pomeroy burstein donlan and roberts ancient greece

These palaces served as the administrative, political, economic, and religious centers of the town. Behind the administrative buildings there was vast rooms to store grains in large jars called pithoi. The palaces were decorated with beautiful frescos of plants, animals, and youthful human figures, which indicates a strong aesthetic appreciation of nature. These palaces all had the same basic design with a central courtyard surrounded by administrative buildings on one side and private chambers on the other. The most famous and biggest of these palaces was at Knossos. Although we aren’t sure if the Minoans were one single unified society, we do know that they built monumental maze-like royal palaces at many different sites on Crete. Today we call this civilization Minoan after the myths about King Minos. As villages grew in size and complexity, local men obtained leadership roles as chieftains and over time these chieftains consolidated power to become hereditary kings, which led to the two major Bronze Age cultures in Greece.īy 2000 BC, the first of these major civilizations had developed on the island of Crete. Obsidian found at Francthi Cave reveals that by 10,000 BC these early humans could cross the seas to acquire volcanic materials from the nearby island of Melos. Humans first arrived in Greece over 40,000 years ago. The post was tricky to write because I was trying to capture the most important aspects of Ancient Greece history that I learned from the book from an already “brief history” on the topic, condensing hundreds of pages into a post just short of 5000 words.

This textbook delivers in that regard, but like most textbooks wasn’t the most engaging read. They are best used when one wants to get a grasp of the larger picture of a subject. A textbook tends to be good for gaining a broad overview of a subject and good ones tend to be more accurate than mass market popular histories, but they usually lack depth and vitality.

Pomeroy burstein donlan and roberts ancient greece