The Greeks

• 2000 BC - they began to migrate into Europe's southeastern region.
• Greek city-states were the first to practice citizen participation in government.
• The city-states traded and colonized along the northern coast lands of the Mediterranean Sea.
• They were innovators in warfare, developing methods of fighting by land and sea.
• With the people of Europe, came an increase in population and wealth.
• By 3500 BC there were people in western Europe who were numerous and well organized enough to construct ceremonial monuments consisting of circles and rows of huge upright boulders.
• Along with the boulders, there were massive earthen tombs and fortifications.
• Megalithic structure - from the Greek words for "large boulder".
• these Megalithic structures have survived to this very day.
• These people were the first to use an agricultural tool, the plow.
• archaeologists know this because they have discovered traces of furrows in the soil on which they were originally built.
• Stonehenge - a huge, open-air monument built by a prosperous farming and trading people in the west of England, probably as a religious center.
• The Stonehenge was repeatedly rebuilt over a period of several hundred years, until it reached its final form about 2000 BC.
• This monument consists of about 160 massive boulders, weighing up to 50 tons each.
• all of these stones had to be dragged many miles to the site.
• Instead of their earlier tongues, the people of the region began to speak languages of Indo-European origin that were the distant ancestors of Greek and Latin, as well as of most European languages today.
• When a leading warrior died, his horses and chariot, his bronze swords and daggers, and his gold and silver drinking cups would all go to the grave with him.
• presumably so that he could go on riding, fighting, and drinking as a comrade of the gods in the afterlife.
• Next to the warrior would lie his wife, with her jewelry and her fine textiles and utensils, so that she, too, could go on fulfilling her role in the afterlife.
• that of a presiding over a household made wealthy by farming and war.
• she may even have been thought of as sharing in her husband's delights.
• Women shared the warrior values of their menfolk. they went to war along with the men-- not only to bring them food and bind their wounds but also to force them back into the fight if they panicked, and sometimes to join in the fighting themselves.
• The main business of life was farming.
• The different small groups of people would sometimes fight for metals, slaves, and other items that brought prestige to their possessors or could be exported to Asia Minor, Mesopotamia, or Egypt in return for some of the luxuries of civilization.
• Barbarian - comes from the Greek word barbaros, which originally meant "Non-Greek."
• Today, people often use the words "barbarian" and "barbaric" to describe those they believe to be less intelligent, refined, or humane than themselves.