of their families. But where commerce and industry flourished, the free citizens grew rich by the
employment of slaves--male in the mines, female in the textile industry. These slaves were, in
Ionia, of the surrounding barbarian population, and were, as a rule, first acquired in war. With
increasing wealth went increasing isolation of respectable women, who in later times had little
part in the civilized aspects of Greek life except in Sparta.
There was a very general development, first from monarchy to aristocracy, then to an
alternation of tyranny and democracy. The kings were not absolute, like those of Egypt and
Babylonia; they were advised by a Council of Elders, and could not transgress custom with
impunity. "Tyranny" did not mean necessarily bad government, but only the rule of a man
whose claim to power was not hereditary. "Democracy" meant government by all the citizens,
among whom slaves and women were not included. The early tyrants, like the Medici, acquired
their power through being the richest members of their respective plutocracies. Often the source
of their wealth was the ownership of gold and silver mines, made the more profitable by the
new institution of coinage, which came from the kingdom of Lydia, adjacent to Ionia. *
Coinage seems to have been invented shortly before 700 B.C.
One of the most important results, to the Greeks, of commerce or piracy--at first the two are
scarcely distinct--was the acquisition of the art of writing. Although writing had existed for
thousands of years in Egypt and Babylonia, and the Minoan Cretans had a script (which has not
been deciphered), there is no conclusive evidence that the Greeks knew how to write until about
the tenth century B.C. They learnt the art from the Phoenicians, who, like the other inhabitants
of Syria, were exposed to both Egyptian and Babylonian influences, and who held the
supremacy in maritime commerce until the rise of the Greek cities of Ionia, Italy, and Sicily. In
the fourteenth century, writing to Ikhnaton (the heretic king of Egypt), Syrians still used the
Babylonian cuneiform; but Hiram of Tyre ( 969-936) used the Phoenician alphabet, which
probably developed out of the Egyptian script. The Egyptians used, at first, a pure picture
writing; gradually the pictures, much conventionalized, came to represent
* See P. N. Ure, The Origin of Tyranny.