5. The Greek Experience, 3500–30 B.C.E.

Humans came into Greece over many thousands of years, in waves of migrants whose place of origin and cultural characteristics have been the source of much scholarly debate. The people of ancient Greece built on the traditions and ideas of earlier societies to develop a culture that fundamentally shaped the civilization of the western part of Eurasia much as the Chinese culture shaped the civilization of the eastern part. The Greeks were the first in the Mediterranean and neighboring areas to explore many of the questions about the world around them and the place of humans in it that continue to concern thinkers today. Drawing on their day-to-day experiences as well as logic and empirical observation, they developed ways of understanding and explaining the world around them, which grew into modern philosophy and science. They also created new political forms and new types of literature and art.

Historians, archaeologists, and classicists divide the history of the Greeks into three broad periods: the Helladic period, which covered the Bronze Age, roughly 3000 B.C.E. to 1200 B.C.E.; the Hellenic period, from the Bronze Age Collapse to the conquest of Greece by Macedonia in 338 B.C.E.; and the Hellenistic period, stretching from the death of Alexander the Great, the ruler of Macedonia, in 323 B.C.E. to the Roman conquest in 30 B.C.E. of the kingdom established in Egypt by Alexander’s successors. During the Hellenic period, Greeks developed a distinctive form of city-state known as the polis and made lasting cultural and intellectual achievements. During the Hellenistic period, Macedonian and Greek armies defeated the Persian Empire and built new cities and kingdoms, spreading Greek ideas as far as India (see Chapter 3). During their conquests they blended their ideas and traditions with those of the societies they encountered, creating a vibrant culture.