Friday, November 21, 2008

How the Greeks lived




THE TERM “ANCIENT GREEKS” CAN REFER TO MANY CULTURES

and times in world history. The ancient Greeks include the warriors who fought in the Trojan War in the 1200s B.C.E. and whose mythical stories, retold by Homer, are considered the foundation of Western literature. They also are the sophisticated (from the Greek word sophos, which means “wisdom”)Athenians of what is known as Classical Greece, who gave us democracy in the 400s B.C.E. and whose architecture and literature remain an important part of our culture. And they are the Mediterranean peoples who, in the two centuries before Rome began its rule of the Western and near Eastern world in the 140s B.C.E., made ground-breaking contributions to science and mathematics.The history of the ancient Greeks spanned many centuries, from about 1600 B.C.E. to 146 B.C.E. As their world was unfolding, their Mediterranean neighbors included Egypt, whose civilization had already been around 2,000 years. To the east, in modern-day Turkey, the Hittites made up another powerful kingdom that jostled with Egypt for control over Syria, which lay between them. The nearby Phoenicians first developed an alphabet and advanced the art of shipbuilding. Trade and exchanges of culture and technology flourished among these Mediterranean kingdoms, which also came to include the early Greeks.Greece was never a unified country in antiquity. Rather, it was a collection of perhaps as many as 1,500 often fiercely independent city-states (a city that functions as a separate nation). The people of those citystates shared a culture and a language, even though they were scattered throughout the modern-day Greek mainland in southeastern Europe and around the Mediterranean and Black Seas (including today’s Turkey).

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