LECTURE 9: THE GREEK

CIVILIZATION
Greek Civilization, in Brief
A body politic, a political system with laws fashioned by the people and with
guaranteed participation for citizens.
The Greeks developed a civil culture that broke with the Near Eastern traditions of
monarchy. (Mesopotamia: Iraq & Syria; Anatolia: Turkey; Levant: Syria, Lebanon, Israel,
Palestine, & Jordan; Persia: Iran; Egypt)
In Athens the government was a democracy in which the male citizens themselves, not
their representatives, made political decisions directly. This democracy allowed no role
for women, foreigners, or slaves.
The fifth and fourth (BC) centuries witnessed an extraordinary flowering of intellectual
and artistic achievement.
Alexander the great, went on to conquer Egypt, Persia, and vast stretches of Asia
Minor.
The last decades of the fourth century (BC) the Greeks, having lost the world of the
independent polis, embraced the larger world of Alexander’s empire, which brought
them into contact with other peoples.
The Greek language took deeper roots in the Near East and ultimately became the
language for the Christian New Testament.
 The Greeks, the people who spoke and imported
the Greek language, began to settle in Greece
about 2000 B.C., arriving from the Balkan areas to
the north; they were members of the general family
of Indo-Europeans who started to migrate into
Europe at an uncertain time, perhaps around 5000
B.C.
 Chronology
 Phase 1
 3000 – 1100 B.C.: Crete and early Greece
 1600 – 1100 B.C.: Mycenean Civilization
 1100 – 800 B.C.: The Dark Age
 Phase 2
 800 – 600 B.C.: The Greek Renaissance
 700 – 400 B.C.: The Economy of the Poleis
 Phase 3
 500 – 323 B.C.: Classical Period
 331 – 323 B.C.: Alexander the Great
 Phase 4
 332 – 30 B.C.: Hellenistic Age
Crete and Early Greece (3000 – 1100
B.C.)
 The first important society in the Greek world
developed on the island of Crete, just south of the
Aegean Sea. The people of Crete were not Greek;
they probably came from eastern Asia Minor well
before 3000 B.C.
Cretan Civilization
 Source of Cretan civilization is archaeological evidence
found in a villa at Knossos known as the palace of
Minos, often called Minoan. The myth suggests that
Greeks had at least a dim recollection of a ruler called
Minos, the powerful king who “cleared the seas of
piracy, captured islands, and placed his sons in control
over them”. The palace of Minos was built over a period
of about 700 years from ca. 2200 to ca. 1500 B.C.
 Much of the wealth of Crete came from trade, and
Cretan pottery has been found far and wide throughout
the Mediterranean world. About a dozen sites in the
Greek world, probably trading posts, are called Minoa,
obviously named after Minos.
“Marine Style” vase on the top and
“late minoan ii” on the right.
Crete and the Greeks
 Minoan civilization reached its height between
1550 and 1400 B.C. Greek art of this period shows
Minoan influence, and at least two Greek goddess:
Athena and Artemis, were probably adopted from
Crete.
Cretan Writing
 The Minoans also had interchange with the Greeks
through writing. Clay tablets have been found at
Knossos in two similar scripts, called Linear A and
Linear B. Both scripts are syllabic: each symbol
represents a sound, such as ko, rather than a letter
of an alphabet.
 The language written in Linear A, the older script
(used ca. 1700-1500 B.C.), has not yet been
deciphered; but Linear B, the younger of the two
scripts (used ca. 1450-1400 B.C., has been
deciphered as an early form of Greek.
Linear A on the left & Linear B on the right.
The Collapse
 About 1380 B.C., a catastrophe, whose causes are
uncertain, engulfed Knossos and other Cretan cities;
several of the stately palaces were burned or
destroyed. A massive earthquake shook the island
at this time, but the disaster may also have been
connected with a quarrel or rebellion against Greek
rule.
 Mycenaean Civilization (1600 B.C. –
1100 B.C.)
 By about 1600 B.C., the Greeks had created
wealthy, fortified cities, among which the most
prominent was Mycenae, built on a huge citadel in
the Peloponnese. The years from 1600 to 1100
B.C. are therefore often called the Mycenaean
Age. Between 1400 and 1200 B.C.
 Mycenae reached the height of its prosperity and
created the most imposing monuments in Bronze
Age Greece. A mighty decorated gateway with a
relief of lions carved over it, known as the Lion
Gate, formed the entrance to the walled citadel.
 The Dark Age
 The period 1100 – 800 B.C. is called the Dark Age of
Greece, because throughout the area was sharp
cultural decline: less elegant pottery, simple burials,
and no massive buildings. Even the art of writing in
Linear B vanished.
 However, farming, weaving, making pottery, the
Greek language in spoken form, and other skills
survived.
The Greek Renaissance (ca. 800 – 600
B.C.)
 With the passing of time, Greek culture revived
after the Dark Age and entered period of
extraordinary artistic and intellectual vitality. Poetry
and art broke new frontiers; the economy
expanded, partly through overseas colonization;
and the polis, or independent city-state, emerged.
Greek Religion
 The Greeks brought with them, during their earliest
immigration around 2000 B.C., the worship of some of
their gods, above all, Zeus, the sky god, whose name is
Indo-European; his counterparts are Dyaus in early
India, Jupiter in Rome, and Tiu in Norse myths. Other
gods were adapted from other regions: Apollo, the son
god, from western Asia Minor; Aphrodite, goddess of
love, from Cyprus; Athena, goddess of wisdom, and
Artemis, the hunter goddess, from Crete.
 At a much later stage, Greeks adopted some Egyptian
gods (Isis, for example).
Zeus: god of thunder & king of all gods
Hades: god of underworld & death
Poseidon: god of sea & horse
Apollo: god of sun
Artemis: goddess of hunting
Goddess of war & wisdom
 The Relationship of Greeks to Their
Gods
 Greek gods are anthropomorphic: That is, they are
human-like superbeings, different from people only in
their physical perfection and immortality. The Greeks
never developed a code of behavior prescribed by
religion, as Israel did. Greek religion had no spirit of
evil and scarcely any demanding spirits of good.
 Greeks had priests and priestesses for their temples
and smaller shrines but no priestly class that intervened
in politics.
 Religion and civic life were intertwined, and the
beautiful temples all over Greece were built by
decision of the governing power, but not at the orders
of priests or viziers.
The Debate over Black Athena
 Martin Bernal, in Black Athena, has set forth the
challenging thesis that Greek civilization and even much
of the Greek language rest on cultural borrowings from
Egypt and the Levant from about 2100 to about 1100
B.C. Bernal stated:
◼ “It is generally agreed that the Greek language was formed
during the 17th and 16th century B.C. Its Indo-European structure
and basic lexicon are combined with a non-Indo-European
vocabulary of sophistication. I am convinced that much of the later
can be plausibly derived from Egyptian and West Semitic. This
would fit very well with a long period of domination by Egypto-
semitic conquerors. I discuss some of the equations made between
specific Greek and Egyptian divinities and rituals, and the general
belief that the Egyptian were the earlier forms and that Egyptian
religion was the original one.” (p.23)
 In response, Lefkowitz and Rogers stated:
◼ “Archaeologists,linguists, historians, and literary critics have
the gravest reservations about the scholarly methods used in
Black Athena. Archaeologists cite a constant misconstruing of
facts and conclusions and misinterpretation of such
archaeological evidence as there is … . Linguists see
Bernal’s methods as little more than a series of assertive
guesses, often bordering on the fantastic.”
Public Games
 Founding of Panhellenic athletic games in 776 B.C.:
beginning of the ‘historic’ period of Greek
civilization.
 The first games were held at Olympia, in the
Peloponnese, and were dedicated to Zeus.
Originally, the Olympics featured only foot races
and wrestling, but gradually they came to include
horse and chariot races, boxing, javelin throwing,
and other events.
Colonization
 They colonized vigorously from ca. 750 to ca. 550
B.C., and by the end of this period Greeks were
spread through the Mediterranean.
Greek Colonization
ca.750-550bc
Literature
 The greatest literary creations of the Greek are the
two epic poems: the Iliad and the Odyssey. Greek
legend explained the war by the romantic story in
about the seduction by a Trojan prince of Helen, the
wife of a king of Sparta.
 The Iliad is a portrait – in rolling, majestic verse – of
a warrior aristocracy in which greatness in combat is
the highest virtue. The Iliad is essentially a poem
about men and women.
 The Odyssey, by contrast, celebrates cleverness
rather than sheer military prowess.
Homer
 Organization and Government
 The most important event in the Greek Renaissance was the
emergence, soon after 800 B.C., of the independent city-state, the
polis. Physically, the polis had a central inhabited area, often
surrounding a citadel called the acropolis (high city). The acropolis
came to be reserved for temples, shrines, treasuries, and other
official buildings. The polis was a community of both male and
female citizens. Male citizen could vote, but female could not.
 Example: Sparta’s Government
 The public assembly included all members over the age of thirty,
who elected a council of twenty-eight elders over age sixty to
serve for life and to plan business for the assembly. The assembly
also chose five overseer each year; they receive foreign delegates,
summoned the assembly to meet, and in gerneral acted as a check
on the power of the king.
 Slavery was accepted and was justified by philosophers like
Aristotle, who asserted that nature had divided humanity into
natural masters and natural slaves.
The Invasion of Persians
 The First Persian attack: The Persians first attacked
(492 B.C. – 490 B.C.) Eretria, on the island of
Euboea, and then landed in Attica on the beach at
Marathon. At a later legend told of an Athnian,
Eucles, who ran back to Athens in his armor with the
good news; he cried out “Hail, we rejoice”, and
dropped dead (the origin of the marathon race). (if
possible picture from net)
 The second War (480 B.C. – 479 B.C.) they failed to
Themistocles’ brilliant trick.
First Persian
War
 Second
Persian War
 The Peloponnesian War (430- 405
B.C.)
 According to British Historian, Lord Acton stated as
Historical laws, “power tends to corrupt”. The
Athenian empire, which had emerged out of the
heroic victory in the Persian Wars, became more
and more domination over its subject states – its
former allies. This movement and the resentment
that it caused brought about the long war that
sealed the doom of the Greek city-states.

 Between Athens and Sparta (431 to 405 B.C.),

Sparta turns to be a strong state in the region.
 Endnote
 Looking back at fifth century B.C., we can see that,
in the interstate politics, the Greek poleis made little
constructive use of their brilliant victory over the
invaders from Persia. Freed of a foreign enemy,
they divided themselves into two blocs that turned
against one another and, like characters in a Greek
tragedy, involved themselves in the catastrophe of
the Peloponnesian War.
 Greek Culture
 In less than two centuries Greek society went
through an amazing transformation in the areas of
drama, historical writing, and philosophy.
 Greek Tragedy
 One of the most lasting achievements of the fifth century
B.C. was the creation and perfection of a new literary and
theatrical form, tragedy. Greek dramas were first
appeared in Athens, at religious festivals honoring the god
Dionysus. Celebrations were marked by dancing, addressed
increasingly profound moral issues.
 The writers of tragedies derived most of their plots from
tales of gods and heroes in Greek mythology; therefore
drama never lost its close connection with religion.
 Their central themes include questions fundamental to all
religions: What is humanity’s relationship to the gods? What
is justice? And if the gods are just, why do they allow people
to suffer?
Masks represent comedy &
tragedy.
Dionysus

Experts say that the

above remain is of
Dionysus
 Historical Writing
 Writing history, a new literary form to explain
human condition developed by the Greeks.
 Herodotus, a Greek from Asia Minor, is rightly
called the “Father of History”. In fact, it was the
constant wars in the 5th century B.C. prompted him
to seek to explain why war was their perpetual
companion. Not only Herodotus but many more, for
example, Thucydides also used PW as a source of
data to describe the war history.
Herodotus
Thucydides
 Philosophy
 The supreme intellectual invention of the Greeks is
the search for knowledge called philosophy.
 - use of reason to discover why things are as they are.
 - they began to suspect that there was an order in the
universe beyond manipulation by the gods – and that
human beings could discover it.
 - soon after 600 B.C. certain Milesians raised a
profound question: What exists?
 Philosopher Thales taught that everything in the whole
universe was made of water, a notion that echoes
Babylonian myths of a primeval flood.
 Anaximander, held that the origin of everything was an
infinite body of matter, which he called “the boundless”.
 Pythagoras, who developed a strikingly different theory to
explain the order of the world. He saw the key to all
existence in mathematics and approached the universe
through the study of numbers. He said, ‘all objects are
similar to numbers’, ‘objects always contain a numerically
balanced arrangement of parts’. His theory is remarkably
similar to the modern discoveries of mathematical
relationships within all things, including even the genetic
code in our bodies.
Thales, Anaximander & Pythagoras
 Democritus, world as made up of invisibly small
particles, or atoms (a-toma in Greek meaning
‘things that cannot be divided’. Death, according
to this theory, leads simply to the redistribution of
the atoms that make up our body and soul and thus
need hold no terror for humanity.
 The Sophists: challenged nearly all accepted
beliefs. Human beings and their perceptions are
the only measure of whether a thing exists at all.
Customs and law of nature are not same.
Democritus
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle
 Rise of Macedonia
 The Rise of Philip
 Alexander the Great
The Rise of Philip
Alexander the Great
 The Hellenistic Age (323 – 30 B.C.)

 Euclid ( about 300 B.C.)

 Archimedes ( - 212 B.C.)
Discussion