Greek city-states: a first look

The first firm date in Greek history is 776 BCE, worked out more than three centuries later from a list of Olympic sprint winners.

Palaces before cities

Greek history did not begin with Athens. In the Bronze Age the island of Crete was home to the Minoan civilization, named by the archaeologist Arthur Evans after the legendary King Minos; its largest palace was at Knossos. On the mainland, the Mycenaeans built fortified palaces at Mycenae, Pylos and other sites. Palace scribes kept records on clay tablets in a script now called Linear B. Those tablets were never meant to last. They survived because the fires that destroyed the palaces baked them hard: at Knossos perhaps around 1400 BCE, at Pylos around 1200 BCE.

Collapse and a quiet age

Around 1200 BCE the Mycenaean palaces were destroyed, part of a wider crisis across the eastern Mediterranean that historians call the Late Bronze Age collapse. Writing disappeared from Greece. The following centuries, roughly 1200 to 800 BCE, used to be called the Greek Dark Age because so little evidence survives, although excavations have since shown that some communities stayed busy and connected.

The polis

By the 8th century BCE a new kind of community had appeared: the polis, usually translated as "city-state". A polis was a town together with the farmland around it, run by its own citizens or rulers, with its own laws, army and gods, and later its own coins. Greece’s mountains and many islands divide the land into small pockets, which helps explain why hundreds of separate city-states grew up instead of one kingdom. Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes and Miletus were among the best known, and many cities sent out colonies, from the Black Sea to southern Italy and Sicily.

A new alphabet

In the late 9th or early 8th century BCE, conventionally around 800 BCE, Greeks adapted the Phoenician alphabet, which had 22 letters, all for consonants. They turned five of them into vowels: alpha, epsilon, iota, omicron and upsilon. That made Greek the first alphabet in the strict sense, with letters for both consonants and vowels. The oldest substantial Greek inscriptions, such as a line scratched on a wine jug from Athens, date to about 740 to 725 BCE. This alphabet later passed through the Etruscans to Rome, and from Latin to English.

776 BCE

Greeks counted time in Olympiads, four-year periods starting from the first Olympic Games, traditionally dated to 776 BCE. Britannica notes that this date was calculated in the 5th century BCE by Hippias of Elis, the region where Olympia lies. Archaeology suggests the games may have become a major event a little later, around 700 BCE. At first there was a single race, a sprint called the stadion. The games brought together Greeks who otherwise fought each other often. Democracy in Athens, the Persian Wars and Alexander the Great are covered in the Greece and Rome course.