ANCIENT CIVILIZATION

Ancient Civilization

Ancient Civilization

Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations

The Mycenaean Civilization often referred to as representing the first civilization of modern Europe, the ancient Greeks were an Indo-European group that moved into the area around 1900 BCE. By 1600, BCE, the Greeks had developed into a warrior society, and they had begun to expand their influence into the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. They captured Knossos, the palatial capital of the Minoan civilization on Crete. About a century later, the palaces at Knossos lay destroyed; however, the Mycenaeans began building palaces on the Greek mainland at sites such as Mycenae, Tiryns, Thebes, Orchomenos, Pylos, and Athens.

The Mycenaeans constructed megalithic fortifications around these cities with thick walls and massive gate complexes. This period also known for large tholos (cone shaped) tombs and chamber tombs. The Mycenaeans mastered hydrology as demonstrated through their building of dams and dikes and their channeling of water via aqueducts into their cities where it collected in underground chambers. Perhaps their greatest hydrological feat was draining the valley area called the Kopais basin-formerly the largest lake in central Greece, a natural, shallow, marshy lake measuring about 18-by-11 kilometers-and turning it into farmland.

They developed a series of canals leading to a central canal that funneled the water into the northern Euboean Gulf. The Mycenaeans heavily fortified a site called Gla, a former island in Lake Kopais, to protect this drainage system. Gla, the largest of Mycenaean sites in land area, had cyclopean walls measuring up to 6.75 meters thick 5 meters high, and stretching over 2.8 kilometers around the site (De Mieroop, 2004).

Greek polis development

The central political unit for the Greeks was the polis, and only through understanding the polis can we, understand human nature. Our nature is never directly accessible to us because, we are all raised within particular society—the conventional laws under which we raised and live condition our underlying human nature. To, understand the polis the ancients looked at the constitution of the polis—the fundamental values and principles that form a society. The U.S. Constitution, for example, identifies the fundamental values and principles of the country, those of the Declaration of Independence, and then goes on to construct institutions and distributes power in the way thought best to secure those principles.

Most countries do not have written statements of their principles, but their principles can be discerned by looking at who rules the society. This understanding ...