Mark Meek's Ideas: Athens And The Beginnings Of Greece

Ancient Greece is all around us. Our alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet. The word "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. Greek letters are used to denote scientific and mathematical constants. The best-known of these is pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to it's diameter. Pi is the Greek predecessor of our letter P.

The idea of using an alphabet to write, letters representing the phonetic components of speech, is actually a Phoenician idea. The name "Phoenician" is where, of course, words like "phonetic" and "phone" came from.

But it is the Greek alphabet that became the predecessor of the Latin alphabet that is so widely used today. Science and math students are familiar with Greek letters as constants like delta ( which became D), representing change, epsilon (E), sigma (S), rho (R), gamma (C) and, tau (T).

The ideas of both democracy and that matter consists of atoms both come from Democritus, for whom is named "democracy". Democritus also introduced the concept that, if we keep cutting something in half, eventually we will come to a piece that cannot be cut further, in other words atoms. The word "atom" is from the Greek and means "cannot be cut".

The Greek contributions to fields like drama and philosophy are far too extensive to go into here.

Thucydides and Herodotus are two renowned historians from ancient Greece.

Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath, name for the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates.

The famed boulevard, the Champs Elysees in Paris, is actually named for the ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries.

There are believed to have been four tribes of ancient Greeks. These were the Ionians, the Dorians, the Aeolians and, the Achaeans. The city of Athens was populated by Ionians. Columns on buildings often use one of three styles. These are the Ionic, for the Ionians, the Doric, for the Dorians and the Corinthian, for the Greek city of Corinth.

The modern imitation of such architecture is known as neoclassical. An example of neoclassical architecture, modeled on that of ancient Greece, is the British Museum. The columns with the "scrolls" at the top are the Ionic Order.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Museum#/media/File:British_Museum_from_NE_2_(cropped).JPG

The original Greece was called Mycenean, from 1600 to 1100 B.C. after a central town. It has become known for it's elaborately painted pottery. Mycenean Greek civilization ended with what is known as the "Bronze Age Collapse", in the eastern Mediterranean. This collapse was followed later by what is known as Archaic Greece.

The well-known Greek alphabet originated in Classical Greece, which came after Archaic Greece. But early Mycenean Greece had a writing system that has been called "Linear B".

Here is a look at the ruins of Mycenae. This was the center of the "original" Greece. The "classical" Greece that has contributed so much to the world, and which revolved around the city of Athens, came centuries later. The first three scenes of Mycenae are from Google Street View.

There are multiple scenes following. To see the scenes, after the first one, you must first click the up arrow ^, before you can move on to the next scene by clicking the right or forward arrow, >, After clicking the up arrow, you can then hide the previews of successive scenes, if you wish.

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7308722,22.75636,3a,75y,259.78h,90t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipOwr8B-Rtjkit9FxHCsz_UTIXMBSfU697GsaH3g!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipOwr8B-Rtjkit9FxHCsz_UTIXMBSfU697GsaH3g%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi3.0910087-ya120.341515-ro3.9932933-fo100!7i5760!8i2880

After the era of Mycenean Greece, Archaic Greece formed from a collection of city-states and was the predecessor of "Classical Greece" with which the world has become so familiar because so much about the world originated there.

Classical Greece was in conflict with Persia, which it displaced as at least the western world's most important power, in the 5th and 4th centuries B.C. There were five major battles between the Persian Empire and their rebellious Greek subjects.

The Greeks, in what must have been the upset of the ages, won four out of the five. At Marathon, in 490 B.C, there was a great naval battle. The Persians could be said to have won at Thermopylae, but the Greeks triumphed in a land battle at Salamis, in 480 B.C. The fourth battle was on land at Plataea. The final was the Battle of Mycale.

Classical Greece is considered to have concluded with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C., and the fragmentation of the vast empire that he had conquered soon after.

The Classical period of Greece is considered as the beginning of the world's most important center of power being in Europe. Classical Greece centered around Athens, although Syracuse in Sicily and the Alexandria that Alexander the Great founded in Greek-controlled Egypt were also very important.

What is known as the Delian League of Greek city-states, united to defend against the Persians, was led by Athens but it's control was resented by other cities and this led to a losing battle with Sparta, in southern Greece. This is known as the Peloponnesian War, named for the peninsula which comprises the southern third of Greece.

The town of Sparta, once the great rival of Athens, is still there today. These three images, from Google Street View, are of the ancient ruins and modern city of Sparta.

The canal is the Corinth Canal, from the Nineteenth Century, which technically makes the Peloponnesus into an island.

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.074314,22.4303149,3a,75y,14.97h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sf6xxyqcyXwq6RapbX1prlQ!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Df6xxyqcyXwq6RapbX1prlQ%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D12.039402%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656

Another Greek city that was a rival of Athens was Thebes. It had sided with the Persians against Athens and also defeated Sparta. Thebes was eventually destroyed by Alexander the Great. If the name of Thebes sounds familiar, it is not because of this Greek city but because the capital city of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt was called Thebes, although that is what the Greeks renamed it after Alexander's conquest of Egypt.

Anyway, Thebes in Greece is still there today.

https://www.google.com/maps/@38.3242531,23.3186664,3a,75y,274.63h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s79YxPesmmXCONOQhldx_Ew!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3D79YxPesmmXCONOQhldx_Ew%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D274.62643%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656

The time from the fragmentation of Alexander the Great's empire, after his death in 323 B.C. to the rise of the next world power, Rome, is referred to as the Hellenistic Era. Macedon, in northern Greece where Alexander was from, was the dominant state in the Hellenistic Era, as it had defeated both Athens and Thebes.

The name of Jesus is the Greek form of Joshua. That is why I believe that the reference in the Book of Zechariah, which was written before the Hellenistic Era, to a high priest named Joshua, who will "take away the sin of the world in one day" is actually foretelling Jesus by name.

In more modern times Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire but rebelled and gained it's freedom, just as it had from the Persian Empire so long before. In our visit to "Cairo", we saw that the Pasha Dynasty of Egypt, which had kind of broken free of the Ottoman Empire, assisted the Ottomans against the Greek rebellion of 1821.

Athens was made the capital of an independent Greece in 1834. The newly-independent Greece was originally a kingdom, but the monarchy was abolished in favor of the Second Republic. A military coup restored the monarchy in 1935. But the monarchy was abolished again, in favor of the Third Republic, in 1973. Greece was under military leadership from 1967 to 1974.

Pericles was the great leader of Athens who began the structures on the Acropolis, the famous hill around which Athens is built, in the Fifth Century B.C. "Acropolis" means "high city" and the best-known of these structures is the ruins of the temple known as the Parthenon. These four images of the Parthenon are from Google Earth.

Upon Greek independence, in the Nineteenth Century, structures that foreign powers had added to the Acropolis, the Byzantines, Franks and, Ottomans, were removed. The remains of a very old Mycenean structure can still be seen on the Acropolis.

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9716241,23.7271505,3a,75y,93.77h,90t/data=!3m8!1e1!3m6!1sAF1QipM-uey7jygFAhySlgRKmiWM_vgr5kBlzo8V_OqU!2e10!3e11!6shttps:%2F%2Flh5.googleusercontent.com%2Fp%2FAF1QipM-uey7jygFAhySlgRKmiWM_vgr5kBlzo8V_OqU%3Dw203-h100-k-no-pi-0-ya264.68976-ro0-fo100!7i7924!8i3962

The Zappeion can be considered as Athens' modern version of the Parthenon. The first image is from Google Earth.