Transcript File

GREECE
Unit 4
Ancient Greece
Homer
• His works date back to
700 BCE
• He created some of the
earliest Greek writings
• His poems tell of people
who lived 500 years
before his time
• The stories were passed
down from generation to
generation before Homer
recorded them
Land & Sea
• In ancient times cedar, cypress, and pine
covered the mountains of Greece, but the
people cut most of the trees down to get
timber for shipbuilding and charcoal for fuel
• This deforestation led to erosion, which swept
away precious soil, making it even more difficult
to produce enough wheat for a growing
population
• Except for iron and silver (Spartan Laconia &
Laurium) Greece also had few mineral deposits
• With limited farmland and few natural
resources, many Greek city-states relied on
foreign trade
The Minoans
• Were the earliest
civilization associated
with Ancient Greece
• It was located on the
Island of Crete
• It was named after a
legendary ruler, King
Minos
• King Minos dominated
a large part of the
Augean Sea with his
powerful Navy
The Minoans
• Tales of King Minos and his Navy had been Greek
legends for centuries before Greek historian
Thucydides recorded them in 5th century BCE
• In 1900, Archaeologist Arthur Evans found actual
evidence of this Ancient Kingdom. His discovery of the
palace of King Minos at Knossos was one of the most
important archaeological finds of the century
• The palace he uncovered was like a huge maze, with
over 800 interconnecting rooms grouped around the
large central courtyard
• Rooms seemed to have had various purposes,
suggesting that the palace served as a gov’t center,
royal residence, temple, and storehouse
The Minoans
• The west side housed the official quarters or state
rooms, including a throne room and large storerooms
• The huge jars found in these storerooms, originally for
olive oil, wine, and grain may represent taxes paid by
the people to the King
• The east side, which extends beyond a large courtyard,
housed the domestic or living quarters
• The palace also had several architectural innovations
- Light-wells or shafts to create a brighter more open
atmosphere
- They piped water into the palace
- Had flush toilets and baths
- Constructed an advanced drainage system
(Indoor plumbing did not become common again for
3,600 years)
The Palace Ruins
The Minoans
• On the interior walls of the main rooms there were wall
paintings depicting nature and Minoan life
• One room had an entire mural of dolphins
• Other paintings show crowds watching lively dances or
sports such as bull-leaping
• In some images young men and women are shown
grabbing the horns or a charging bull and vaulting over its
back
• The bull seems to have been sacred to the Minoans
• Other evidence suggests these people worshipped a
Mother goddess of fertility who often appear with snakes
• As no battle scenes appear on the walls and few weapons
were found in the excavations, historians believe the
Minoans were more peaceful, more preoccupied with
nature and life than with war
The Minoans
• Archaeologists also discovered 2 clay tablets at
Knossos with different scripts, they were named
Linear A and Linear B
• The script called Linear B was finally decoded in
1952, and probably replaced the earlier script,
Linear A, which remains a mystery
• Texts written in Linear B have also been found at
many mainland locations in Greece
• Their discovery suggests that Greeks from the
mainland – possibly from the Mycenaean civilization
that emerged in 1,600 BCE dominated Knossos in its
final years
The Minoans
• Knossos was not only the Minoan center on the Island of
Crete, but it was the most important
• Sometime around 1,450 BCE, most of the palace-centers
were destroyed, although historians are not certain why
• One theory (1939) suggested that a massive eruption of
a volcano on the island of Thera destroyed the palaces
• This theory also linked the sudden destruction of the
Minoan civilization with the legend of the lost continent
of Atlantis
• Recently, however, historians have found flaws in this
theory and now believe that invaders from the Greek
mainland probably destroyed the palace-centers on the
Island
The Mycenaeans
• While the Minoan palace-centres were flourishing
on Crete, people on the Greek mainland were
living in small, simple farming communities.
• Waves of invaders from the North hindered their
development
• Indo-European peoples penetrated the Greek
mainland as early as 2500BCE
• Within 500 years, they had penetrated southern
Greece, building fortress settlements on the fertile
plains
• Some of the early invaders spoke Achaean, which
became the basis of modern Greek
The Mycenaeans
• The invaders seized Mycenae, the main
centre on the Greek mainland at the
time
• They built a wealthy and powerful
civilization, known as the Mycenaean,
that flourished for about 500 years
• Mycenaean culture dominated the
Mediterranean between 1600 and 1100
BCE
The Legend of Minotaur
• A favorite legend of
the Athenian
Greeks told of
Theseus and the
Minotaur
• The story linked King
Minos of Crete with
Theseus, one of the
earliest and
greatest kings of
Athens
• Read story aloud…
THE LEGEND OF THE MINOTAUR
The Mycenaeans
• Mycenaean kings ruled over their territories
from fortified palaces and gained much of
their wealth from trade and piracy
• In the most famous of their expeditions they
attacked the city of Troy on the northwest
corner of Asia Minor
• Mycenaeans passed down treasured songs
and stories about a great Trojan War and other
adventures from generation to generation
• Each Mycenaean city had its own King, but
the King of Mycenae itself, Agamemnon, was
the most important
The Mycenaeans
• Around 1876 a German Archaelogist conducted
excavations and discovered the following:
• Agamemnon’s royal residence was built around a
central hall accessed from a court yard.
• There were domestic quarters, workshops, and storage
rooms inside the residence
• The interior walls were decorated with frescoes, many
of which depicted scenes of war or hunting
• There were vertical burial shafts
• The grave shafts looked that they had been used
more then once
• Inside the graves he found gold, silver, ivory, and
pottery
The Mycenaeans
• There were artifacts found which showed a strong
influence of the earlier Minoan civilization
• The Mycenaeans adopted the Minoans art of wall
painting, their vase designs, style of dress, and form of
writing
• The eventually abandoned the shaft graves, and
started to use thalos tombs, which were massive
chambers cut into hillsides with walls constructed of fine
stone blocks carefully laid in rows, each row narrower
then the other one below it
• Why did they make this change?
The Mycenaeans
• By the beginning of 12th century BCE, many of the
Mycenaean fortresses were destroyed and settlements
were abandoned
• This may have been due to several factors:
- Civil Wars among the Mycenaen cities
- Outside invasion
- Drought and Famine
- Disease
• All of the Mycenaen centres, except for Athens, fell
• By 1100 BCE all of Mycenae was destroyed
The Trojan War
• Two epic poems by Homer “Iliad” and “Odyssey” describe
the Trojan War
• Approximately 1194-1184 BCE
• Greeks vs Troy
• The story of the Trojan War and the Greek hero Achilles
• Troy – The movie that was release in 2004 is based around
Homer’s writings
• The film has some definite Hollywood exaggeration
The Iliad & Troy
• The story of the Trojan War and the Greek
hero Achilles
• Troy – The movie that was release in 2004 is
based around Homer’s writings
• The film has some definite Hollywood
exaggeration
The Dark Ages
• Following the collapse of the Mycenaean
civilization, Greece entered a bleak period that
lasted for 300 years
• This period has been named by historians the Dark
Ages, because we know so little about these years
• It was a time when new raiding parties arrived from
the North, dispersing the Greek-speaking people all
around the Aegean Sea
• The achievements of the Mycenaean civilization in
construction, art, monument building, and writing
were lost or forgotten
• In their trek south, the invaders wiped out farming
communities, drastically reducing the food supply,
famine struck, and the Greek population rapidly
declined
The Rise of the City-State
• Despite the hardships of the Dark Ages, Greeks
gradually developed small, secure, and
independent communities
• These communities formed the basis of the Greek
City-State or Polis (community of people)
• Even at it’s largest, a polis rarely exceeded 20,000
people, and was more like a town then a city
• There were 2 major exceptions, Athens and Sparta
• Athens and its surrounding villages covered about
2,500km, and Sparta eventually controlled 2/5 of
the Peloponnese
The Rise of the City-State
• By the middle of the 8th century BCE, the population
of the Greek world was growing once again, and
putting a strain on the available food supply
• The Greeks needed to find additional land to grow
more food, and needed to do something about the
overcrowded streets
• Colonization became essential and various cities
launched a search for apoikai or “ away homes”
where their goal was to create self-sufficient colonies
which would be only bound to the parent city by
trade
The Rise of the City-State
• The first Greek colony was established in about 750 BCE on the Bay
of Naples
• During the next century Greek cities appeared on almost every
coastal plain in Sicily, Southern Italy, parts of Northern Africa, Spain,
and France
• The greatest of the colonies was Syracuse in Sicily, the population of
which grew to over 100,000 people by the 5th century
The Rise of the City-State
• Due to the upsurge in trade, metal currency became
common use
• A new middle class emerged, made up of the people who
made their living through commerce and industry rather then
from the land
• The Greeks adopted an alphabet, which would be passed
down to us by way of the Romans
• Some city states began to specialize in certain products, for
example Athens produced a great deal of pottery
• During this period the 1st Olympics were held and Homer
wrote his great literary works
• Growth ,exploration, trade, the exchange of ideas, the
glorification of past heroes and exploits in Homer’s poems all
played a factor in the development of Greek society, and
Ancient Greece was on the verge of its greatest period
The Persian Wars
• At the beginning of the 5th century BCE the growing citystates faced a serious threat – Invasion by the powerful
eastern empire of Persia, the largest of all of the neareastern empires
The Persian Wars
• It was ruled by a powerful general, Cyrus the Great and
was a powerful and unified empire
• Greece was a small city-state unit weakened by fighting
one-another and were ill prepared to defend
themselves
• Would they fall easy prey to a powerful and unified
empire?
War @ The Plains of Marathon
The Persian Wars
• Realizing the Persians would probably return, the
Athenians, under Themistocles, took defensive
precautions
• Most importantly they developed a strong navy, with a
fleet of 200 ships
• Sparta and Athens decided to share a leadership role
• The concern of the Athenians was well founded, as
Xerxes, the son and successor of Darius (former Persian
King), was determined to continue the assault against the
Greek mainland
• He took an army of 180,000 people and 1,200 ships to
fight Greece
The Persian Wars
• The Greeks chose a defense position at Thermopylae, a
narrow pass through which the Persians had to pass
• The Greeks had about 7,000 troops, led by Spartan King
Leonidas, who had brought with him 300 of the finest
Spartan soldiers
• This is the story that lead to the Hollywood movie “300”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp29zkbSVQk
Classical Greece
• The end of the Persian Wars marked the liberation of the
Ionian city-states and the dawn of the greatest age in
ancient Greek history
• The single century between 480-380 BCE saw a
phenomenal rush of achievements, many of these
stemmed from Athens
• Metal work, glass making, and other crafts were created
• It was a time for great thinkers, artists, poets…It was so
impressive that some call this century “the age of the
Greek miracle”
• A “league” was formed in 478BCE uniting the city-states
of Greece to protect themselves against further attacks
from the Persians
Classical Greece
• Members had to contribute money or ships as a
defense fund
• Most city-states chose money, and Athens used the
money to build ships
• According to the rules of the league, a member could
not withdraw without consent from all, and when
Naxos and Thasos tried to break away, they were
crushed by Athens and forced to pay a heavy tribute
• The other great city-state and rival to Athens was
Sparta
• It developed very differently from Athens, and was a
highly militaristic state, unlike democratic Athens
Sparta ruled by a small group of powerful aristocrats
Classical Greece
• Sparta had taken no part in the colonization movement
between 800-550BCE, it had remained agricultural,
leaving commercial ventures to other states
• It fought battles to acquire more land and eventually
dominated most of the Peloponnese
• Tensions between the 2 rivals increased when Athens
tried to expand it’s empire in central Greece, threatening
Sparta’s power base
• Athens blocked some cities from trading, and these cities
were opposed…They decided to ask Sparta for help in
these issues, and hence the outbreak of the great
Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE
The Peloponnesian War
• This war lasted 27 years, and was costly and bitter!
• Athens strength was its powerful navy and wealth, while
Sparta on the other hand had a formidable land army of
disciplined professional soldiers
• The Athenian leader, Pericles, devised a strategy to
defend Athens, as he used his forces to guard the long
walls that surrounded the city and that stretched as far as
the port of Piraeus
• The strategy had a fatal flaw, too many people lived in
confined quarters, and hygiene deteriorated which lead
to a terrible plague and 1/3 of the population including
the general dying…Athens had been dealt a severe
blow
The Peloponnesian War
• The war dragged on in a seesaw struggle with victories gained
by each side, and in 421 BCE the 2 sides actually agreed to a
short-lived truce
• The Athenians attacked and captured the Island of Melos,
which wanted to only stay out of the struggle, and for their
trouble had all men of military age put to death, and women
and children sold to slavery
• The following year the Athenians set out to attack Syracuse on
the Island of Sicily, this was met with mixed feelings from the
Athenians back home, and when they struggled time and
again to penetrate the walls of Syracuse the negativity
worsened
• Eventually the Athenian fleet was defeated in the Syracuse
harbour, the army was surrounded and forced to
surrender…The war lasted another 10 years, but Athens could
not recover
The Peloponnesian War
• The Spartans had formed an alliance with the Sicilian’s, and
also aligned themselves with the Persians which made them
even stronger on land and sea!
• The combined Spartan and Persian fleet defeated the
Athenians at Aegospotami in 405 BCE, and the power of
Athens crumbled
• The following year the Spartan fleet blockaded Athens, which
prevented essential grains from getting into the city, near
starvation brought an end to the fighting
• Sparta’s allies wanted to destroy Athens and sell its citizens to
slavery, but Sparta blocked the move
• Instead Athens was forced to surrender its empire and all of its
fleet
• The Spartans also tore down the cities long walls, but left
Athens intact, and free, partly in recognition of its service to
the Greek states during the Persian Wars
The Peloponnesian War
• After the war, during the 1st half of that century Sparta
ruled Greece, then for a time it was Thebes, but the most
serious threat to the city-states was on the Northern
frontier in Macedonia
• This is where we find the story of “Alexander The Great”
Alexander The Great
• The Macedonians lived in the North of the Greek
peninsula, and spoke a dialect of Greek
• They were mostly farmers and shepherds and
had not achieved the same cultural glory as the
Greeks to the South
• However, in 4th century BCE several Kings united
and transformed the state into a great military
power
• The most brilliant king was Philip 11
• The discovery of rich gold deposits had provided
wealth Philip needed to assemble one of the
greatest fighting forces the world had ever seen
Alexander The Great
• At a battle near Thebes Philip 11 crushed the
independent Greek city-states, and made them part of
the Macedonian realm…This was Philip’s first conquest,
and only the beginning of his plan to conquer the entire
Persian empire
• Philip military strength came from 1) his use of the phalanx
formation as the main unit in his military, and the strong
support of a well trained cavalry
• The phalanx formation densely packed lines of foot
soldiers armed with long lances (spears) created a
formidable obstacle, even to armed cavalry
Alexander The Great
• Philip did not have the opportunity to fulfill his ambitions
of conquering the Persian empire, as in 336 BCE, he was
assassinated by a member of his own bodyguard during
his daughter’s wedding celebration
• His 20 year old son Alexander was proclaimed King…
• And here we have the story of Alexander The Great
Alexander The Great
• After Alexander died in 323 BCE, there was no
heir apparent
• For 40 years, his generals fought over the spoils of the
empire
• Finally a pattern of large states emerged, each ruled by
a king descended from one of Alexander’s men (The
Ptolemaic kingdom of Egypt
• On the Greek mainland turmoil once again marked the
lives of the citizens
• Peace was not restored until Rome conquered Greece in
27 BCE!
Ancient Greek Geography Assignment
Regions:
1) Asia Minor
2) Macedonia
3) Peloponnese
4) Crete
5) Thrace
6) Ionia
Bodies of Water:
7) Aegean Sea
8) Ionian Sea
9) Black Sea
10) Mediterranean Sea
City-States:
11) Mycenae
12) Athens
13) Sparta
14) Knossos
15) Troy