Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Morkot Robert
Title : The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece
Year : 1997

Link download : Morkot_Robert_-_The_Penguin_Historical_Atlas_of_Ancient_Greece.zip

Foreword. Traditionally, the Greeks have been held up as our ancestors, particularly in matters of culture and politics: freedom and democracy as we understand them are supposed to have begun with Greece. The ancient Greeks were like us, but earlier. As such, they were unlike other ancient peoples such as the Phoenicians and the Egyptians. It is increasingly obvious that, not only is this view of the Greeks a myth, but that the Greeks were probably more unlike us than we have ever allowed. Democracy, even of the limited Athenian kind, was not the universal (or even dominant) political system of the Greek world. The Greeks themselves attributed much of their culture to stimuli from Egypt and Phoenicia, and increasingly this reality is being acknowledged. As archaeology reveals to us more of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations and anthropology challenges our assumptions about the Classical world, our perceptions of Greece must change radically. While we would not begin to devalue the glory of Periklean Athens or its enormous influence in ancient and recent times, we increasingly recognize that it is one, relatively short, period in the development of Greek civilization. Perhaps due to the nature of the international age in which we live, we have also begun, at last, to appreciate the contribution and the importance of the three hundred years of the Hellenistic world. ...