The First Persian war began when Persia sent an invasion force into Athens in retaliation for its participation in a Greek raid on Persia. The Greeks defeated the Persians in the Battle of Marathon. The Parthenon was completed. The temple was built in Athens to house a statue of Goddess Athena so that she could watch over the city. Athens lost the Peloponnesian Wars.
The Athenian democratic government was removed and replaced by a ruling body of 30 tyrants. The philosopher Socrates, founder of philosophy, was charged with impiety being disrespectful to the Gods he was found guilty and executed.
They excavated in pairs, always with one person on watch, ready to cover precious items if someone approached. And yet it was impossible not to feel elated, too. It was like, Oh my god, what will come next?! The discovery of a golden cup, as lovely as the day it was made, proved an emotional moment.
If you forget that, it becomes an exercise in removing things from the ground. In late June , the scheduled end to their season came and went, and a skeleton began to emerge—a man in his early 30s, his skull flattened and broken and a silver bowl on his chest. Stocker got used to working alongside him in that cramped space, day after day in the blazing summer sun. Griffin, help me to be careful. In August, Stocker ended up in the local medical clinic with heatstroke.
In September, she was rewarded with a gold-and-agate necklace that the archaeologists had spent four months trying to liberate from the earth. By November, the grave was finally empty. Every gram of soil had been dissolved in water and passed through a sieve, and the three-dimensional location of every last bead photographed and recorded.
Inside, the room is packed with white tables, wooden drawers, and countless shelves of skulls and pots: the results of decades of excavations in this region. Still the organizational force behind the Pylos project, Stocker looks after not just the human members of the team but a troupe of adopted animals, including the mascot, a sleek gray cat named Nestor, which she rescued from the middle of the road when he was 4 weeks old.
She opens box after box to show their contents—one holds hundreds of individually labeled plastic bags, each containing a single bead. Another yields seal stones carved with intricate designs: three reclining bulls; a griffin with outstretched wings.
From separate wrappings of acid-free paper she reveals a bronze dagger, a knife with a large, square blade perhaps used for sacrifices and a great bronze sword, its hilt decorated with thousands of minute fragments of gold. From jewelry to gilded weapons, a sampling of the buried artifacts researchers are using to fill in the details about the social currents in Greece at the time the griffin warrior lived By 5W Infographics; Research by Virginia Mohler.
One is the individual story of this man—who he was, when he lived, what role he played in local events. The other story is broader—what he tells us about the larger world and the crucial shifts in power taking place at that moment in history.
Analyses of the skeleton show that this something dignitary stood around five-and-a-half feet, tall for a man of his time. Combs found in the grave imply that he had long hair. Davis and Stocker are also planning DNA tests and isotope analyses that they hope will provide information about his ethnic and geographic origins. At first, the researchers struggled to precisely date his burial.
Soil layers are usually dated based on the shifting styles of ceramics; this grave held no pottery at all. Davis and Stocker believe that the tholos tomb at Pylos was still in use at this time. If the warrior was in fact an important figure, perhaps even a leader, why was he buried in a separate shaft grave, and not in the tholos?
Bennet, on the other hand, speculates that contrasting burial practices in such close proximity may represent separate local family groups vying for supremacy. On Crete, Minoan palaces across the island burned along with many villas and towns, although precisely why they did remains unknown.
Only the main center of Knossos was restored for posterity, but with its art, architecture and even tombs adopting a more mainland style. But over the centuries, the trees were cut down for firewood, lumber and to make room for farms. Today, forests can be found mainly in the Pindus and Rhodope mountain ranges. The long coastline and clear waters make Greece an ideal location to spot lots of cool sea life, including starfish, sea anemones, sponges and seahorses.
Snorkels at the ready! Greece is home to lots of fascinating plant life, too. These plants include fragrant herbs such as thyme, rosemary, oregano, and bay and myrtle trees.
Bird watching is also popular in Greece, where geese, ducks and swallows stop over during their migration from Africa to Europe.
The first great civilisation in Greece was the Minoan culture on the island of Crete , around B. In B. During ancient times, the country was divided into city-states ruled by noblemen.
The largest were Athens, Sparta, Thebes and Corinth. Each state controlled the territory around a single city, and they were often at war with each other. Athens became the most powerful city-state and in B. But during that time, only men were allowed to vote! The first Olympic Games were held in the southern city of Olympia in B.
Only men could compete in the events such as sprinting, long jump, discus, javelin, wrestling and chariot racing. In the 2nd century B. The Romans conquered the Greeks in B.
But in , following the Greek Revolution , Greece won independence. For other serious crimes, including manslaughter, exile was a common punishment. For lesser crimes, fines or confiscation of property were used. In all courts, cases were tried by large juries of citizens, selected by lot, and presided over by a magistrate. Any citizen could bring charges against another. The accuser put his case, and the accused then defended himself.
The jurors cast their vote as they left court by each dropping a pebble into a jar for guilty or for innocent. A board of eleven magistrates was responsible, with the help of a body of slaves, for maintaining law and order, arresting wrong-doers and supervising prisons which were mainly used for condemned prisoners awaiting execution.
Although we know little about Greek law, there can be no doubt that Greek law would have a profound influence on Roman law , not least in the fact that the earliest laws of the Romans were inscribed on stone tablets and set up in a public place. As time went by, most city-states of Greece did in fact give up a measure of their much-prized independence to form alliances with one another, against joint enemies.
They did this often voluntarily, but sometimes under coercion. The most famous of these alliances were the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League, led by Athens and Sparta respectively. The Delian League originated as a defensive alliance against the Persian threat, being founded in the early fifth century.
However, as time went by, Athens became more and more dominant, treating the other league cities more as subjects than as equals. This behavior eventually helped lead to the downfall of the League click here for more in this period of Athenian history.
The Peloponnesian league was founded much earlier than the Delian, in the 7th century BC, and endured much longer. Its chief city, Sparta, had achieved its position of leadership largely through military means; however, the League served the interests of the other cities by offering them effective protection from non-League enemies. Also, Sparta made sure that League cities were under aristocratic regimes which tended to be in favor of Spartan values click here for more on Sparta and the Peloponnesian League and its later leading role in Greece.
The city-states relied on their own citizens to fight in their armies. Each citizen had to have his own armor and weapons, and spend a certain amount of time undergoing military training. The fact that the Greek world was fragmented into hundreds of small city-states, with only a few thousand citizens each, meant that wars, though frequent, were limited the scale. The duration of campaigns was determined by the need for most of the citizens to return to their farms for harvest time.
Campaigns would therefore often be restricted to summer. Battles were fought between large formations of foot soldiers, fighting at close quarters: the majority of the casualties in a set-piece battle would obviously occur at the front of the two formations; if one of the sides turned and ran a not infrequent occurrence the all were in danger.
Cavalry played a comparatively minor role in Greek warfare. A hoplite fighting a Persian soldier. A hoplite , or heavy-armed infantry soldier, was armed with a spear, large shield, and helmet. Swords might also be carried, but as a secondary weapon. Better-off hoplites would have in addition a bronze breastplate and greaves. These would tend to fight in the front line, the place of most honor. The scale of Greek warfare increased somewhat in the 6th century BC, when groups of city-sates formed alliances.
The most famous of these was the Peloponnesian League, under the leadership of Sparta. These and other leagues the Achaean, the Aetolian increased the scale of Greek warfare further in the 5th and 4th centuries. Large armies were fielded, forces were deployed further from their homes, and campaigns grew longer. Naval warfare became more important, with several city-sates maintaining large fleets of galleys the rowers of these galleys were usually the poorest of the citizens, who could not afford to pay for their own armor.
Blockades and sieges became common. In Hellenistic times the scale of Greek-style warfare would become much larger still. The Greeks worshipped a pantheon of gods and goddesses, headed by the chief of the gods, Zeus. Greek religion placed little emphasis on ethical conduct — stories about the gods portrayed often them as lying, cheating, being unfaithful, getting drunk and so on.
As in many traditional religions, a Greek god or goddess was seen more as a potential source of help, rather than as a focus of devotion. Each city-state had its own festivals, but certain festivals were common to all the Greeks. The most famous of these were the Olympic games, held in honor of Zeus every four years starting traditionally in BC. There were much fewer events than in a modern Olympics, and there were competitions in music and poetry as well as in athletics.
The winner of an Olympic event was awarded an olive wreath and won great honor in his home city. The Greeks often consulted oracles — priests or priestesses at certain shrines who, in a trance, uttered messages from the gods. People would go to oracles for advice and guidance on specific matters. The most famous of these was the oracle at the shrine of Apollo at Delphi. Advice was sought by private individuals as well as by politicians and military commanders.
The Eleusian Mysteries and the cult of Orpheus injected an emotional elements into worship. One joined these through initiation, and their beliefs were secret. Hence we know little about them. However, they stressed the importance of the afterlife — initiates were promised immortality — and the need for ethical standards of behavior were emphasized. Numerous myths have come down to us about the Greeks gods, goddesses and semi-divine heroes.
They also have much to say about the origins and nature of the world. Many of these myths contradict one another, something that the Greeks found no problem with. Most Greek cities did not have publicly-funded schools — Sparta was the exception.
Education was therefore a private affair. Wealthy families would put a boy under the care of a slave who would accompany him everywhere. The boy and the accompanying slave would attend a small school run by a private teacher, who would have a few pupils in his charge. Here, the boy would learn to read and write, and do arithmetic. Later, they learned to sing and play music which for the Greeks included poetry. A slave accompanies his two charges to school. After the age of 12 boys focussed on physical education.
They trained in such sports as the throwing the discus and javelin, running and wrestling. Some wealthy families would also have their girls educated. They would be taught to read, write, and play music; and they were also given also some physical education. After school, older boys underwent military training. The family bought armor and weapons for them, and the young men learnt how to fight effectively in military camps. For boys from wealthy families, training in public speaking would round off their education.
Here, courses involving logic, literature and philosophy were taught. Meanwhile, girls from wealthy families were trained in managing the household.
This would have involved account-keeping, as well as more domestic tasks such as weaving. In fact, how educated a young woman actually became would have depended entirely on her family, and of course her own motivation. Even while the Greeks were emerging from their Dark Ages after the fall of Mycenae c. It was almost certainly first composed in oral form before being written perhaps a hundred years later.
These poems have been studied by western scholars ever since. The Greeks were the first to pioneer the art form of drama. This had its origins in the dances and songs of sacred rites, and was always associated with religious festivals. A chorus chanting words or singing songs replaced the dancers, and originally only one solo actor stood out from the rest. Actors wore different masks to depict various standard moods or characters.
Greek drama included both tragedy and comedy. It reached maturity in 5th century Athens. Aeschylus BC reduced the importance of the chorus, and increased the role of individual actors and dialogue. Sophocles BC took these innovations further, while Euripides BC used dialogue to portray deep human emotions.
The Greeks also pioneered the writing of history as not merely the chronicling of events, but in striving for accuracy, objectivity and meaning in their accounts. Herodotus c. Greek architecture is known for its grace and simplicity. The finest buildings the Greeks erected were their temples; and the most famous of these is the Parthenon, in Athens. Here was located the statue if the god. In front of the cella was the porch, and both porch and cella were surrounded by a colonnade of columns.
These elements went together to form a simple yet gracious building.
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