Greece!

Now that we have learned all about Egypt and their civilization and way of life, we shift unto a new topic--Greece! 

"Within classical Greek civilization there appeared ideas, art forms, and types if government whose influence on Western Civilization has lasted down to the present day."

When the Greeks first appeared, they were one of the first of many barbarian people. A barbarian is a term used to describe the distinctive way of life based on farming, warfare, and tribal organization that became widespread in Europe beginning around 2500 B.C. In about 2000 B.C., the Greeks were migrating to Europe's southeastern region, which was relatively close to the people living around the Asian Minor, the Fertile Crescent, and Egypt. With all the people in their surroundings, the Greeks began to adapt and change their way of life as they saw it. The Greeks were very influenced by their neighbors but by 800 B.C. they had created their own new and distinctive way of living. And with this new way of life, including new ideas, arts, and government, they really shaped how the rest of the western world was going to live.

The Greek city-state was the first to practice the citizens' involvement in government. You could almost say that it was like democracy in practice. City-states also traded goods with areas along the northern coast of the Mediterranean. This brought the Greek civilization to many people of Mediterranean Europe. Their independence was also preserved from far-away kings trying to control their land because they innovated new warfare around 500 B.C.

Even before the Greeks had created a civilization, the people living on early Europe created fascinating  megaliths, just like the ones the Greeks were able to create. A megalith is a massive rough-cut stone used to construct monuments and tombs. One of the most earliest achievements of early Europe was the Stonehenge.

In the barbarian way of life, instead of  their earlier language, the people living in that region began to speak languages of Indo-European origin that were ancestors of Greek and Latin. They spoke this language because that is what they adapted to when living around some many different people in neighboring areas. Europeans lived in villages that housed several related families; generally, the settlements were widely scattered, because the population was much smaller than Egypt or Mesopotamia.

Groups of villages were called tribes. Tribes are a social and political unit consisting of a group if communities held together by common interests, traditions, and real or mythical ties of kinship. Tribes would meet from time to time to talk about business and celebrate festivals. Tribes often would have less power than the chieftains, people Greek and Roman thought of as kings and queens. 

This is all the information I retained and though was interesting from LO-1.