Introducing the Ancient Greeks: From Bronze Age Seafarers to Navigators of the Western Mind

by Edith Hall

of Gilgamesh on clay tablets in the Tigris Valley in 1853. There has been a constant stream of newly

by the ancient Egyptians continue to appear, requiring, for example, a reassessment of the importance of the Nubians to North African history.

that reveal the Greek “miracle” to have been one constituent of a continuous process of intercultural

innovators, but they could never have made the progress they did without adopting many of their skills, ideas, and practices from their non-Greek neighbors. It has become a new orthodoxy that the Greeks were very similar to their ancient Near Eastern neighbors in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Levant, Persia, and Asia Minor. Some scholars have gone so far as to ask whether the Greeks came up with anything new at all, or whether they merely acted as a conduit through which the

These also involve a geographical journey, since the center of Greek activity and achievement shifted over time from the peninsula and islands that constitute the Greek nation today to significant communities in Italy, Asia, Egypt, Libya, and the Black Sea worlds. But most of

adumbrated

historiography

never was a recognizable independent state run by Greek speakers, centered in and including what we now know as Greece, until after the

sacrifices. But this book sets out to answer a single question: Beyond their cultural absorbency, their language, their myths and Olympian polytheism, what exactly did the ancient Greeks, living in hundreds of diverse communities scattered across so many coasts and islands, ever have in common?

helots

Areopagus

Lyceum

Ten Characteristics of the Ancient Greeks Most ancient Greeks shared ten particular qualities most of

four—that they were seagoing, suspicious of authority, individualistic, and inquiring—are tightly interconnected and the most important. They were also open to new ideas, witty, and competitive.

excellence in talented people, as well as being wild...

Sea and their islands. They were one of the most littoral peoples the planet has ever seen. Their preferred mode of transport was

swimming. The Athenians believed it was the duty of every father personally to teach his sons how to read and how to swim: The proverb characterizing the most uneducated type of man said he could “neither read nor swim.” The Assyrians and Hebrews

politicized level. The second outstanding feature of the ancient Greek mind-set that we shall encounter repeatedly is their suspicion of authority, which found expression in their advanced political sensibility. This quality receives special attention

consciousness. Leaders are consistently scrutinized by Greek authors and usually found wanting.

How the Greeks reconciled their suspicion of authority with their almost universal acceptance of slavery presents a greater challenge.

The idea of individual freedom underlies the third characteristic of the ancient Greeks instrumental in their

intellectual progress: a marked sense of individual independence, of pride in their separate selfhood and individuality,

eschatology.

trireme.

prow,

ethnography,

flayed

patois.

magnetite