THE EARLY KINGDOMSBy: Madison Halcovage

Building Communities

Around the time 2000 B.C.E. horseman from central Europe moved to the Greek peninsula. These people were called the Achaeans by a Greek poet that was named Homer. The Achaeans invaded Greece for a while. They destroyed villages that people were already living in and claimed it theirs. They spoke a language that was a forerunner of Greek.

Tribes

Every tribe chieftain had seized the most land that they could find. Then they made a small kingdom on their land. They built a citadel which is a walled fortress. That way they could live in privacy with their family and the other people of their tribe.

Tribes

Most of the small kingdoms were built on the eastern side of Peloponnese which is not far from the sea. The chieftains in the tribes were eventually kings.

Houses

Common people usually built their houses out of mud brick and wood. They built their houses at the foot of the citadel. They planted their crops around the area they built their houses. Since the soil is thin and rocky they always had to work very hard to cultivate it.

Grapes

Grapes grow a lot in Greece in the hot and dry summer and they are picked out in the fall. People placed them in wooden vats and trampled by the farmers families until all of the grape juice drained out. The liquid was poured into clay pots

Olive Oil

The olives were extracted to make oil which had a whole lot of uses. The uses of olive oil were for butter, lighting, soap, paying taxes, to offer it to the gods at ritual ceremonies, and to take the stiffness out of cloth.

Animals

People raised animals in Greece. They raised sheep, goats, oxen, and horses. The sheep gave people wool. The goats gave people milk. They were also a good source of meat. The oxen were used to help farmers do their plowing job by pulling their plows. Horses were used to pull war chariots.

Fish

In Greece people ate lots of fish from the Mediterranean. At first people of Greece fished in the Agean Sea. They would have nets and spears poised to fish.

Common Bonds

The Greeks all shared some of the same things like language, similar life styles, and the same sets of religious beliefs. The religion was based on the worship of lots of gods. The most important deity was Zeus which was the sky god. Other important deities were Poseidon the god of the sea and Dionysus the god of vegetation was also important.

Fighting

In Greece people were fighting against other neighborhood kingdoms which is very common. Earlier in Greece people were very warlike. They fight over land ownership which sometimes lead to bloodshed. When a army that was unknown all the farmers hid in the citadels. After warriors would go to other city gates to battle.

Kingdoms

Southern Greece controlled lots of kingdoms. These kingdoms that southern Greece controlled were Argos, Mycenae, Thebes, Pylos, Athens, and Tiryns. When other people invaded the small kingdoms they appealed to their stronger neighbors to defend their land.

Mycenae

In 1600 B.C.E. Mycenae became the most powerful kingdom in all of Greece. They made a empire and they made the first great civilization in mainland Europe. They ruled for 500 years. This period was know as the Mycenaean Age.

Facts

In Greece only one fifth of the land can be farmed because of all the mountains on the land.

People learned how to make bronze weapons and tools just like the Minoans.

The iron age began when the tools and weapons were not made of bronze anymore.

The Agean islands were made up by the peaks of the under water mountain range.