This is the History of the World Podcast with me Chris Hasler and you're listening to volume three the classical world

episode 23

Ancient Greece, a summary, part one. The After the late Bronze Age collapse around the year 1200

b c. E Greek lands entered a dark age. A lot of uncertainty exists about this period and

this is because there is a lack of contemporary written evidence about what

was going on. We only really see the emergence of the Greek alphabet in

around 800 BCE. The Peloponnese may have been settled by migrants from the north called Dorians.

But also there were migrations away from the Bulken Peninsula onto the islands of the Aegean

and the west coast of Anatolia, which is very often called Asia Minor.

But it's the landmass of the modern country of Turkey.

As these people diversified, they would settle in urbanized cities and develop individual societal identities. And these identities would be highlighted and celebrated from 776 BC with the introduction of the Pan-Hellenic

Olympic Games held in the Peloponnesian settlement of Olympia to be held every

olympiad which is a period of four years. The issue that we have with this information though is that the suggested start

date of 776 BCE is only referred to retrospectively and like so much of the information so early in ancient Greek history

we have to make our own decision about how we feel about the information that we are reading.

The stories of Homer may have existed for some time before they were written down for the

first time during the 8th century B.C.

When we enter the 7th century B.C. we begin to feel more confident about the information that

we know about.

And this is thanks to historians such as Herodotus and Thucydides

who penned so much information about Greek history up until the 5th century

B.C. As the Greek city states started expanding and colonizing,

...