UNIT IV: THE ANCIENT GREEKS                                                    back to Greece

   A. The Mediterranean World:

  - the climate of the area is neither too hot nor too cold - generally quite pleasant
  - rainfall is a problem : most of the rain falls in the autumn, winter and spring.  The summer growing season is
    often too dry for proper growth of crops
  - much of the land, particularly on the European side, is hilly to mountainous, topsoil is often rocky, thin,
    infertile (the best crops in many places are things like grapes and olives)
  - the whole area is subject to natural disasters : earthquakes, volcanoes, etc.
  - the coastline, particularly of Greece, is very long and indented, providing many good bays and harbours for
    sailors. The sea has many  islands that provided safety for early mariners.
  - because land transport has often been difficult, the sea has often  been used as a highway : "The sea unites; the
    land divides."
  - the AEGEAN SEA (the branch of the Mediterranean between Greece and Asia Minor, has hundreds of
    islands and these served as the "stepping stones" by which civilization came from the Near East to Europe.

  B. The Minoan Civilization:

  - this early civilization centered on the island of Crete
  - it was named after the legendary KING MINOS
  - the capital city was KNOSSUS
  - the capital. was dug up by Sir Arthur Evans in the early 1900's.

        Before this even the people who lived on the island of Crete did not know about the ancient culture that had existed on their island. After Evans dug up Knossus, other archaeologists soon followed and rapidly discovered enough remains to prove that there had been a very advanced civilization on the island of Crete much earlier than had been believed previously.

     Minoan People and Life:

  - the Minoan people were not the ancestors of the Greek people who appeared later. They were originally from
    the Near East and they brought their advanced culture westward
  - their own paintings and pottery decorations show them as slender, fit, athletic-looking people
  - they seem to have been an active, outdoors-loving group of people: their pictures show them hunting, boxing,
    and practicing an incredibly difficult sport that we know as "bull-leaping"
  - they used a wide variety of industrial skills in order to produce goods to trade with : metal goods, cloth,
    pottery, processed foods were all made in abundance
  - towns were laid out in orderly fashion : many streets were paved;  they often had built both sanitary and storm
    sewers
  - in their large comfortable houses, some Minoans had such "modern" conveniences as hot and cold running
    water and flush toilets
  - the Minoans never had much of an army. They depended on their large and skilled navy for protection
  - they had two systems of writing : for a long time only one could be  read but now both have been translated
    them in an ideal spot to trade with both
  - their island position put Europe and the Near East, so their historical function was to help bring higher
    cultural knowledge from the east to the west.

    The End of Minoan Civilization

 - for a long time, the end of Minoan civilization has been something of a mystery.  Scholars could not understand
   why such a vibrant and busy civilization came to a reasonably abrupt end, leaving no trace to the point where
   later people did not even know it had existed.
 - it seems that lately the mystery has come closer to being solved. Try to read some of the different points of
   view and try to decide in your own mind which explanation is most likely.