Archaic Greece
By around 1000 BC the Greeks were starting to rebuild their civilization after the Dark Ages. There seem to have been more people around, and enough gold to pay for building new buildings. The Greeks did not rebuild the kings' palaces, though, because most Greek cities did not have kings anymore. Most cities were ruled by a group of rich men called aristocrats. This kind of government is called an oligarchy (OLL-ih-gark-ee). Instead, the Greeks built temples to the gods where the old palaces had been, mostly on top of hills.
There got to be so many people in Greece that the Greeks began to sent out groups of men (and sometimes women) to build new cities in other parts of Europe and Africa. One example is the city of Marseilles in the south of France. Another is a city on the Black Sea called Byzantion, which is now Istanbul, or the city of Cyrene in Libya. These are called colonies.
The Greeks (especially Corinth) also began to trade with West Asia again, especially with the Phoenicians. They learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians around 750 BC, and that is how Homer was able to write down the stories about the Trojan War. The Greeks also learned about art from Western Asia. The Greeks also began to take jobs as mercenaries (soldiers working for other people) again, in Egypt and also in Lydia (Turkey).
Around 650 BC there were two new ways of doing things which seem to have started in Greece instead of being learned from other people. We are not sure which came first, or whether one caused the other. One was a new way of fighting wars. The old way was rather disorganized: all the men on one side would just run at the men on the other side, yelling their heads off, and then they would fight until one side ran away or were all killed. In the new way, men lined up side by side, and each man used his shield to protect the man next to him, so that there was a wall of shields. Of course this only worked if everybody cooperated, and you had to practice a lot to be able to do it right, like a marching band. Also, everybody had to have a shield. But if you did it right it was much more successful than the old run-and-yell method. These new soldiers were called hoplites (HOP-lights).
The other new idea was for a new kind of government. Some of the Greek cities still had kings (Sparta for instance), but most of them were ruled by groups of aristocrats. These aristocrats were often fighting with each other over who would have the most power. Some of them tried to get other aristocrats on their side. But now one of these aristocrats had the idea to try to get the poor people on his side, too. That was pretty easy to do, because nobody had been paying any attention to these poor people at all. So this aristocrat was able to get more power than his friends and he was in charge of the city. Instead of being called the king, he was called the tyrant. The earliest tyrants (that we know of ) were in Corinth. Soon other aristocrats in other Greek cities (and in West Asia) copied this idea. (For more on tyrants click here). By 550 BC many cities were still ruled by aristocrats, especially the ones where Dorians lived, but many others were ruled by tyrants, especially the ones where Ionians lived, like Athens. Other aristocrats hated the tyrants, but a lot of poor people loved them. Most of the tyrants did a good job. They protected the poor people from the rich aristocrats, they built a lot of new buildings, and they helped people to trade with West Asia and the other nearby places.
To find out more about Archaic Greece, check out these books from Amazon.com or your library:
Oxford First Ancient History, by Roy Burrell and Peter Connolly (1997). Lively interviews and pictures make the ancient Mediterranean come to life. For middle schoolers.
Geometric Greece: 900-700 BC, by J. N. Coldstream (2nd edition 2003).
Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment, by Anthony Snodgrass (1981). Now perhaps slightly out of date.
