paraphrasing 2

Ch10

Although the Greeks did not build a centralized state until the short reign of Alexander of Macedon, they did serve to link the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions through colonization, commerce, and cultural interaction. Through their unprecedented abilities as sea traders, and later through the unification provided by the Hellenistic empires, the Greeks left a rich cultural legacy of politics, philosophy, art, literature, and science that would go on to shape the European and Islamic worlds for centuries.  Greece is both a Mediterranean country and a Balkan country. And, throughout its history, Greece has been a part of both the Near East and Western Europe. During the Bronze Age and again at the time of the Greek Renaissance of the eighth century B.C., Greece and the Near East were closely connected. The empire of Alexander the Great of Macedonia brought under Greek dominion a vast expanse of territory from the Balkans to the Indus. The Byzantine Empire, with its heart in Constantinople, bridged the continents of Europe and Asia.

Greece's history is also closely intertwined with that of Europe and has been since Greek colonists settled the shores of Italy and Spain and Greek traders brought their wares to Celtic France in the seventh century B.C. The earliest stages of settlement and social evolution occurred in Greece between 10,000 and 3000 B.C., building the foundation for major advances to begin shortly thereafter. Current evidence suggests that Greece was settled by people from the Near East, primarily Anatolia. But some historians argue that groups from Central Europe also moved into the area. Extensive archaeological remains of a number of farming villages of the Neolithic Era (the last period of the Stone Age, approximately 10,000 to 3000 B.C.) have been discovered in the plains of Thessaly in present-day east-central Greece. Larger villages built between 3500 and 3000 B.C. show that in that period society was becoming more complex, and that an elite group was forming. Shortly thereafter, craft specialists began to appear, and the form of social organization shifted from tribalism to chiefdoms. Population increased in this period at a slow rate.

Meanwhile, the island of Crete (Kriti) was first inhabited around 6300 B.C. by people from Anatolia. These early groups brought with them a wide range of domesticated plants and animals. They settled at Knossos, which remained the only settlement on the island for centuries. Only in the final phase of the late Stone Age, did the civilization on Crete begin to advance, and only then did real farming villages appear in other parts of the island. The social structure remained tribal, but it set the stage for change.

The civilization that took root on the mainland is called Mycenaean after the first major archaeological site where this culture was identified. The Mycenaeans, an Indo-European group, were the first speakers of the Greek language. They may have entered Greece at the end of the early Bronze Age, in the middle Bronze Age, or in the Neolithic period. The excavation of exceptionally wealthy graves, and the size and spacing of palace foundations, indicates that the Mycenaeans formed an elite and a chieftain-level society (one organized around the judicial and executive authority of a single figure, with varying degrees of power) by the late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 B.C.). Mycenaean palatial society was at its zenith in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C. At some point in the middle of the fourteenth century, Mycenaeans, whose society stressed military excellence, conquered Knossos and the rest of Crete.

The concept of the polis (city-state) began to evolve with the development of aristocratic clans to replace chiefdoms. Clan rivalries yielded single powerful figures who were termed tyrants because they achieved domination in outright power struggles within the aristocratic group and among clan centers. Because they often were marginal clan members, the success of the tyrants created a new criterion for power: ability rather than birth. This change was a crucial element in the development of the polis, which came to be a politically unified community covering an average of 200 square kilometers and based on a small urban center. When the tyrants were overthrown after one to three generations, the institutionalized structure they created remained and became an important legacy to the modern world.

In the eighth century and early seventh century B.C., Sparta began to develop as a militant polis with a rigid social structure and a government that included an assembly representing all citizens. Meanwhile, Athens became the largest polis, combining several regions of the peninsula of Attica. Under the leadership of the aristocrat Solon, Athens developed a social system in which power was based on wealth rather than aristocratic birth. Citizens of various wealth categories were allotted different positions of power. Thus, in different ways Sparta and Athens built states that included wider sectors of society in their political activity than had any previous society, and the basis of democracy was laid.