Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece or Classical Greece was a civilization which emerged around the 8th century BC, and was annexed by the Roman Empire in the second century BC. Ancient Greece is remembered for its architecture, philosophy and other ideas, which became the foundation of modern Europe. The Olympic Games are originally an ancient Greek tradition.

Understand

 * See Prehistoric Europe for background.

Classical Greece was not the first civilization around the Aegean Sea. Since the 27th century BC, the Minoan culture had flourished on Crete, until displaced by the Mycenaeans around the 16th century BC. They left behind plenty of artifacts, but the only legible written records known to posterity was the cryptic Linear B script.

The first written records from the Greek city-states, poleis, date to the 9th century BC. Among them are the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems describing the Trojan War, supposedly fought in the 12th century BC, and part of the Greek foundation myth. The Graeco-Roman mythology is part of the oldest European literature, with a pantheon later adopted by the Roman Empire.

The period of the 5th and 4th centuries are today known as Classical Greece. During this period, the Greeks defended themselves against the mighty Persian Empire in a series of wars which became legendary in Western culture. Greece later entered a golden age for philosophy, drama, and science. Through colonization and conquest, Greek language and culture came to stretch far beyond the territory of modern Greece, with especially strong footprints in Sicily and across Asia Minor (today, the Asian part of Turkey). In Ancient Greece's apogee, the dominant cities of Greece were Athens and Sparta, which often were at war against each other.

Starting with the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC, the Greek culture spread as far east as modern-day Afghanistan, and Egypt was ruled for three centuries by the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, which was founded by one of Alexander's generals. This late bloom of Greek culture, which was later partially supplanted by the Roman Empire, is known as the Hellenic era.

According to the Biblical book of Acts, the Apostle Paul traveled to the region in the 1st century AD and brought Christianity to the area.

Greek heritage
Some elements of Greek culture endured for centuries after the last Greek polity had disappeared. For instance Coptic, the language that Ancient Egyptian evolved into, was written in Greek-derived letters until it died out as a vernacular in the 17th century; Coptic still survives as a liturgical language for Egyptian Christians. Other examples include Greek authors and philosophers, such as Homer and Socrates, that were and are still widely read among a certain subset of Europeans. Greek terms have entered the general lexicon of many European languages including English, mostly relating to things the Greeks were known for (theatre, politics, democracy) or scientific terms. Sometimes Greek and Latin terms have been mixed, such as in the case of "automobile" which derives from Greek "autos" (~self) and Latin "mobilis" (~movable, moving). For these reasons and the fact that the Christian New Testament was written in Ancient Greek, Ancient Greek is still taught in many secondary schools and universities throughout Europe. The Roman Empire held Greek culture in high regard, particularly in the eastern parts, and Greek was a co-official language alongside Latin in the Roman Empire.

Although in modern times the Greek alphabet itself is only used to write Greek (and the individual letters as symbols in maths and science), the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets that are used by many other European languages were originally derived from the Greek alphabet. The very word "alphabet" is also derived from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet (alpha and beta) and its importance in being the first known phonetic script, a script to encode all vowel and consonant sounds (as opposed to other scripts that only encoded consonants or had ideographic and/or syllabic aspects), cannot be overstated.

The Byzantine Empire survived as a bastion of Greek heritage until it fell in 1453. Some Byzantine scholars moved west, and contributed to the Italian Renaissance. From the 17th century, the Grand Tour became a customary voyage where north Europeans visited the Greek ruins in southern Italy. Over time, tourism expanded to Greece proper.

Greece became independent from the Ottoman Empire in the 1820s, adopting a monarchical constitution largely on the urging of the Great Powers of Europe, and initially enthroning a Bavarian Wittelsbach prince, hence the – still used – blue and white colors of the Greek flag.

Destinations
The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were listed in some of the earliest guides for travellers, written in Greek a few centuries BCE.

Mainland Greece




Italy