The Aegean is divided by 1000 BCE…
1053 BCE to 910 BCE
The Aegean is divided by 1000 BCE among small communities engaged in constant warfare.
The Dorians have largely supplanted the Mycenaeans in Greece.
Most people live in small communities in remote areas supported by subsistence farming in the Mediterranean Dark Ages (lasting perhaps from 1100 BCE to 1000 BCE in some places, or 900 BCE in others),
Greece, organizationally, is a chiefdom society.
Most trade and contacts with cultures in the Near East and elsewhere lapse.
New peoples have arrived by the end of the Mediterranean Dark Age and settled, as, for example, the Dorians in southern Greece and Crete and the southern Cyclades as far as Rhodes or the Phrygians in central Anatolia.
Notable, too, is the fact that new late Hittite states had been formed in northern Syria at this time.
Two Indo-European peoples dominate the Balkans to the north of Greece: the Illyrians to the west and the Thracians to the east of the great historical divide defined by the Morava and Vardar river valleys.
The Thracians are advanced in metalworking and in horsemanship.
They intermingle with the Greeks and give them the Dionysian and Orphean cults, which later become so important in classical Greek literature.
Thracian tribesmen engage in agriculture and stock raising and trade with peoples who live along the Aegean Seacoast.
The Illyrians are more exclusive, their mountainous terrain keeping them separate from the Greeks and Thracians.
