The earliest evidence of the presence of human ancestors in the Balkans, dated to 270,000 BC, is to be found in the Petralona cave, in the northern Greek province of Macedonia.[9] All three stages of the stone age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic) are represented in Greece. Franchthi Cave is one of the better known examples of this era, as it was occupied during all three of these phases.[10] Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC,[9] are the oldest in Europe by several centuries, as Greece lies on the route via which farming spread from the Near East to Europe.[11]
Greece is home to the first advanced civilizations in Europe and is considered the birthplace of Western civilization,[12][13][14][15][16] beginning with the Cycladic civilization on the islands of theAegean Sea at around 3200 BC,[17] the Minoan civilization in Crete (2700–1500 BC),[16][18] and then the Mycenaean civilization on the mainland (1900–1100 BC).[18] These civilizations possessed writing, the Minoans writing in an undeciphered script known as Linear A, and the Myceneans in Linear B, an early form of Greek. The Myceneans gradually absorbed the Minoans, but collapsed violently around 1200 BC, during a time of regional upheaval known as the Bronze Age collapse.[19] This ushered in a period known as the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent.
The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BC, the year of the first Olympic Games.[20] The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the 8th or 7th centuries BC.[21][22] With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerged various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, which spread to the shores of the Black Sea, Southern Italy (Latin: Magna Graecia, or Greater Greece) and Asia Minor. These states and their colonies reached great levels of prosperity that resulted in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy. In 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the world's first democratic system of government in Athens.[23][24]
By 500 BC, the Persian Empire controlled territories ranging from their home of Iran all the way to what is now northern Greece, Macedonia, southern Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Romania, and posed a threat to certain Greek states. Attempts by the Greek city-states of Asia Minor to overthrow Persian rule failed, and Persia invaded the states of mainland Greece in 492 BC, but was forced to withdraw after a defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. Τhe Battle of Marathon is often seen as a pivotal moment in European history, since the following two hundred years saw the rise of the Classical Greek civilization, which has been enduringly influential in western society and civilization. A second invasion by the Persians followed in 480 BC. Despite a heroic resistance at Thermopylae by Spartans and other Greeks led by King Leonidas, Persian forces sacked Athens.
Following successive Greek victories in 480 and 479 BC at Salamis, Plataea and Mycale, the Persians were forced to withdraw for a second time. The military conflicts, known as the Greco-Persian Wars, were led mostly by Athens and Sparta. The fact that Greece was not a unified country meant that conflict between the Greek states was common.
Following the assassination of Phillip II, his son Alexander III ("The Great") assumed the leadership of the League of Corinth and launched an invasion of the Persian Empire with the combined forces of all Greek states in 334 BC. Following Greek victories in the battles of Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, the Greeks marched onSusa and Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of Persia, in 330 BC. The Empire created by Alexander the Great stretched from Greece in the west to Pakistan in the east, and Egypt in the south.The most devastating intra-Greek war in classical antiquity was the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), which was won by Sparta and marked the demise of the Athenian Empire as the leading power in ancient Greece. Both Athens and Sparta were later overshadowed by Thebes (led by the prominent Greek General Epaminondas, a tactical genius and innovative military strategist[25]) and eventually Macedon, with the latter uniting the Greek world in the League of Corinth (also known as the Hellenic League or Greek League) under the guidance of Phillip II, who was elected leader of the first unified Greek state in history.
Before his sudden death in 323 BC, Alexander was also planning an invasion of Arabia. His death marked the collapse of the vast empire, which was split into several kingdoms, the most famous of which were the Seleucid Empire and Ptolemaic Egypt. Other states founded by Greeks include the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom (250 BC-125 BC) in modernAfghanistan, Pakistan, and Tajikistan and the Greco-Indian Kingdom (180 BC - 10 CE) in modern Afghanistan and India. These kingdoms influenced the development of Buddhism through Greco-Buddhism and Greco-Buddhist art, leading to the first figural representations of the Buddha, and sent some of the first Buddhist missionaries to China,Sri Lanka, and the Mediterranean. Many Greeks migrated to Alexandria, Antioch, Seleucia and the many other new Hellenistic cities in Asia and Africa.[26] Although the political unity of Alexander's empire could not be maintained, it brought about the dominance of Hellenistic civilization and the Greek language in the territories conquered by Alexander for at least two centuries, and, in the case of parts of the Eastern Mediterranean, considerably longer.[27]
