Our Sea

Part 2 - Civilizations

Based on the island of Crete, the Minoan civilization built trading networks throughout the Aegean, from mainland Greece to the Levant (Lebanon) and Egypt, from 3000 BCE. They farmed olives and grapes where other crops would not grow, raised sheep and traded wool with the mainland populations where they came into contact with the literate Mesopotamian and Egyptian empires. They developed a writing system known as Linear A and Cretan hieroglyphs.

The Minoan civilization reached its peak by 1600 BCE but disappeared about 1100 BCE following a series of earthquakes, tsunamis and a volcanic eruption on the island of Thera (Santorini) between 1642 and 1540 BCE. They left extensive records on baked clay tablets.

After the collapse of Minoan civilization, Crete was occupied by Mycenaean and Dorian Greeks from the mainland and the island became a part of Greek mythology.

About 1050 BCE, the Semitic-speaking inhabitants of the Levant (Lebanon) founded the civilization of Phoenicia and established a number of trading colonies around the Mediterranean between 1500 and 300 BCE (notably Carthage in modern Tunisia in 814 BCE). As a result their version of the Hebrew alphabet became the most used system in the Mediterranean.

The first dynasty of the Persian Empire was created by the Achaemenids, under Cyrus the Great in 550 BCE. With the conquest of the Median, Lydian and Babylonian empires it stretched from Libya, Egypt and the Levant to India (occupying the areas of modern Syria, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan). Greece was next.

Greece had emerged, in the 8th century BCE, as a large number of independent city-states isolated from each other by the sea or mountains. The literacy of Crete had been lost but the Greeks modified the Phoenician alphabet to create the Greek alphabet which later became the basis for the Roman alphabet that is still used by many languages today.

The Greeks built extensive trading networks throughout the Mediterranean in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, and many Greeks emigrated to form colonies in Southern Italy, Sicily and Asia Minor. This caused a long series of conflicts between the Carthaginians and the competing Greek cities of Sicily (especially Syracuse) and, which lasted from 600 to 265 BCE.

In the 6th century BCE, the cities of Athens and Corinth became major maritime and mercantile powers and the ruling aristocracies had to fight to avoid being overthrown by wealthy merchants and populist tyrants. The golden age for the Athenians started after the Greek Spartans helped the Athenians overthrow a tyranny in 510 BCE. When Athens turned against Sparta, Cleisthenes proposed that all citizens share in political power and Athens became a democracy.

The Greek city-states were constantly fighting each other and steadily improving their military weapons and tactics. Meanwhile the Persian empire made several attempts to conquer the Greek cities and, in 547 BCE, Cyrus the Great conquered the Greek-inhabited region of Ionia. In 499 BCE, the Ionian city-states rebelled against the Persian-supported tyrants who ruled them. The Ionians were quickly defeated but the next Persian emperor, Darius I, did not forget that the Athenians had assisted the Ionian revolt. In 490 BCE, Darius assembled an armada to conquer Athens. Although greatly outnumbered, the Athenians defeated the Persian army at the Battle of Marathon.

 In 481 BCE, the new Persian emperor Xerxes demanded that many of the Greek city-states submit to Persian rule. In response, however, 70 of the nearly 700 Greek city-states formed an alliance which was surprising because many of them were officially at war with one another. In 480 BCE, Xerxes invaded with an army of about 200,000 (although some estimate are as high as 2.5 million) and a fleet of between 600 and 1200 triremes. He was opposed by an alliance of 31 Greek city-states, including Athens and Sparta.

In the narrow valley at Thermopylae, in August 480 BCE, the Spartan king, Leonidas I, and his personal 300 man bodyguard, supported by soldiers from the Allied Peloponnesian cities occupied the pass. The position was ideally suited to the phalanx shield wall of hoplite warfare and the Persian army were forced to attack the Greek phalanx head on. The Allies withstood two full days of attacks until Xerxes discovered a path behind the Allied lines. When scouts warned they were being outflanked, Leonidas dismissed most of the Allied army and remained with a rear guard of about 2,000 men. On the final day, the rear guard formed a line in the wider part of the valley intending to slaughter as many Persians as they could.

Eventually, all of Leonidas's Greeks were killed or captured leaving Boeotia and Attica open to invasion. The allies evacuated the population of Athens by sea to Salamis as the Persians quickly captured most of Greece but most of the Allied armies and the navy remained and Xerxes wanted to end the war quickly.

The Allied fleet of 271 triremes had meanwhile defended the Straits of Artemisium to protect the flank of the forces at Thermopylae. The fleet had held off the Persians until it was no longer needed then, badly damaged, it retreated to the island of Salamis. It remained there into September, even after Athens fell, hoping to lure the Persian fleet to battle in the cramped Straits of Salamis. The trireme was a warship powered by three banks of oars and the most common naval tactic was ramming or boarding by ship-borne marines.

The large number of Persian triremes struggled to manoeuver in the narrow straight and the Allied fleet scored a decisive victory, sinking or capturing at least 200 Persian ships, thereby ensuring the safety of the Peloponnessus.  Xerxes retreated to Asia with the bulk of the army leaving his general Mardonius in Greece to complete the conquest.

The allied Greeks followed up their success by destroying the rest of the Persian fleet at the Battle of Mycale, before expelling Persian garrisons from Sestos and Byzantium (later Constantinople, and still later, modern Istanbul) in 478 and 479 BCE. Following the Persian withdrawal from Europe, Macedon and the city-states of Ionia regained their independence. A Greek fleet was sent to Cyprus in 451 BCE, but achieved little and the Greco-Persian Wars drew to a quiet end. During this period, Athens' naval power enabled it to force the other Delian league states to accept its policies and the league became an Athenian empire.

Athenian relations with Sparta declined again and in 431 BCE war broke out and continued until a peace treaty was agreed in 421 BCE. These wars weakened the heartland of Greece permitting Philip II of Macedon to conquer Thessaly, Thrace, Thebes and Athens, and, within twenty years, to become ruler of all of Greece, except Sparta. He forced most of the city-states to join the League of Corinth thus preventing them from fighting each other.

Philip II then started a war with the Persian (Achaemenid) Empire but was assassinated early on in the conflict leaving his son, Alexander the Great, to continued the war. Alexander defeated Darius III of Persia and completely destroyed the Achaemenid Empire, annexing it to Macedon. When Alexander died in 323 BCE, Greek power and influence was at its zenith.

Alexander's conquests led to a steady emigration of the young and ambitious to the new Greek empires in the east. Many migrated to Alexandria (Egypt), Antioch and other cities founded as far away as Afghanistan.

However, the Greek culture changed fundamentally away from the fierce independence of the Greek city-states. Instead, within a few centuries, the Greeks revolutionized many fields of art, engineering, science, mathematics, law, government, medicine and philosophy.

During this period the centres of Hellenistic (Greek) culture were Alexandria (capital of the Ptolemaic Kingdom in Egypt) and Antioch (in modern Turkey near Syria) capital of the Seleucid Empire).

The city-states within Greece formed themselves into two leagues (the Achaean which included Thebes, Corinth and Argos, and the Aetolian which included Sparta and Athens) and for much of the period until the Roman conquest, these leagues were usually at war with each other.