Greece
Publié le 17/01/2022
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Today, a nation in southeastern Europe,
part of the Balkan Peninsula. This country's official
name is the Hellenic Republic, and the people who
live there call their country "Ellas" or "Hellas." These
names reflect images of the ancient past of this part of
the Mediterranean world. Greek comes from Graeci,
the name the Latin-speaking people of Italy gave
to colonists from across the Ionian Sea. The word
Hellenic refers to the god Hellen, ancestor of the
ancient peoples of the southern Balkan Peninsula
and the name the people of this land gave themselves
from ancient times.
People have inhabited the land that is now Greece
from prehistoric times. Archaeologists have discovered
Stone Age farming settlements on this peninsula
from as long ago as 6500 b.c. The ruins of towns and
villages built during the early and middle Bronze Age
(3000 to 1600 b.c.) are also quite common. Evidence
from all of these sites shows that, during the Bronze
Age, the people of Greece began trading extensively
with neighbors on Crete and in Asia Minor and the
Middle East.
In the late Bronze Age (1600 to 1150 b.c.), the
first true cities and small kingdoms appeared, many
of them on the southern part of the peninsula, an
area known as the Peloponnesus. Here and in this
age, the first significant power centers of ancient
Greece developed. The city of Mycenae grew into a
major trading and military center on the northeastern
side of the Peloponnesus, not far from the Isthmus
of Corinth. Agamemnon, one of the great heroes
of Greek legends, was king of this city, according to
Homer's Iliad and other ancient sources. This city
also gave its name to the first great age of Greece, the
Mycenaean Age.
Homer, the Greek poet credited with writing the
Iliad and the Odyssey, lived and wrote, according to
the best scholarly evidence, around 1050 to 700 b.c.,
a time known as the Archaic Age of Greek history.
His subject matter, though, was the Mycenaean Age
and the heroes and warriors of that time. The first
people who worshiped the gods and goddesses that
Homer wrote about lived in a time that left few if any
written records, but their stories were preserved by
the developing Greek culture. More than a century of
archaeology has revealed much about this mythology
and about the lives of the people who believed in
these gods.
The great Classical Age of Greece began about
490 b.c. It was separated from the Mycenaean Age by
a dark age of conflict and by the Archaic Age, including
the time of Homer, from 750 to 490 b.c. During
the Classical age, people built great temples to the
gods, poets and dramatists drew upon the myths of
the Greek religion to write their great works, and
artists carved statues and fashioned jewelry to commemorate
the gods. The Classical Age was the height
of cultural development.
During all of its history, Greece was a collection
of city-states, or small communities, rather than a
nation. These communities organized around individual
political ideals, but the people of this peninsula
shared a great deal of culture and trade. They shared
a common language and common beliefs in the great
pantheon of Zeus and the Olympian Gods. Though
city-states waged war with one another as well as
the people of other lands around the Mediterranean,
the people found it easy to travel between cities and
towns to visit religious sites such as Apollo's Oracle
at Delphi, and to conduct business.
The Hellenistic Age followed the Classical Age.
It began with the conquests of Philip III and his son
Alexander the Great. This age represented the spread
of Greek culture from Spain in the west to Pakistan
in the east. People living in Greek colonies around
the Mediterranean Sea helped spread the concepts of
civilization to other people, greatly influencing the
lives of people of other cultures. By the end of this
period, the Romans had spread their political and
military influence to this neighboring peninsula and
made Greece part of the Roman Empire.
Liens utiles
- Ancient Greece - history.
- Ixion Greek King of the Lapiths in Thessaly, the largest ancient region of north-central Greece.
- Pythian Games Greek A sacred rite enacted in ancient Greece to honor the ancient serpentmonster, Python, slain by the god Apollo.
- Lapiths (plural: Lapithae) Greek Mythical people of Thessaly, in north-central Greece.
- Magna Graecia (Great Greece) Greek The collective name given to Greek colonies founded by settlers in southern Italy and the island of Sicily.