "We have finds proving that Egyptians and Phoenician-Punic people used that method,
too."
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/08/080811-greek-ship.html
Greek ship raised from
Mediterranean August 2008
Why Sicily ?
Natural Resources in Med
• http://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/
EU/EU05-02.html
Settlement Patterns
Magna Graecia
• http://mappinghistory.uoregon.edu/english/
EU/EU05-03.html
Ceramics workshop in Italy
Archaeological Evidence
Burial in
Bread Oven in Taganrog, Russia
Modern Migration
• The Facts of the Matter
• immigrant -- a person who leaves one country to settle permanently
in another after being granted permission to do so by the
government
• illegal immigrant -- an alien (non-citizen) who has entered the United
States without government permission or stayed beyond the
termination date of a visa. This person is sometimes referred to as
an undocumented immigrant".
• undocumented immigrant -- an alien (non-citizen) who has entered
the United States without government permission or stayed beyond
the termination date of a visa. This person is sometimes referred to
as an "illegal immigrant".
WHAT WOULD YOU BRING?
• Your political party has just been
ostracized – Now What?
• What would you bring with you on your
voyage to a colony?
• How would you pack it?
• How would it help you once you arrived?
• Do you think you’d ever go back?
Taranto 706 BCE
Dorian Greek immigrants as the
only Spartan colony
Who would you ostracize?
• Draw your own pot sherd
• Inscribe the name of a teacher to be
banished
• Place in ceramic kylix