Ancient greece timeline

This article covers the Greek civilization as a whole. For the history of the modern nation state, see History of modern Greece.

The history of Greece encompasses the history of the territory of the modern nation-state of Greece as well as that of the Greek people and the areas they inhabited and ruled historically. The scope of Greek habitation and rule has varied throughout the ages and as a result, the history of Greece is similarly elastic in what it includes.

Timeline

Generally, the history of Greece is divided into the following periods:

• Prehistoric Greece:
  • PaleolithicGreece, starting circa 3.3 million years ago and ending in 20,000 BC. Significant geomorphological and climatic changes occurred in the modern Greek area which were definitive for the development of fauna and flora and the survival of Homo sapiens in the region.
  • Mesolithic Greece, starting in 13,000 BC and ending around 7,000 BC, was a period of long and slow development of primitive human "proto-communities".
  • Neolithic Greece, beginning with the establishment of agri
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    Ancient Greece

    Greek civilization from 1200 BC to 600 AD

    This article is about the civilisation. For the language, see Ancient Greek.

    Ancient Greece (Ancient Greek: Ἑλλάς, romanized: Hellás) was a northeastern Mediterranean civilisation, existing from the Greek Dark Ages of the 12th–9th centuries BC to the end of classical antiquity (c. 600 AD), that comprised a loose collection of culturally and linguistically related city-states and communities. Prior to the Roman period, most of these regions were officially unified only once under the Kingdom of Macedon from 338 to 323 BC.^[a] In Western history, the era of classical antiquity was immediately followed by the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine period.^[1]

    Three centuries after the decline of Mycenaean Greece during the Bronze Age collapse, Greek urban poleis began to form in the 8th century BC, ushering in the Archaic period and the colonisation of the Mediterranean Basin. This was followed by the age of Classical Greece, from the Greco-Persian Wars to the death of Alexander the Great

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    Who were the ancient Greeks?

    Why were the Greeks significant?

    • About 2,500 years ago Greece was one of the most important places in the ancient world.

    • The Greeks were great thinkers, warriors, writers, actors, athletes, artists, architects and politicians.

    • The Greeks called themselves Hellenes and their land was Hellas.

    • The name ‘Greeks’ was given to the people of Greece later by the Romans. They lived in mainland Greece and the Greek islands, but also in colonies scattered around the Mediterranean Sea.

    • There were Greeks in Italy, Sicily, Turkey, North Africa, and as far west as France.

    • They sailed the sea to trade and find new lands. The Greeks took their ideas with them and they started a way of life that's similar to the one we have today.

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    The early history of Ancient Greece

    • People have been living in Greece for over 40,000 years. The earliest settlers mostly lived a simple hunter-gatherer or farming lifestyle. This is similar to Prehistoric Britain.

    • The Minoans were the first great Greek civilisation