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GETTING TO KNOW THE ANCIENT GREEKS
Who were the ancient Greeks?
The ancient Greeks were peoples who lived from about 800 bc to 150 bc. They are famous for developing a way of living that we still use today.
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Mount Olympus Dodona
Delphi
Corinth Olympia Argos
Troy
Samos
Athens
Ephesus
Rhodes
Epidauros Mycenae
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100 200 km
Sparta
Cythera
Delos
Modern Greece is a small mountainous country made up
of a long finger of land (a peninsula) and hundreds of islands. It lies near the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea.
Many peoples
Ancient Greece was
not a single country
as we see it today
(picture 1). Instead,
it was a collection of
peoples who shared
the same language and history.
Early times
There was an ancient Greek civilisation in the Bronze age – a time before the use of iron. The ancestors of the ancient Greeks lived in cities such as Troy (known for the legend of the Trojan Horse) and Mycenae (picture 2).
Their power faded away by about 1000 bc for reasons we do not know because their written language was lost. The time that followed this was called the greek Dark ages, when people abandoned their cities.
A land of cities
By about 800 bc the Greeks were once more building cities and they also began to write
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G 1 Important sites from ancient Greece and the Greek colonies in ancient Persia (now Turkey).
down their history. This is why many people choose this date as the start of ancient Greek times (picture 5).
Each group of people became based around a city in a valley, and was separated from its neighbours by tall ranges of mountains. As a result, the people would not have thought of themselves so much
as ‘Greeks’, but as, for example, Athenians (those who belonged to the city of Athens) or Spartans (those who belonged to the city of Sparta), just as the Romans in later times were the people who came from the city of Rome, not Italy.