Greek History

The history of Greece encompasses the history of the territory of the modern nation-state of Greece, as well as that of the Greek people and the areas they inhabited and ruled historically. The scope of Greek habitation and rule has varied throughout the ages, and, as a result, the history of Greece is similarly elastic in what it includes.

Generally, the history of Greece is divided into the following periods:

At its cultural and geographical peak, Greek civilization spread from Greece to Egypt and to the Hindu Kush mountains in Afghanistan. Since then, Greek minorities have remained in former Greek territories (e.g. Turkey, Albania, Italy, Libya, Levant, Armenia, Georgia, etc.), and Greek emigrants have assimilated into differing societies across the globe (e.g. North America, Australia, Northern Europe, South Africa, etc.). Nowadays most Greeks live in the modern states of Greece (independent since 1821) and Cyprus.

The Neolithic Revolution reached Europe beginning in 7000–6500 BC when agriculturalists from the Near East entered the Greek peninsula from Anatolia by island-hopping through the Aegean Sea. The first Greek-speaking tribes, speaking the predecessor of the Mycenaean language, arrived in the Greek mainland sometime in the Neolithic era or the Bronze Age. The transition from the Greek Neolithic to the Early Bronze Age (or Early Helladic I–II) occurred gradually when Greece's agricultural population began to import bronze and copper and used basic bronze-working techniques first developed in Asia Minor, with which they had cultural contacts. During the end of the 3rd millennium BC (circa 2200 BC; Early Helladic III), the indigenous inhabitants of mainland Greece underwent a cultural transformation attributed to climate change, local events and developments (e.g., destruction of the "House of the Tiles"), as well as to continuous contacts with various areas such as western Asia Minor, the Cyclades, Albania and Dalmatia.

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