Ancient Greece · Part 2 · The rise of the city-states · B1–B2
The Archaic Age: Colonies, Tyrants and the Olympic Games
Part 2 of Ancient Greece: after the Dark Age, the Greeks learned to write again, founded hundreds of independent cities, and spread them around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. They held games at Olympia every four years and lived under tyrants, aristocrats and the first experiments with law. Compound adjectives (a four-year cycle, Greek-speaking cities, well-known poets), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, how the Greek world was born: not as one country, but as hundreds of little cities, each with its own laws and its own gods.
Alexandria is one of their great-great-grandchildren. The first Greek cities were villages with walls.
They come into the story too, with a crown of olive leaves.
Historians call the period from about 800 to 480 BCE the Archaic Age. The Greeks borrowed the alphabet from the Phoenicians, and the poems of Homer were probably written down in this period. The typical Greek community was the polis, the city-state: a town with its farmland, its own laws, army and gods. There were more than a thousand of them.
From about 750 BCE, Greeks founded colonies all around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea: Syracuse in Sicily, Massalia (Marseille) in Gaul, Byzantium, Cyrene in Libya, and many more. In Egypt, the pharaoh allowed Greek traders to settle at Naucratis in the Delta. Historians still debate how much the colonies were driven by hunger for land, by trade, or by quarrels at home.
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