The Making of Ancient Greece

Greece, with its innumerable harbors, bays, gulfs, and chains of islands, was from the beginning a land of seafarers. The early civilization that grew up around the Aegean Sea, possibly from Phoenician colonization, benefited from contact with the older cultures of Mesopotamia and Egypt.

The earliest Aegean civilization had its center in the island of Crete and is called Minoan for Minos, a legendary Cretan king. Minoan civilization developed about 2500 B.C. and dominated the Aegean world by the middle of the 16th century B.C. Its most important city was Knossos. The Minoans colonized many Aegean islands and established cities on the east coast of Asia Minor and in Greece.

On the Greek mainland another civilization developed when, between 2000 and 1700 B.C., the Achaeans, a Greek-speaking people, migrated from the north and settled. Their civilization became known as the Mycenaean after the name of their principal city, Mycenae. Historians also often refer to the Achaeans as Mycenaeans. Sometime in the 1400's the Minoan civilization disappeared, possibly destroyed by an invasion of Achaeans. Much of the culture, however, having been adopted by the Achaeans, survived.

By 1200 B.C., trade was flourishing between the Achaeans and other peoples in the Mediterranean. One of the cities with which they traded was Troy (or Ilium) in Asia Minor. A dispute developed about 1194 B.C., and the Achaeans laid siege to Troy, which fell after 10 years. Centuries later, the Trojan War was the subject of two epic poems, The Iliad and The Odyssey, attributed to Homer. These epics provide a record of the heroes, places, customs, and beliefs of the last stage of Mycenaean civilization.

The Achaean language eventually evolved into three dialects—Aeolian, Ionian, and Arcadian. The inhabitants of Greece came to be identified by the dialect they used. The Aeolians lived in Thessaly and central Greece; the Ionians in Boeotia, Attica, and Euboea; and the Arcadians in the Peloponnesus.

Another great wave of Indo-Europeans swept into the Greek peninsula around 1100 B.C. These were the Dorians, barbarians who destroyed everything in their path. Mycenae was burned, and the last traces of the old Minoan culture were wiped out. Much of the Achaean population fled to the Aegean islands and Asia Minor. The Aeolians settled in the northern section of the islands and coastline, the Ionians in the center. The Dorians themselves occupied the south. Attica was the only division on the mainland bypassed by the Dorian invasion.

The next 300 years or so are often referred to as the Dark Age. It was a time of warfare and migrations. There is almost no record of events of this period. However, one development of supreme importance was the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet. The Greeks improved it and eventually passed it on, by way of Rome, to the Western world. Of importance also was the gradual blending of various population elements into one nationality. The Greeks—or Hellenes, as they called themselves—who emerged in history from the seventh century B.C. onward shared a common language, religion, and body of legend.