100% Greek History
The shores of Greece's Aegean Sea saw the emergence of the first high civilizations in Europe, namely the Minoan on Crete and Mycenaean civilizations. After these, a Dark Age followed until around 800 BC, when a new era of Greek civilization emerged. The Greek city-states (never united) established colonies along the Mediterranean and many resisted Persian invasions. Greek culture would later become the basis of the Hellenistic civilization that followed the empire of the grecophile Macedonian conqueror Alexander the Great. Mycenaean Greece (Bronze Age)
Mycenaean Greece , also known as Bronze Age Greece, is the Late HelladicBronze Age civilization of ancient Greece. It is the historical setting of the epics of Homer and much other Greek mythology. The Mycenaean period takes its name from the archaeological site Mycenae in the northeastern Argolid, in the Peloponnesos of southern Greece. Athens, Pylos, Thebes, and Tiryns are also important Mycenaean sites.
The Mycenaean period fell between the arrival of the Greeks in the Aegean around 1600 BC and the collapse of their Bronze Age civilization around 1100 BC. The collapse is commonly attributed to the Dorian invasion, though some archaeologists and historians doubt that any such invasion took place.
The Mycenaean civilization was dominated by a warrior aristocracy. Around 1400 BC the Mycenaeans extended their control to Crete, center of the Minoan civilization, and adopted a form the Minoan script called Linear A to write their early form of Greek. The Mycenaean era script is called Linear B.
The Mycenaeans buried their nobles in beehive tombs (tholoi), large circular burial chambers with a high vaulted roof and straight entry passage lined with stone. They often buried daggers or some other form of military equipment with the deceased. The nobility were frequently buried with gold masks, tiaras, armour, and jeweled weapons. Mycenaeans were buried in a sitting position, and some of the nobility underwent mummification.
Around 1100 BC the Mycenaean civilisation collapsed. Numerous cities were sacked and the region entered what historians see as a dark age. During this period Greece experienced decreasing population and they lost their literacy. Historians have traditionally blamed this decline on an invasion by another wave of Greek people, the Dorians, although the historical validity of this theory is now doubted.
Greek Dark Ages
The Greek Dark Ages (ca. 1200 BC-800 BC) refers to the period of Greek prehistory from the presumed Dorian invasion and end of the Mycenaean civilization in the 11th century BC to the rise of the first Greekcity-states in the 9th century BC and the epics of Homer and earliest writings in alphabeticGreek in the 8th century BC.
The Mycenaean collapse coincided with the fall of several large empires in the near east, most notably the Hittite and the Egyptian. The cause may be an invasion of the sea people wielding iron weapons. When the Dorians came down into Greece they also were equipped with superior iron weapons, easily dispersing the already weakened Mycenaeans. The period after these events is collectively known as the Greek Dark Ages.
Archaeology shows a collapse of civilization in the Greek world in this period. The great palaces and cities of the Myceneans were destroyed or abandoned. The Greek language ceased to be written. Greek dark age pottery has simple geometric designs and lacks the figurative decoration of Mycenean ware. The Greeks of the dark age lived in fewer and smaller settlements, suggesting famine and depopulation, and foreign goods have not been found at archaeological sites, suggesting minimum international trade. Contact was also lost between foreign powers during this period, yielding little cultural progress or growth of any sort.
Kings ruled throughout this period until eventually they were replaced with an aristocracy, then still later, in some areas, an aristocracy within an aristocracy -- an elite of the elite. Warfare shifted from a focus on cavalry to a great emphasis on infantry. Due to its cheapness of production and local availability, iron replaced bronze as the metal of choice in the manufacturing of tools and weapons. Slowly equality grew among the different sects of people, leading to the dethronement of the various Kings and the rise of the family.
Families began to reconstruct their past in attempts to link their bloodlines with heroes from the Trojan War, more specifically Heracles. While most of this was legend, some were sorted by poets of the school of Hesiod. Most of these poems are lost, though, but some famous "storywriters", as they were called, were Hecataeus of Miletus and Acusilaus of Argos.
It is thought that the epics by Homer contain a certain amount of tradition preserved orally during the Dark Ages period. The historical validity of Homer's writings is vigorously disputed; see the article on Troy for a discussion.
At the end of this period of stagnation the Greek civilization was engulfed in a renaissance that spread the Greek world as far as the Black Sea and Spain. Writing was relearned from the Phoenicians, eventually spreading north into Italy and the Gauls.
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is the term used to describe the Greek-speaking world in ancient times. It refers not only to the territory of the present Greek state, but also to those areas settled in ancient times by Greeks: Cyprus, the Aegean coast of Turkey (then known as Ionia), Sicily and southern Italy (known as Great Greece), and the scattered Greek settlements on the coasts of what are now Albania, Bulgaria, Egypt, France, Libya, Romania, Spain, and Ukraine.
There are no fixed or universally agreed dates for the beginning or the end of the Ancient Greek period. In common usage it refers to all Greek history before the Roman Empire, but historians use the term more precisely. Some writers include the periods of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations (from about 1600 BC to about 1100 BC), while others argue that these civilizations, while Greek-speaking, were so different from later Greek cultures that they should be classed separately.
The Parthenon is the most famous surviving building of Ancient Greece and one of the most famous buildings in the world.
Traditionally, the Ancient Greek period was taken to begin with the date of the first Olympic Games in 776 BC, but most historians now extend the term back to about 1000 BC. The traditional date for the end of the Ancient Greek period is the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC. The following period is classed Hellenistic.
These dates are historians' conventions and some writers treat the Ancient Greek civilization as a continuum running until the advent of Christianity in the third century AD.
Ancient Greece is considered by most historians to be the foundational culture of Western Civilization. Greek culture greatly influenced the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of Europe. Ancient Greek civilization has been immensely influential on the language, politics, educational systems, philosophy, art and architecture of the modern world, particularly during the Renaissance in Western Europe and again during various neo-Classical revivals in 18th and 19th century Europe and The Americas.
Hellenistic Greece
Philip V of Macedon, "the darling of Hellas", wearing the royaldiadem
The Hellenistic period of Greek history was the period between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the annexation of the Greek peninsula and islands by Rome in 146 BC. Although the establishment of Roman rule did not break the continuity of Hellenistic society and culture, which remained essentially unchanged until the advent of Christianity, it did mark the end of Greek political independence.
During the Hellenistic period the importance of "Greece proper" (that is, the territory of modern Greece) and of its exclusive colonies within the Greek-speaking world declined sharply. The great centres of Hellenistic culture were Alexandria and Antioch, capitals of Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleucid Syria respectively, more then Athens and Corinth. See Hellenistic civilization for the history of Greek culture outside of Greece in this period.
Roman Rule and Middle Ages
Militarily Greece itself declined to the point that the Romans conquered the land (168 BC onwards), though Greek culture would in turn conquer Roman life. Greece became a province of the Roman Empire, but Greek culture would continue to dominate the eastern Mediterranean and when the Empire finally split in two the Eastern or Byzantine Empire, centered on Constantinople, would remain Greek in nature, as well as encompassing Greece itself. From the 4th century to the 15th century the Eastern Roman Empire survived eleven centuries of attacks from the west and east until Constantinople fell on May 29, 1453 to the Ottoman Empire. Greece proper had gradually been conquered by the Ottomans during the 15th century.
Ottoman Rule
When the Ottomans arrived, two Greek migrations occurred. The first entailed the Greek intelligentsia migrating to Western Europe and influencing the advent of the Renaissance. The second migration entailed Greeks leaving the plains of the Greek peninsula and resettling in the mountains. Greece being mostly mountainous, the Ottomans could not conquer the entire Greek peninsula since they did not create either a military or administrative presence in the mountains. There existed many Greek mountain clans all across the peninsula and islands.
The Sphakiots of Crete, the Souliots (or Souli) of Epirus, and the Mani (or Maniots) of Peloponnesus were the most resilient mountain clans throughout the Ottoman Empire. By the end of the 16th century up until the 17th century, many Greeks began to migrate from the mountains to the plains. The millet system contributed to the ethnic cohesion of Orthodox Greeks by segregating the various peoples within the Ottoman Empire based on religion. The Greek Orthodox Church, an ethno-religious institution recognized as their only representative (with the patriarch as Ethnarch) by the Ottomans, helped the Greeks from all geographical areas of the peninsula (i.e. mountains, plains, and islands) to preserve their ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and racial heritage during the harsh years of Ottoman rule.
The Greeks living in the plains during Ottoman occupation were either Christians who dealt with the burdens of foreign rule or Crypto-Christians (Greek Muslims who were secret practitioners of the Greek Orthodox faith). Many Greeks became Crypto-Christians in order to avoid heavy taxes and at the same time express their identity by maintaining their secret ties to the Greek Orthodox Church. However, Greeks who converted to Islam and were not Crypto-Christians were deemed Turks in the eyes of Orthodox Greeks.
Creation of the modern Greek state
The Ottomans ruled Greece until the early 19th century. In 1821, the Greeks rebelled and declared their independence, but did not succeed until 1829. The elites of powerful European nations saw the war of Greek independence, with its accounts of Turkish atrocities, in a romantic light (for example, the 1824 painting Massacre of Chios by Eugene Delacroix).
Scores of non-Greeks volunteered to fight for the cause--including, for example Lord Byron--and indeed at times the Ottomans seemed on the point of almost entirely suppressing the Greek revolution but for the threatened direct military intervention of France, England or Russia. The Russian minister for foreign affairs, Ioannis Kapodistrias, himself a Greek, returned home as President of the new Republic following Greek independence. That republic disappeared when a few years later Western powers helped turn Greece into a monarchy, the first king coming from Bavaria and the second from Denmark.
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, in a series of wars with the Ottomans, Greece sought to enlarge its boundaries to include the ethnic Greek population of the Ottoman Empire, slowly growing in territory and population until it reached its present configuration in 1947. In World War I, Greece sided with the entente powers against Turkey and the other Central Powers. In the war's aftermath, the Great Powers awarded parts of Asia Minor to Greece, including the city of Smyrna (known as Izmir today) which had a large Greek population. At that time, however, the Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, overthrew the Ottoman government, organised a military assault on the Greek troops, and defeated them. Immediately afterwards, hundreds of thousands of Turks then living in mainland Greek territory left for Turkey as an exchange with hundreds of thousands of Greeks living in Turkey.
Despite the country's numerically small and ill-equipped armed forces, Greece made a decisive contribution to the Allied efforts in World War II. At the start of the war Greece sided with the Allies and refused to give in to Italian demands. Italy invaded Greece on 28 October1940, but Greek troops repelled the invaders after a bitter struggle (see Greco-Italian_War). This marked the first Allied victory in the war. Hitler then reluctantly stepped in, primarily to secure his strategic southern flank: troops from Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria and Italy successfully invaded Greece, overcoming Greek, British, Australia and New Zealand units.
However, when the Germans attempted to seize Crete in a massive attack by paratroops - with the aim of reducing the threat of a counter-offensive by Allied forces in Egypt - Allied forces, along with Cretan civilians, offered fierce resistance. Although Crete eventually fell, this delayed German plans significantly, with the result that the German invasion of the Soviet Union started fatally close to winter.
During years of Nazi occupation, thousands of Greeks died in direct combat, in concentration camps or of starvation. The occupiers murdered the greater part of the Jewish community despite efforts by the Greek Orthodox Church and many Christian Greeks to shelter Jews. The economy languished. After liberation, Greece experienced an equally bitter civil war-between communists and royalists-that lasted until 1949.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Greece continued to develop slowly, initially with the help of the U.S. Marshall Plans' grants and loans, and later through growth in the tourism sector. In 1967, the Greek military seized power in a coup d'etat and overthrew the right-wing government of Panayiotis Kanellopoulos and established what became known as the Regime of the Colonels. The Central Intelligence Agency was suspected in involvement in the coup. The new regime in Athens was supported by the U.S.A. In 1973, the regime abolished the Greek monarchy. In 1974, dictator Papadopoulos denied help to the USA and rumor has it that as a result the US, through Kissinger's efforts, initiated a second coup. Colonel Ioannides was appointed as the new head-of-state.
Many hold Ioannides responsible for the coup against President Makarios of Cyprus -- the coup seen as the pretext for the first wave of the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974; see: the 1974 crisis between Greece and Turkey. The Cyprus events and the outcry following a bloody suppression of Athens Polytechnic uprising in Athens led to the implosion of the military regime. A charismatic exiled politician, Konstantinos Karamanlis, returned from Paris as interim prime minister and later gained re-election for two further terms at the head of the conservativeNea Dimokratia party. In 1975, following a referendum to confirm the deposition of King Constantine II, a democratic republican constitution came into force. Another previously exiled politician, Andreas Papandreou also returned and founded the socialistPASOK party, which won the elections in 1981 and dominated the country's political course for almost two decades.
Since the restoration of democracy, the stability and economic prosperity of Greece have grown. Greece joined the European Union in 1981 and adopted the Euro as its currency in 2001. New infrastructure, funds from the EU and growing revenues from tourism, shipping, services, light industry and the telecommunications industry have brought Greeks an unprecedented standard of living. Tensions continue to exist between Greece and Turkey over Cyprus and the delimitation of borders in the Aegean Sea but relations have considerably thawed following successive earthquakes - first in Turkey and then in Greece - and an outpouring of sympathy and generous assistance by ordinary Greeks and Turks.
Source: Wikipeida
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