Introduction to Ancient Greece

Intro to Greece
Show Transcript January 16th, 2023

Hello students,
Greece is on the continent of Europe, toward the south-east portion of the continent. It’s on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea.
Greece has poor soil. You can’t farm on rocks. Better soil comes from river valleys, depositing silt, with bits of rock and mineral particles larger than clay but smaller than sand. Silt promotes water retention and air circulation.
Greece’s rocky soil made it hard for plants to grow roots and absorb nutrients. The rocks don’t provide nutrients for the plants, and plants also need soil with organic matter. That’s plant or animal tissue in various stages of decomposition. Soil isn’t just broken down rocks.
The climate of Greece is a combination of wet, mild winters and long, dry, hot summers. This varies a bit. Up in the mountains, winter can be much colder.
Greece can be quite windy in summer. The Meltemi blowing south through the Aegean sea. In the Ionian Sea, summer wind is called the Maistro.
Greece culture has grown and shrunk over time.The earliest Greek civilization was on the island of Crete. It was called the Minoan civilization in 2000 BCE. We still have a lot to learn about the Minoans. They used a language called Linear A, which we still have not deciphered. We don’t know what they wrote about, so we interpret their history from artifacts. We also know a little bit about the island from the legend of the minotaur in the labyrinth.
This is during what we call the Bronze age. Bronze is a metal alloy from copper and tin. It’s the first alloy humans made. They could melt copper and tin out of certain rocks. This is malachite, which is a copper ore. It doesn’t look like copper, but there’s copper in there.
Bronze is a mix of melted copper and tin. It’s stronger than both metals and was easy to mold or shape. People made weapons and armor, but also picks and hoes to make farming easier.
When the minoans began using weapons and armor from bronze, they had an advantage over any other tribes. Other tribes were still using stone tools. In some cases they were using copper, but copper is not as strong as bronze.
The next Greek civilization was the Mycenaeans, on the southern tip of the Greek peninsula in 1600 BCE. It lasted several hundred years. We know a lot about it because we not only have artifacts, but also written histories in languages we understand. The Mycenaeans were eventually destroyed by invading tribes.
Around 800 BCE small city-states began to form. These are more powerful than a city, acting more like little countries. They shared much of the same language and culture of other Greek peoples, but would have their own fortress and protection. They were independent.
Greek culture spread and established colonies through the eastern Mediterranean, reaching the coastal populations of Europe, Asia and Africa.
In the meantime, the civilization of the Romans began to rise and establish influence around the Mediterranean. By 146 BCE Romans had conquered the Greek city-states. Greek culture was adopted, shaped, and included in Roman culture, but the time of the Ancient Greeks being a major civilization had come to an end. Its influence shrank back to where it was before, located on the Greek peninsula with many nearby islands.
As with any civilization, the Greeks had to adapt to their environment. They had many hills and mountains, so they had to rely on less farming than some civilizations. They had a lot of coastline and islands, so they built ships to fish and trade with other peoples across the mediterranean. They were isolated on islands, which made it difficult to maintain a singular, defensible government. But they adapted and created city-states where each city defended itself with a fortress or wall.
Sources:
Minoan Linear A, Crete, AMH
Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Minotaur
© Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons
Cast iron melting
P sakthy, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons
Bronze age tools
See page for author, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Bronze weapons
Eunostos, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Neolithic tools
Gary Todd, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Mycenaean World Map
User:Alexikoua, User:Panthera tigris tigris, TL User:Reedside, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Mycenaean larnax 1
Zde, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons