Touristic Information : Greece

One of the great paradoxes of history is that the next hesitant advance of European civilization - the development of the first city - states - took place not on the fertile open central European plains, but in a remote island to the south of the Aegean Sea which was completely lacking in metal resources. While the glittering mounted warrior-princes of central Europe dissipated their creative energy in warefare, a highly cultured yet peaceful society, built on trade and an agricultural surplus, emerged on Crete.

The history of Greece can be traced back to Stone Age hunters. Later came early farmers and thecivilizations of the Minoan and Mycenaean kings. This was followed by a period of wars and invasions, known as the Dark Ages. In about 1100 BC, a people called the Dorians invaded from the north and spread down the west coast. In the period from 500-336 BC Greece was divided into small city states, each of which consisted of a city and its surrounding countryside.

The land of philosophers, tragedies and legends, Greece offers dazzling seas scattered with islands of all shapes and sizes from world famous Mykonos and Santorini to less travelled Folegandros and Milos. Its picturesque mainland filled with archaeological sites of great importance the likes of Delphi and Olympia, are also not to be forgotten. From land or sea, the visitor can experience ancient history and tradition or simply relax in island sunshine and cool breezes.

Greece is a much harder place to live than Egypt because the soil is not as good and there is not always enough water to grow plants for food So people did not move there until a lot later. Our first evidence of real settlement in Greece comes from about 55,000 (57,000 years ago). Even then there were not very many people until around 3000 BC. Greek history is usually divided into a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age. Each of these periods can be divided into smaller periods as well. The religious beliefs of Classical Greece can be interpreted in many different ways. Nobody can be sure how or why people believe a certain story about their Gods. And different people probably have different reasons for believing a story. Or the same person may believe a story for several different reasons. Not everyone believes all the stories, either: different people may tell different stories. And people may tell one story in one situation, and a different story in a different situation, whatever seems to fit. Here are some of the stories that people told in Ancient Greece, and some of the reasons why they might have told these stories and not other ones. To help you relate one story to another, here are some of the ways that the Greeks thought their Gods were related. (in family trees, = means they are married, or at least they have babies together.

The Greeks had a general tendency to devide the world into pairs of things, one opposed to the other. They saw everything as divided into two parts, which fought with each other all the time. So they tended to divide people into two groups too.

There are a lot of different ways to divide people. One important way is to divide people from animals: the Greeks said that people were different from animals because animals ate their food raw, and people ateTheirscooked (that is, people know how to use fire). And people have rational thought, but animals do not.
People are also divided from Gods. People eat food, and gods do not. People die, but gods do not.

Another way of looking at these divisions is to divide Greek people from barbarians, people who are not Greek. The Greeks called all foreigners barbarians, even if they were very civilized like the Egyptiansor the Perisians.

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