Greece/Ελλάς, Ελλάδα

Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, is a country in Southeast Europe. Athens is the country's capital and largest city. According to the 2011 census data, Greece's population is slightly less than 11 million.

Greece's name differs in comparison with the names used for the country in other languages and cultures, just like the names of the Greeks. Although the Greeks call the country Hellas or Ellada (Greek: Ελλάς, Ελλάδα) and its official name is Hellenic Republic, in English the country is called Greece, which comes from Latin Graecia as used by the Romans and literally means 'the land of the Greeks', and derives from the Greek name Γραικός; however, the name Hellas is sometimes used in English too.

 

The earliest evidence of human presence in the Balkans, dated to 270,000 BC, is to be found in the Petralona cave, in the northern Greek province of Macedonia.[23] Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC,[23] are the oldest in Europe by several centuries, as Greece lies on the route via which farming spread from the Near East to Europe.[24]

Greece is home to the first advanced civilizations in Europe and is considered the birthplace of Western civilization,[25][26][27][28][29] beginning with the Cycladic civilization on the islands of the Aegean Sea at around 3200 BC,[30] the Minoan civilization in Crete (2700–1500 BC),[29][31] and then the Mycenaean civilization on the mainland (1900–1100 BC).[31] These civilizations possessed writing, the Minoans writing in an undeciphered script known as Linear A, and the Myceneans in Linear B, an early form of Greek. The Myceneans gradually absorbed the Minoans, but collapsed violently around 1200 BC, during a time of regional upheaval known as the Bronze Age collapse.[32] This ushered in a period known as the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent.

 

 

The Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens is a symbol of classical Greece.

 

 

Detail of the Alexander Mosaic, depicting Alexander the Great on his horse Bucephalus.

The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BC, the year of the first Olympic Games.[33] The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the 8th or 7th centuries BC. With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerged various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, which spread to the shores of the Black Sea, South Italy (known in Latin as Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece) and Asia Minor. These states and their colonies reached great levels of prosperity that resulted in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy. In 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the world's first democratic system of government in Athens.[34][35]

By 500 BC, the Persian Empire controlled territories ranging from what is now northern Greece and Turkey all the way to Iran, and posed a threat to the Greek states. Attempts by the Greek city-states of Asia Minor to overthrow Persian rule failed, and Persia invaded the states of mainland Greece in 492 BC, but was forced to withdraw after a defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. A second invasion followed in 480 BC. Despite a heroic resistance at Thermopylae by Spartans and other Greeks, Persian forces sacked Athens. Following successive Greek victories in 480 and 479 BC at Salamis, Plataea and Mycale, the Persians were forced to withdraw for a second time. The military conflicts, known as the Greco-Persian Wars, were led mostly by Athens and Sparta. However, the fact that Greece was not a unified country meant that conflict between the Greek states was common. The most devastating of intra-Greek wars in classical antiquity was the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), which marked the demise of the Athenian Empire as the leading power in ancient Greece. Both Athens and Sparta were later overshadowed by Thebes and eventually Macedon, with the latter uniting the Greek world in the League of Corinth (also known as the Hellenic League or Greek League) under the guidance of Phillip II, who was elected leader of the first unified Greek state in the history of Greece.

Following the assassination of Phillip II, his son Alexander III ("The Great") assumed the leadership of the League of Corinth and launched an invasion of the Persian Empire with the combined forces of all Greek states in 334 BC. Following Greek victories in the battles of Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, the Greeks marched on Susa and Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of Persia, in 330 BC. The Empire created by Alexander the Great stretched from Greece in the west and Pakistan in the east, and Egypt in the south. Before his sudden death in 323 BC, Alexander was also planning an invasion of Arabia. His death marked the collapse of the vast empire, which was split into several kingdoms, the most famous of which were the Seleucid Empire and Ptolemaic Egypt. Other states founded by Greeks include the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom and the Greco-Indian Kingdom in India. Although the political unity of Alexander's empire could not be maintained, it brought about the dominance of Hellenistic civilization and the Greek language in the territories conquered by Alexander for at least two centuries, and, in the case of parts the Eastern Mediterranean, considerably longer.

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