World History For Dummies. Peter Haugen
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and its governor shall give back to him everything that he has lost.”
ABCs IN BC
When scribes started using symbols to represent pieces of words — first syllables and then individual sounds — alphabetic writing began. At first, alphabetic writing was a form of shorthand, even though it wasn’t actually shorter, just easier to write than the pictograph style, which required a different symbol for every word. With an alphabet, scribes were able to combine fewer symbols to make many words.
Shaping the World Ever After
Throughout this book, you find references to Greeks who lived between about 479 and 323 BC. Their ideas shaped world civilization, leading to modern science, shaping influential schools of philosophy and religion, and setting precedents for democratic government.
Before I get to these Classical Greeks in this section, you need to know about their world, which is ancient but not as ancient as the earliest Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations.
Building a Persian Empire
By the seventh and sixth centuries BC, the Middle East had been crawling with civilizations great and small for centuries. Before the Persians rose up and asserted themselves, they were ruled by another conqueror: the Medes. Famous for crack-shot archery, the Medes came from Media. Media (also spelled Medea) was in northern Iran.
In 512 BC, Cyrus, a young Persian king from the Achaemenid family, got tired of paying tribute to his grandfather, the king of the Medes. Cyrus gathered up his troops and turned the tables on Gramps, after which he built the Achaemenid Persian Empire. This empire ruled western Asia for two centuries, taking in an area stretching from western India to North Africa and even into Eastern Europe. Around 500 BC, one of the empire’s greatest kings, Darius I, built a 1,500-mile highway from Susa in Iran to Ephesus in Turkey, with stations providing fresh horses on the way for messengers (much as the Pony Express did in America in the 19th century AD).
Also in Turkey, the independent-minded Ionian Greeks in coastal city-states stood up to the Persians. Originally from Greece, across the Aegean Sea, these Ionians spoke Greek; organized their society along Greek lines; and looked to Greece, not Persia, as their homeland. With support from mainland Greek cities such as Athens, they rebelled against Persian rule in 499 BC. Darius I sent an army to punish Athens for helping the revolt, setting off the Persian Wars. Although the Greeks eventually won, bad feelings remained and flared up again more than 150 years later, when Alexander the Great headed the Greek forces.
Growing toward Greekness
Long before the Persian Empire, prehistoric cultures grew and flourished in Greece and on the islands of the Aegean Sea. The Minoans had a complex economy and government on Crete and other islands in the area until about 1450 BC, when Minoan traders suddenly disappeared from Egyptian trade accounts. (For speculation about why, see Chapter 2.) Mycenaeans living in 13th-century BC Greece also had a sophisticated government and culture.
Both civilizations were predecessors and possibly ancestors of the Classical Greeks — called Classical not because of their taste in music (Mozart wouldn’t be born for a long, long time), but because so much of what they thought, said, and wrote has survived. Classical Greek ideas, literature, and architecture — not to mention toga parties and those cool letters on the fronts of fraternity and sorority houses — are still around in the 21st century AD.
By routes direct and indirect, the Greeks — especially their philosophical approach to examining the world critically — spread all over the Mediterranean and then down through history, profoundly influencing successive cultures.
Adapting to the lay of the Greek land
Sea and mountains cut up the Greek homeland, separating people instead of bringing widespread populations together. Yet Greek growers gathered for trade, and from marketplaces, they built cities in mainland valleys and on isolated islands. Greek citizens gathered and lived in these independent cities, and they did something unusual for this stage of history: They talked openly about how the independent city-state (called a polis) should be run.
Greek citizens, whether living in Greece, Turkey, or Italy, were free to an extent unheard of in imperial societies such as Persia’s. Most Greek citizens were small farmers for whom freedom meant being able to grow and market their crops without interference. Citizen was far from being a universal status, of course; one had to be a man (never a woman) of Greek parentage and language to be a citizen. (Foreigners who didn’t speak Greek, whose languages sounded like so much “bar bar bar” to the Greeks, were dismissed as barbarians.)
FIGURE 4-2: The Greeks built independent city-states all over the Aegean and well beyond.
Yet among free Greek citizens, the custom of asking questions — about the way the city was run, about the legends of their gods, or about the way nature works — led to exciting advancements. Inquisitiveness fueled philosophy and thought about nature. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, and even biology became issues to theorize about and problems to solve.
Finding strength in common culture
The Greek city-states built empires based on influence and alliance more than conquest, but they did fight one another. Sparta, famous for single-minded military ferocity, began the long, exhausting Peloponnesian War of 431–404 BC because Spartans objected to what they saw as imperialism on the part of Athens — especially under powerful Athenian leader Pericles. Sparta brought down Athens, center of learning and beauty, and Thebes tamed Sparta. (I talk about the Greek style of fighting in Chapter 16.)
Yet the Athenians, Spartans, Thebans, and others in Greek city-states never forgot that they were Greeks; they spoke dialects of the same language, worshipped the same gods, and grew up hearing the epic poems of Homer. (The Iliad and The Odyssey were a combination of holy scripture, Star Wars-type saga, and World History For Dummies of the time.) Different city-states also gathered for athletic competitions (the original Olympics). When Greeks were threatened by barbarians, as in the wars against the mighty Persian kings Darius I in 490 BC and his son Xerxes I in 480 BC, the city-states worked together, if only temporarily.
The 2006 film 300 introduces elements of fantasy into its depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, a landmark conflict of the Persian Wars. 300 depicts the king of Sparta and his tiny force of 300 troops standing up to the million-strong Persian army of Xerxes I.
Making Alexander great
The Greeks’ fierce, contentious independence made them vulnerable over the period