GREECE

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GREECE HISTORY


Greece is a much harder place to live than Egypt, because the soil is not as good and there is not always enough water to grow plants for food. So people did not move there until a lot later. Our first evidence of real settlement in Greece comes from about 55,000 BC (57,000 years ago). Even then there were not very many people until around 3000 BC. Greek history is usually divided into a Stone Age, a Bronze Age, and an Iron Age. Sometimes people divide each of these periods into smaller periods as well.

Stone age


Greek Old Stone Age


A good deal of the Old Stone Age, or Paleolithic, time period had gone by before anyone came to live in Greece. The first definite signs of people living in Greece are from around 55,000 BC. We still know very little about them. They lived mainly from gathering wild plants and got their meat by hunting wild animals. They did not farm. They probably knew how to plant seeds, but chose not to because there was already plenty of food growing wild for the few people who lived in Greece at this time.
Franchthi Cave
These people used stone, wood, plant fibers, and bone to make their tools, but they did not use metal. They did not build houses, but lived mainly in caves along the coastline. One example of a cave where people lived in the Old Stone Age is Franchthi Cave. The people living in Franchthi Cave hunted deer and rabbits, caught fish, and gathered wild grain for bread or porridge, wild peas and beans, and nuts.


Greek Middle Stone Age


We don't know much yet about the people of Greece in the Middle Stone Age. They still lived mainly from gathering and hunting. They still did not farm or use metal or build houses. They lived in caves.They seem to have sailed on the Mediterranean Sea in small boats made of reeds and animal skins. We think this because they used tools made of obsidian, and you can't get obsidian on the Greek mainland. The nearest place where there is obsidian is on the Aegean islands between Greece and Turkey, so either the mainland Greeks were sailing to the islands to get obsidian, or the islanders were sailing to Greece to sell it to them


Neolithic Greece


By around 7000 BC there started to be more people in Greece. This may be related to the Black Sea catastrophe which happened about this time. Maybe because of refugees from this disaster, it became harder and harder to get all the food you needed just by gathering and hunting. So people began to farm. Farming was more work (and not as much fun as picking wild berries and nuts), and the food you got wasn't as good for you and was pretty boring, but you could feed more people on less land. People also began to herd sheep and goats.
Once you are farming, you also need to build fences to keep out the deer and rabbits, and to keep in the sheep and goats, and people also began to build houses. Probably there weren't enough caves for all the new people, though people were still living in Franchthi Cave at this time too, and still sailing around in little boats.
By 5800 BC, there was a small village at a place called Nea Nikomedia. The people had small houses made of sticks and mud (wattle and daub). There was a wooden fence around the village to keep out animals (or to keep them in). People had started to use pottery (clay pots). Probably they learned how to make pots from people from West Asia, who came to live in Greece about this time.
Sesklo pottery
By around 5000 BC people began having stone foundations for their houses, and stone walls around their villages. Their fanciest pottery (dishes, pitchers, cups) was decorated with red and white patterns, and some of it was carried to other villages and sold there. The best dishes and cups came from a village called Sesklo.
Other villages imitated the Sesklo cups, but not as well. Probably around this time the Greek villages got big enough to choose a "big man" or "headman" to organize the village and settle arguments, and lead the men to war.
Around 4000 BC somebody destroyed the village of Sesklo. Possibly some group of people invaded Greece from the north, from Yugoslavia or Turkey, and took over some parts of Greece. These invading people seem to have had a big military advantage over the Sesklo people: they had bows and arrows, so they could shoot over the stone walls from far away.
These new people then settled down and built villages in Greece. One of these new villages is called Dimini. Dimini had one big house in the center, maybe for the headman of the village, and also had several stone walls around it. (These people also moved back into Nea Nikomedia.)



Bronze Age

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