The Ancient Greeks

The ancient greeks are an ancient civilization, not nearly as ancient as the Egyptians, but old still. Ancient Greek history does significantly overlap with ancient Egyptian history, and given that both civilization lived relatively close to one another, there has been significant contact with the Egyptians.

The ancient Greeks seem to have evolved from the Bronze Age Mycenaean civilization, which collapsed at the end of the Bronze age, along with a great many other civilizations that collapsed at the same time. The ancient Greeks were said to have come from four tribes : The Achaeans, the Aeolians, the Ionians and the Dorians. At first, the Greeks were said to have lost their system of writing that the Mycenaean had, but made a new one using Phoenician script. For much of its history, the ancient Greeks were divided in small regions, each controlled by a city state. Notable city states of ancient Greece were Athens, Sparta, Corinth and Thebes, which eventually rose to prominence over the centuries.

As the Greek population flourished, it caused overpopulation, which prompt them to form colonies on other lands, like Asia Minor, Italy and Sicily. These colonies were not held under the authority of Greek city states, but shared their cultures and religion.

In the 6th century BC, to solve many social and political problems that had plagued the city, Athens started a revolutionary new political structure: Democracy. Athenian democracy assured that every Athenian citizen had as say in the political doings of the city. Of course, citizens were limited to male, native born free man, and so did not exactly represent the entire Athenian population.

At the beginning of the fourth century BC, a major conflict occurred when several ionic city states in Asia Minor decided to rebel against the Persian empire, with the support of Athenians. The Persians, under the leadership of Darius, angered by the Athenians' involvement in the rebellion, sought to conquer Greece. This first attempt by the Persians to conquer Greece was crushed at the Battle of Marathon in 490.

Ten years later, the Persians, now led by Xerxes launched a second campaign to conquer Greece. The Persians crossed through Thrace but were temporarily halted during the legendary battle of Thermopylae, where a small Greek force, lead by the Spartan king Leonidas held off the Persians for three days at the hot gates. Meanwhile, the Greeks blocked the Persians for two days in the naval battle of Artemisium. Despite the Persians' victory at Thermopylae and Artemisium, the Greeks were eventually able to fight back the Persians when the Athenian general Themistocles crushed the Persian fleet at Salamis and the Greeks assembled a massive hoplite army to defeat the Persian land forces at Plataea.

After the war against Persia, Athens become a dominant Greek power and flourished in arts and trade. This golden age was marked by many prominent Greek philosophers like Socrates and Plato.

This Athenian power came to rival Sparta's own power, which caused a massive war between the two city states, which Sparta eventually won.

Decades later, a new powerful Greek kingdom appeared in the north: the Macedonian kingdom, which was led by Philip II. Philip, and his son, Alexander the Great, conquered and united the rest of Greece. Alexander the Great brought his conquest much further, leading the Greeks into countless campaigns in Asia, taking down the Persian empire and conquering all the way to Egypt and India. Although Alexander's empire collapsed shortly after his death, it still helped propagate Greek culture across the world.

This era ended in 146 BC, when Greece was conquered and annexed by the Roman Republic.