Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Ancient Greece is one of the oldest and longest lasting civilizations in the world. Greek cultural influence spread throughout the Mediterranean, and with Alexander the Great’s conquests it spread as far as India.
The origin of Greek civilization is different from some of the earlier civilizations. For one, the geography of Greece made unification extremely difficult. There was no major river to center around, like the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia or the Indus River in the Harappan civilization. Greece was incredibly mountainous, creating natural barriers between villages. This created very separate groups of people with individual cultures developing. There was a shared language and a general shared religion, but the details of how each village, by then called city-states, ran themselves was very different. Sparta, for example, was a military city-state ruled by monarchs and Athens was a sanctuary of learning and ruled by a democracy. Land became the most important resource, as economies of all city-states depend on agriculture instead of trade. This led to the rise of colonization, which was an easy solution to acquiring more land, which was obviously a finite resource in Greece itself. Between 750 BCE and 600 BCE, Greek colonies sprang up all across the Mediterranean region, including throughout Asia Minor, North Africa, and the coast of the Black Sea. Each of these colonies were independent from their originating city-states, though the cultures of each was influenced by the original city-state. The artifacts left behind are only the surface of what ancient Greece has provided the modern world. Ancient Greece was the first to create and establish a democratic government and the alphabet that we use has its routes in ancient Greece. The Olympics, mythology, science/math theories, and the theater are a few more examples.