The history of Greece can be traced back to the 3rd to early 2nd millennium BC when the Proto-Greeks are assumed to have arrived in the Greek peninsula. Later came early farmers and the civilizations of the and Mycenaean kings. After a period of wars and invasions, known as the Dark Ages, in about 1100 BC, a people called the Dorians invaded from the north and spread down the west coast. Timespan from 500-336 BC Greece was divided into small city-states, each of which consisted of a city and its surrounding countryside.
Greece started to rise out of the Dark Ages, which took after the fall of the Mycenaean development, in the eighth century BC. From about the ninth century BC, composed records start to appear, as Greeks embraced the Phoenician letters adjusting them to make the Greek letter set. Greece was divided into a lot of smaller states to a great extent directed by Greek geology, where each island, valley, and plain is cut off from its neighbors by the ocean or mountain ranges.
The Archaic period could be seen as the Orientalizing period when Greece was at the periphery, yet not under the influence, of the sprouting Neo-Assyrian Empire. Greece embraced social components from the Orient, in craftsmanship, and also in religion and mythology. Archeologically, Archaic Greece is checked by Geometric stoneware.
Two major wars shaped the Classical Greek world. The Persian Wars ( 500–448 BC ) is recounted in Herodotus’s Histories. Ionian Greek cities revolted from the Persian Empire and were supported by some of the mainland cities, eventually led by Athens. The notable battles of this war include Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea.
To prosecute the war and then to defend Greece from further Persian attacks, Athens founded the Delian League in 477 BC. Initially, each city in the League would contribute ships and soldiers to a common army, but in time Athens allowed ( and then compelled ) the smaller cities to contribute funds so that it could supply their quota of ships. Secession from the League could be punished. Following military reversals against the Persians, the treasury was moved from Delos to Athens, further strengthening the latter’s control over the League. The Delian League was eventually referred to pejoratively as the Athenian Empire.
In 458 BC, while the war was still ongoing, war broke out between the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League, comprising Sparta and its allies. After some inconclusive fighting, the two sides signed peace in 447 BC. That peace, it was stipulated, was to last thirty years: instead, it held only until 431 BC, with the onset of the Peloponnesian War. Our main sources concerning this war are Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War and Xenophon’s Hellenica.
The war began over a dispute between Corcyra and Epidamnus. Corinth intervened on the Epidamnian side. Fearful lest Corinth captures the Corcyran navy ( second only to the Athenian in size ), Athens intervened. It prevented Corinth from landing on Corcyra at the Battle of Sybota, laid siege to Potidaea, and forbade all commerce with Corinth’s closely situated ally, Megara ( the Megarian decree ).
The war had left obliteration’s afterward. Discontent with the Spartan administration that took after counting the way that it ceded Ionia and Cyprus to the Persian Empire at the finish of the Corinthian War ( 395–387 BC ) incited the Thebans to assault. Their general, Epaminondas, pulverized Sparta at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC, introducing a time of Theban strength in Greece. In 346 BC, not able to predominate in its ten-year war with Phocis, Thebes called upon Philip II of Macedon for help. Macedon immediately constrained the city-states into being united by the League of Corinth which prompted the overcoming of the Persian Empire and the Hellenistic Age had started.
The Hellenistic time of Greek history starts with the demise of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and finishes with the extension of the Greek promontory and islands by Rome in 146 BC. Even though the stronghold of Roman standard did not break the progression of Hellenistic culture and society, which remained basically unaltered until the coming of Christianity, it did mark the end of Greek political autonomy.
From a military point of view, Greece itself declined that the Romans prevailed over the area ( 168 BC onwards ), however, Greek society would thus overwhelm Roman life.
The Romans isolated the area into four littler republics, and Macedonia authoritatively turned into a region, with its capital at Thessalonica. Whatever remains of the Greek city-states, in the end, paid reverence to Rome finishing theirs by law independence. The Romans left neighborhood organization to the Greeks without making any endeavor to nullify conventional political examples. The public square in Athens kept on being the core of city and political life.
East Roman or Byzantine Empire and its history are described by Byzantinist August Heisenberg as the history of “the Christianized Roman empire of the Greek nation”. The division of the empire into East and West and the subsequent collapse of the Western Roman Empire were developments that constantly accentuated the position of the Greeks in the empire and eventually allowed them to become identified with it altogether. The leading role of Constantinople began when Constantine the Great turned Byzantium into the new capital of the Roman Empire, from then on to be known as Constantinople, placing the city at the center of Hellenism a beacon for the Greeks that lasted to the modern era.
The Empire started to recoup from the annihilating effect of progressive intrusions, from the late eighth century, and the reconquest of Greece started. Greeks from Sicily and Asia Minor were accumulated as pilgrims. The Sclavinias were dispensed with and the Slavs were either routed out or osmosed. By the center of the ninth century, Greece was Greek once more, and the urban areas started to recuperate because of enhanced security and the reclamation of viable focal control.
The development of the towns invited in the Venetians, and this enthusiasm toward exchange seems to have further expanded success in Greece. Positively, the Venetians and others were dynamic brokers in the ports of the Holy Land, and they made a profit out of transporting merchandise between the Crusader Kingdoms of Outremer and the West while additionally exchanging widely with Byzantium and Egypt.
The most paramount occasion for the Empire happened in the year 1204 and it imprints the start of the late Byzantine period. Constantinople was lost for the Greek individuals shockingly, and the domain was vanquished by Latin crusaders and would be supplanted by another Latin one, for 57 years. After the continuous debilitating of the structures of the Byzantine state and the decrease of its territory from Turkish attacks, came the fall of the Empire because of the Ottomans. The Fall of Constantinople in 1453 is viewed as the end of the Byzantine period.
At the point when the Ottomans arrived, two Greek movements happened. The primary movement involved the Greek intellectuals moving to Western Europe and impacting the coming of the Renaissance. The second movement involved Greeks leaving the fields of the Greek landmass and resettling in the mountains. In the early months of 1821, the Greeks announced their freedom yet did not accomplish it until 1829. The Great Powers initially had the same perspective concerning the need of saving business as usual of the Ottoman Empire, yet soon changed their stance. Scores of non-Greeks volunteered to battle.
In the late nineteenth century, modernization converted the social structure of Greece. In Athens and different urban communities men landing from rustic ranges set up workshops and stores, making a white-collar class.