Eventually Greek colonisation reached as far north-east as Ukraine.

To the east, the Aegean coast of Asia Minor was colonised first, followed by Cyprus and the coasts of Thrace, the Sea of Marmara and south coast of the Black Sea.

Greece was divided into many small self-governing communities, a pattern dictated by Greek geography, where every island, valley and plain is cut off from its neighbours by the sea or mountain ranges.Īs Greece recovered economically, its population grew beyond the capacity of its limited arable land, and from about 750 BC the Greeks began 250 years of expansion, settling colonies in all directions. Literacy had been lost and the Mycenaean script forgotten, but the Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet to Greek and from about 800 BC a written record begins to appear. In the 8th century BC Greece began to emerge from the Dark Ages which followed the fall of the Mycenaean civiliZation. All histories of Ancient Greece have to contend with these biases in their sources. These writers, furthermore, concentrate almost wholly on political, military and diplomatic history, and ignore economic and social history. That is why we know far more about the history and politics of Athens than of any other city, and why we know almost nothing about some cities' histories. Those Greek historians and political writers whose works have survived, notably Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Plato and Aristotle, were mostly either Athenian or pro-Athenian, and all were political conservatives. Subsequent events are described in History of Hellenistic Greece.Īny history of Ancient Greece requires a cautionary note on sources. The history of Ancient Greece is taken to end with the reign of Alexander the Great, who died in 323 BC. Secondary and tertiary texts such Herodotus 'Histories', Pausanias 'Description of Greece', Diodorus 'Bibliothiki' and Jerome's 'Chronicon', contain brief chronologies and king lists for this period. The period from 1100 BC to the 8th century BC is a 'dark age' from which no primary texts, and only scant archaeological evidence, survive. The period from 1600 BC to about 1100 BC is described in History of Mycenaean Greece known for the reign of King Agamemnon and the wars against Troy as narrated in the epics of Homer. The Greeks are believed to have migrated southward into the Greek peninsula in several waves beginning in the late 3rd millennium BC, the last being the Dorian invasion.

Ancient wars sparta 2 alexander