Ancient Greece

Early ancient Greek phalanxes had the distinctive tendency to drift to the right side on a battlefield as they advanced. The reason for this was that the soldiers carried their large shields on the left arm because it safeguarded his comrades unshielded right side. This was not planned however, each soldier unconsciously moved toward his right side.

they taught them ways to work with bronze, built ships, and ways to navigate on the sea with the sun and stars.

Women in Athens were not citizens - citizens were males 18 and over who could prove their Athenian ancestry.

Women were kept in the home in virtual purdah, bearing and raising children, tending the house, vegetable garden, chickens etc, getting out only for an occasional women's religious festival.

Their systems initially developed in parallel, becoming limited democracies. Then Athens went further under the influence of Pericles who used a radical democracy to suppress his political opponents. This radical democracy led Athens into misadventures and a long war which it lost, and it eventually reverted to a limited democracy.

The Ecclesia oversaw the work of the architects and artists Phidias, Callicrates and Ictinas..

It extended from Libya to Central Asia an an age of no mechanical transport, where information took weeks to travel.

City wall protected the city from invaders and provided reefuge for the farming and commercial peopte outside the walls. The acropolis was the original refuge before city walls were built, and became a last bastion if the walls were breached, a place for the gods and a repository for treasures under protection of the gods, a place for religious practices, and a refuge at alters for accused fugitives claiming protection from the gods.

Their word was oligarchy. It meant that the upper class acted as an unelected government.

Greece was a land of mountains with limited river plains. A nomad tribe would seize a section of land, set up a defensive fortress on a hill (acropolis) and as it developed a city would grow up. This city and farmland was independent and is what we call a city-state. As they became overpopulated, they sent out the surplus by ship to seize new land and establish a new city-state of their own. Eventually there were over 2,000 of them spread around the Mediterranean and Black Sea littorals.

The oligarchs manipulated things to their own benefit. The limitation here was that, with the wars which became prevalent, the oligarchs needed to lower classes to be part of the army, and so were in a quandary on how to both retain dominance and persuade the lower class to join them to repel external threats. There came a trend for some city-states to appoint tyrants who would direct things more equally for the poorer majority, however when these inevitably fell into disfaour, either the oligarch returned to power of democracies were formed.

Its art, arts, sculpture, buildings, language, philosophy and science, and of course its propensity for warfare.

Dancing to the gods in forest glades.

It was very important in all the Greek city-states. All citizens were liable to be called out in each city when either a threat appeared, to defend the city, or when the city wanted to overcome another city to gain ascendancy in a dispute.

the Acropolis Of Athens is being faded by acid rain because it is melting

The Telesterion at Eleusis was one of the primary centres of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Argos, Thebes, Corinth, Elis, Sparta, Athens.

They were overrun by the invading Dorian Greeks and the Sea Peoples.

Multiple gods - evidenced by expansion of the Jewish single god into tbe Trinity, and the add-ons of angels and patron saints as minor gods covering different aspects of life, and absorption of the characteristics of other gods into the Christian pantheon.

Art, literature, architecture.

Over-populated city-states shipped off their surplus populations to seize land and form new city-states around the Mediterranean and Black seas. The norm one hectare farm could not be divided amongst several children, so exporting the surplus prevented a dangerous class of unemployed men posing a threat of revolt. This resulted in over 2,000 new city-states being established.

Rome was a city-state in Italy which conquered and developed an empire covering the Mediterranean and north west Europe, the Greeks established over 2,000 independent city-states around the Mediterranean and Black Sea littorals.

He launched a punitive expedition against the city-states of Eretria and Athens for sending contigents to Asia Minor during the Ionian revolt. While there, they sacked the Persian provincial capital and destroyed the statues of the gods. His object was to appoint local tyrants in the two city-states to keep them under control and stop them stirring up discontent in the Greek city-states within the Persian Empire.

Fishing, trade, warfare.

They arrived as nomads, and settled on the land to secure a stable living as farmers. This changed over time as some turned to shepherding, fishing, trade, artisans and artists, but the core occupation of a city-state was farming, from which they got their daily bread.