Ancient Greece Notes

- Barbarians are people that had a distinctive way of life, based on farming and warfare. 

- The earliest Greek civilization was very much an offshoot of the ways of life of their eastern neighbors. 

- Citadel and Shrine: the Athenian Acropolis was already ancient when its temples were rebuilt after Persian invaders destroyed them in the 5th century

- Barbarian-a term used to describe the distinctive way of life based on farming, warfare, and tribal organization that became widespread in Europe beginning around 2500BC

- Megaliths: massive rough-cut stones used to construct monuments and tombs

- Tribe: a social and political unit consisting of a group of communities held together by common interests, traditions, and real or mythical ties of kinship

- Over tree thousand years up to the time of the Persian Empire, civilization had spread from its Sumerian and Egyptian homelands right across southwestern Asia and Northeastern Africa

- The early Europeans can't have had any sense of common identity, but time most of them came to share a distinctive way of life

- When a leading warrior died, his horses and chariot, his bronze swords and daggers, and his gold and silver drinking cups would all go to the grave with him- presumably so that he could go riding, fighting, and drinking as a comrade of the gods in  the afterlife.

- People began to speak languages of Indo-European origin that were distant ancestors of Greek and Latin

- Stonehenge: the most famous megalithic structures was built by a farming and trading people in the west of England

- About 2200bc a distinct civilization, known today as Minoan arose on the Aegan island of Crete

- The Master of the Animals: this Cretan gold pendant made about 1700BC shows a powerful being with geese in each hand and bull's horn looming behind him

- Mycenaean civilization lasted shortly after 1200BC

- The Greeks settled in mainland Greece

Greeks

- new ideas

- incredible art forms

- democratic government

- innovators in warfare

- 4000bc - farming and village life spreads from Sumerian and Egyptian lands across SW Asia and NE Africa, and the European continent

- 3500bc- constructed megaliths, finished in 2000bc

- consisted of 160 boulders that weighed up to 50 tons

- 2500bc on, Indo-European nomads migrated from the steppes in eastern Europe

- language evolved to Greek and Latin

- their lives centered around strength and courage, comradeship and loyalty, contests and battles

- tribes were groups of people held together by their common interests

- tribes were headed by powerful hereditary chieftains, thought of as kings

- no cities, no written records, no fixed structures of government

- they were barbarians

- they adopted the way of life of those they encountered, and as they traveled

- the distinctive civilization the Greeks developed is the first that counts as definitely "Western"

Geography of Greece

- mountainous peninsula, covers 3/4 of land

- approximately 1,400 islands in the Aegean and Ionian Seas

- location shaped their culture

- skilled sailors

- poor natural resources

- difficult to unite the ancient Greeks because of the terrain; developed small, independent communities

- approximately 20% suitable for farming

- fertile valleys cover 1/4 pf peninsula 

- because of geography the Greek diet consists of grains, grapes, and olives

- lack of resources most likely led to Greek colonization

- temperatures ranges from 48 in the winter to 80 in the summer