Persia and Greece Ch 6 AP World Studies

Aristotle

(384-322 b.c.e.) A Greek philosopher who encouraged his students to observe the natural world and explain logically how they proceeded from their starting assumptions. This system of reasoning shapes how we present written arguments today. Aristotle did not share Socrates's and Plato's optimism that knowledge alone would result in ethical behavior because he did not accept their view that human nature was good. He emphasized, instead, that people had to study hard so that they could gain control over their desires. Observing the round shadow the earth cast on the moon during eclipses, Aristotle concluded that the earth was a sphere and lay at the center of the universe. He urged his students to observe live animals in nature and was one of the first to realize that whales and dolphins were mammals, a discovery ignored for nearly two thousand years. Aristotle required that his students identify their starting assumptions and explain logically how they proceeded from one point to the next. This system of reasoning remained influential in the Islamic world and Europe long after his death and continues to shape how we present written arguments today.

Plato

(429-347 b.c.e.) A student of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle who used the Socratic method in his teaching, which emphasized ethics. He believed that students should use reason to choose the correct course of action.

Thucydides

(460-395 b.c.e.) Author of History of the Peloponnesian War, a pioneering work.

Socrates

(469-399 b.c.e.) A great philosopher who believed that virtue was the highest good. He developed a method of instruction still in use today, in which teachers ask students questions without revealing the answers. SOCRATIC METHOD - Ate the Hemlock - EXCUTION SUICIDE

Herodutus

(ca. 485-425 b.c.e.) A Greek-speaking historian born in Halicarnassus. Author of The Histories, an investigation of the history, folklore, geography, plants, and customs of the known world. Known as the "father of history."

Artemisia

(flourished 480 b.c.e.) The woman ruler of Halicarnassus, on the Aegean coast of modern-day Turkey, who fought with the Persians against the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis.

Darius I

(r. 522-486 b.c.e.) The third Achaemenid Persian ruler, who succeeded to the throne by coup. He conquered much territory in Eurasia but was unable to defeat the Scythians north of the Black Sea or the Greeks. He also reformed the empire's administrative structure.

Cyrus

(r. 558-530 b.c.e.) Founder of the Achaemenid dynasty in Iran. A native of Persis, Cyrus staffed his administration with many Persians as well as Medes, the tribe he defeated when he took power. Founded the Achaemenid dynasty. When Cyrus founded his dynasty, his soldiers from Persis were obliged to serve in the king's army and to provide their own equipment. They were not paid but were entitled to a share of the spoils from the cities they conquered. His most prestigious unit, the king's bodyguard, was called the Immortals, Herodotus explains, because "If a man was killed or fell sick, the vacancy he left was at once filled so that its strength was never more nor less than 10,000." Maintained an expensive road network. The main road, the Royal Road, linked the cities near the Aegean coast with the capital at Susa. Had a "Pony Express" kind of relay System for goverment travel.

Indo-European Migrant Farmers turned Greek

They usually planted barley, which was sturdier than wheat, in the lowlands, olive trees in the foothills, and grapes on the hillsides.

The Avesta

A book, probably dating to circa 1000 b.c.e. and first recorded in writing around 600 c.e., whose title means "The Injunction of Zarathushtra," the founding prophet of Zoroastrianism. Contains hymns attributed to Zarathushtra himself, which provide our best guide to his original thought.

The Rise of Greek City-States

A new era in Greek history starts around 800 b.c.e. when various regions—including mainland Greece, the islands of the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean, and the Aegean coast of Turkey—coalesced into city-states (polis; plural, poleis). The residents of these different places began to farm more intensively, and the resulting increase in agricultural production permitted a diversification of labor among the growing population: while the vast majority of people farmed around the cities, a tiny minority were able to settle inside walled cities with markets for agricultural goods and temples to different gods. Each city-state, including the surrounding agricultural area, was small, with a population of between five and ten thousand people, but each was self-sufficient, having its own courts, law code, and army (see Map 6.1). These city-states each had a guardian deity whose temple was located within the city walls. The Greeks believed in a pantheon of many gods headed by Zeus and his wife Hera. Each god possessed specific traits: Athena, the guardian god of Athens, was a goddess of wisdom, war, and weaving. The Greeks told many myths about the gods and goddesses, often focusing on their attempts to intervene in the human world. The citizens of the city-state gathered during festivals to offer animal sacrifices to the gods, with whom they communicated through prayers and oracles. The most celebrated oracle was at Delphi, on the Gulf of Corinth where, before making any important decisions, individuals and city-states consulted Apollo's priests to learn what would happen in the future. People traveled all over the Aegean to pray for medical cures and to participate in temple festivals such as the Olympic games, which were held every four years starting in 776 b.c.e. at the temple to Zeus at Olympia in the Peloponnese. The citizens of the city-states of Greece went out to establish more than 250 different city-states along the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas (see Map 6.1). Like Mesopotamian city-states, the Greek city-states remained linked to the mother city through trade. Ships carried olive oil, wine, and pottery produced by the Greeks to other regions, where they obtained lumber to make more ships. During this period, the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet and added vowels. Their first inscriptions date to 730 b.c.e. This new alphabet underlies many modern alphabets, including that of English, because the vowels and consonants could be used to represent the sounds of any language.

Phoenicians

A seagoing people who, around 900 b.c.e., expanded outward from their base on the Mediterranean coast of modern-day Lebanon. Their alphabet, which used only letters with no pictorial symbols, is the ancestor of the Roman alphabet. They used a new type of writing system: an alphabet of twenty-two consonants. Readers supplied vowels on their own. (Consider the many abbreviations we use when texting.) Unlike cuneiform, this alphabet had no pictorial symbols and depicted only sounds.

3 Great Playwrites

Aeschylus, Sophocles (496-406 b.c.e.), and Euripides (ca. 485-406 b.c.e.)—that show individuals, both male, and female, coming to terms with their fates.

Context and Connections: Jews and Zoroastrianism

Although the Jews practiced their own religion while in Babylon, they encountered and absorbed some of the beliefs of those living around them. Scholars of Judaism and Zoroastrianism have recently been able to decipher difficult-to-understand passages because of similar wording in Jewish and Zoroastrian texts. Modern scholarship indicates that the Hebrew concepts of the afterlife and of the Devil arose after the sixty-year Babylonian Captivity, and some attribute these new ideas to the influence of Zoroastrianism.

Context and Connections: Artmesia

Artemisia fascinated Herodotus because unlike well-off Athenian women, who stayed indoors and devoted themselves to managing their households, she led her country's ships into battle. Chinese women, too, occasionally led troops: the oracle bones record that one of the wives of the Shang-dynasty king (Chapter 4) who ruled around 1200 b.c.e. led armies on the battlefield. The famous woman warrior Mulan, depicted in a Disney film, actually existed (she lived before the sixth century c.e.), but she belonged to a northern non-Chinese people. Herodotus also devotes an unusual amount of space to the legendary all-female Amazon warriors. Most scholars had assumed the Amazons never existed, but excavations of Scythian graves in modern Russia have uncovered graves of women soldiers who were buried with their armor and their horses. So the Scythians had women fighters, too, but not all-women armies as Herodotus recorded.

Context and Connections: Democracy and Monarchy

As earlier chapters have discussed, other societies had assemblies: consider the two councils, one of elders and one of younger men, that Gilgamesh (Chapter 2) consulted before he went to war. Athens differed, though, in that these assemblies—and no monarch—ruled.

Sparta

Became one of the first to grant extensive rights to its citizens. Only the descendants of original Spartans could be citizen-soldiers, who fought full-time and were not permitted to farm or engage in business. A second group, called "dwellers around," were descended from the first peoples to be conquered by the Spartans; entitled to own land, they also worked as craftsmen and traders but could not vote. The lowest-ranking group, full-time state slaves (Helots), cultivated the land of the citizens. Because their husbands were often away at war, Spartan women ran their estates and had more freedom than women in other city-states, yet they could not vote. Future Spartan citizens joined the army as young children and received an austere military upbringing; only when they had successfully completed military training could they become citizens. Citizens (but not the state slaves) exercised a limited veto over the policies enacted by a council of elders who ruled in conjunction with two kings as an oligarchy.

Mediterarean Architecture

Between 2000 and 1500 b.c.e., the Mediterranean island of Crete was home to a civilization with lavish palaces, well-built roads, bronze metallurgy, and a writing system called Linear A, which has not been deciphered.

Carthage

By 814 b.c.e., the Phoenicians had established one outpost at Carthage (modern-day Tunis in Tunisia) and subsequently built others along the North African coast and the southern coast of modern-day Spain.

Context and Connections: Darius and Asoka

Darius's inscription differs from those of Ashoka of the Mauryan dynasty (Chapter 3) and the First Emperor of the Qin dynasty (Chapter 4), both of whom had inherited the throne from their fathers. Darius, however, had killed the reigning king, and his distant family ties to Cyrus did not entitle him to the throne, so he had to justify taking power by claiming Ahura Mazda's support. In addition, Darius's use of languages differed from that of the Qin founder, who used a single language, confident that he could communicate with his subjects in Chinese. The text framing the Behistun relief appears in three languages, because, Darius, like Ashoka, ruled a multilingual empire in which people living in the same place spoke different languages.

Hoplites

Greek soldiers, called hoplites could defeat the Persians in hand-to-hand combat because they had better shields, stronger armor, and more effective formations. The soldiers were divided into units, called phalanxes, eight men deep. If the first row of soldiers was broken, the row behind them pressed forward to meet the attack.

Greek City-States

Had their own king and fought other city states, such as Athens, which also was a democracy.

Plato's Academy

He founded the Academy, a gymnasium where he could teach students a broad curriculum emphasizing ethics. Gymnasiums had begun simply as an open ground for soldiers to train, but they had evolved into schools where young boys engaged in exercise and studied texts. Plato taught that people could choose the just course of action by using reason to reconcile the conflicting demands of spirit and desire. Reason alone determined the individual's best interests. Plato admitted boys to the Academy as well as some girls. Some scholars contend that all well-off Greek women could read and write, while others think that only a small minority could.

Salamis

The Greeks regrouped, and Athenian naval commanders secured a surprising Greek victory at Salamis.

Delian

In 478 b.c.e., the Athenians formed the Delian (DEE-lih-yuhn) League, a group of city-states whose stated purpose was to drive the Persians from the Greek world. After several victories in the 470s eliminated the Persian threat, some of the league's members withdrew. Athens invaded these cities and forced them to become its subjects, and in 454 b.c.e. the Athenians moved the league's treasury to Athens, ending all pretense of an alliance among equals. This was the closest that Athens came to having an empire, but its possessions were all Greek-speaking, and its control was short-lived.

Direct Democracy in Athens

In 508 b.c.e., a group of aristocrats extended Solon's reforms further and established direct democracy. All citizens above the age of twenty—roughly thirty thousand men, or 10 percent of the population, but no women or slaves—could join the assembly, the lawmaking body. Supporters of Athenian democracy proclaimed the importance of liberty, both private liberty to live as one desired and political liberty to participate in decision making. Freedom of speech in the private sphere meant that men could speak their minds freely at home; in the political sphere it guaranteed that men could say anything they liked at the assembly. Political equality meant that all citizens enjoyed equal opportunity to speak before the assembly, even though not everyone had the same social position or the same amount of property. Many, however, were too busy to attend the frequent meetings, which occurred as often as forty times a year. Nevertheless, these important ideas continued even after Athenian democracy came to an end in 322 b.c.e. and reemerged some two thousand years later after 1850, when European thinkers urged the adoption of representative democracy, in which one person spoke for others, a departure from the assembly of ancient Athens.

Representative Democracy

In which one person spoke for others, a departure from the assembly of ancient Athens.

Zoroastrianism

Iranian religion named for Zarathushtra (in Persian; Zoroaster in Greek), who taught that a host of good deities and evil demons, all in perpetual conflict, populate the spiritual world. Zoroastrianism featured hymn singing and the performance of elaborate rituals, but unlike the ancient Indian religion, it also held that the world was governed by two opposing forces: good and evil. "The Injunction of Zarathushtra"

Democracy

It took more than one hundred years for Athens to establish democracy. The most famous reformer, Solon (SOH-luhn), became the civilian head of state of Athens in 594 b.c.e. and launched a reform that abolished the obligation to pay one-sixth of one's crop as tax to the state. He also cancelled debts, which made it possible for former debtors to acquire and farm their own land. Athenian citizens formed four assemblies, defined by how much property they owned.

The Greco-Persian Wars, 490-479 b.c.e.

Marathon - The first important Athenian victory came at the battle of Marathon in 490 b.c.e., when the Persian ruler Darius sent a force to punish the Athenians for supporting an uprising against the Persians by the Greeks living on the east coast of the Aegean. The Athenian forces of eleven thousand men attacked the Persian army of twenty-five thousand when they were foraging for food and, in a stunning reversal of what every informed person expected, won a decisive victory on the plain of Marathon. Herodotus's tally of the casualties underlines the immensity of the Athenian victory: the Athenians lost 192 men; the Persians, 6,400.

Minoan Civilization of Crete

Minoans after the king Minos who, Greek legends recounted, ruled a large empire with many ships. Archaeologists have found pottery made in the Minoan style all over the Mediterranean and western Asia, evidence of a wide-reaching Minoan trade network. The Minoan civilization came to an abrupt end in 1500 b.c.e., probably because the Minoans were conquered by the Mycenaeans (1600-1200 b.c.e.). The Mycenaeans used Linear B script.

Context and Connections: The Maya and the Peloponesian War

Much as the protracted wars among the city-states resulted in the decline of the Maya (Chapter 5), the protracted Peloponnesian War wore both Sparta and Athens down, creating an opportunity for the rulers of the northern region of Macedon to conquer Greece.

Thermopolyae

Naval Battle - The Greeks were eventually routed, but three hundred Spartans stood firm and fought to their deaths. The victorious Persians then sacked the deserted city of Athens.

Homer

Odyssey and the Illiad - The poems describe the Trojan Wars that took place centuries earlier between the Greeks and the Trojans living across the Aegean Sea in modern-day Turkey. Archaeologists are not certain whether the Trojan Wars occurred. If they did, it was at the time of the Mycenaean civilization. AND THE WARS WERE NOT FOUGHT OVER HELEN. HELEN WAS FICTIONAL!

Slavery in Greece

Roughly two-fifths of Athens's population, some 120,000 people, were slaves, who also did not participate in the assembly. Many different types of slaves existed. Those who had skills and lived with their masters had less arduous lives than those who worked in the fields or in the hazardous silver mines.

Greek City States and Trade

Ships carried olive oil, wine, and pottery produced by the Greeks to other regions, where they obtained lumber to make more ships.

The Cyrus Cylinder

The Cyrus Cylinder, a 9-inch (23-cm) long football-shaped piece of clay that is one of the most famous primary sources from the ancient world, documents Cyrus's policy. He did not attempt to change their cultures but made offerings to local gods and allowed his subjects to continue to worship as they had before, a key reason for the success of the Persian empire.

Context and Connections: MARATHON

The English word marathon comes from a later legend about a messenger running over 20 miles (32 km) from Marathon to Athens to announce the victory. Exhausted by his effort, he then died, according to the legend.

Sparta and Athens

The Spartans, however, felt that they, not Athens, should be the leader of the Greeks. Since the 460s, tensions had been growing between the two city-states, and from 431 to 404 b.c.e. Athens and Sparta, and their allied city-states engaged in the Peloponnesian War. Sparta, with the help of the Persians, finally defeated Athens in 404 b.c.e.

Partheon

The centerpiece of the city's reconstruction, the Parthenon, was both a temple to Athena, the city's guardian deity, and a memorial to those who had died in the wars with Persia. Once completed, the Parthenon expressed the Athenians' desire to be the most advanced people of the ancient world. Built between 447 and 432 b.c.e., the Parthenon was a two-roomed building surrounded by columns over 34 feet (10 m) tall; one of the interior rooms held a magnificent statue of Athena, now lost. Beautiful friezes inside the roofs and above the columns portrayed the legendary battles of the Trojan War, in which the Greek forces (symbolizing the Athenians and their allies) defeated the Trojans (the ancient counterpart of the Persian enemy).

Lydian coins

The first metal coins in the world, dating to around 600 b.c.e. Made from electrum, a naturally occurring alloy of gold and silver collected from the riverbeds in Lydia, a region on the Aegean coast of modern-day Turkey.

Fueneral Practices of the Zoastrians

The funerary practices of the Zoroastrians differed from those of almost all other ancient peoples. Whereas most peoples buried their dead, Zoroastrians, believing that dead flesh polluted the ground, left corpses outside so that scavenging birds and dogs could eat the flesh; then they collected the cleaned bones and buried them.

Language

The language of the migrants to Iran, Indo-Iranian, belonged to the same language family as Sanskrit (key term in Chapter 3), and their caste system resembled that of Vedic India (see Chapter 3) but had only three ranks: priests, rulers or warriors, and ordinary herders or farmers. Their herding way of life took maximum advantage of the high plateau environment of Iran, which had no major river valley comparable to the Nile, the Indus, or the Yellow Rivers.

Ahura Mazda

The name of the supreme deity of Zoroastrianism, the Lord of Truth, who created heaven and earth, day and night, and darkness and light. Each person, whether male or female, Zarathushtra taught, had to prepare for the day of judgment when everyone would appear before Ahura Mazda. Zarathushtra firmly believed in the ability of human beings to shape their world by choosing between the good and the bad. People who chose the good had to think good thoughts, do good deeds, and tell the truth. Herodotus remarked that young boys were taught to "speak the truth,"Footnote the fundamental Zoroastrian virtue. Whenever anyone lied or did a bad deed, the evil spirit gained ground. The practice of reciting prayers ensured the transmission of the sacred hymns for a full two thousand years before they were written down. Truth is the highest good, and everyone has the ability to follow and promote the truth. Like Vedic religion, Zoroastrianism featured hymn singing and the performance of elaborate rituals, but unlike the ancient Indian religion, it also held that the world was governed by two opposing forces: good and evil.

Culture in Athens: DRAMA

The new literary genres of both Greek tragedy and Greek comedy took shape after 472 b.c.e., when the playwright Aeschylus (525-456 b.c.e.) wrote The Persians, the earliest Greek tragedy surviving today. Set in the Persian capital at Susa, the play opens with a chorus of elderly men speculating about Xerxes's attempted invasion of Greece because they have had no news for so long.

Context and Connections: Cunieform and Phonics

The phonetic alphabet was surely one of the most influential innovations in the ancient world because it was much faster to learn an alphabet than to memorize a symbolic script like cuneiform or Chinese characters. All of the writing systems in the ancient world that existed before Phoenician required students and scribes to learn a new symbol for each word. The still-undeciphered Indus River Valley script had symbols, and the first Indian alphabets date to Ashoka's reign. Chinese remains a character-based language even today. Cuneiform eventually evolved into a phonetic alphabet, but only after the development of the Phoenician alphabet.

Achaemenids

The ruling dynasty in Iran between 550 and 330 b.c.e. The Achaemenids, whose founder was from the region of Persia in the southwest of modern-day Iran, ruled the Persian empire and at its height in the fifth century b.c.e. governed a population estimated at 30 to 35 million people.

Satraps

The third Achaemenid ruler, Darius, divided his empire into provinces called satrapies, each administered by a governor, or satrap. The officials under the satrap were recruited locally, a hallmark of the Persian system. COMPARE AND CONTRAST: SATRAPS TO CITY STATES

1st Olympic Games

Were held in Greece

Woman and Democracy

Women could not serve as soldiers or become citizens. The women who enjoyed the greatest security were married; only children born to such couples were legitimate. Athenian men had many other sexual partners, both male and female: prostitutes whom they visited occasionally, concubines whom they supported financially, and slaves who could not say no to their owners.

Greek Gods

Zeus, Hera, Athena, Poseidon, etc.

Oracle

at Delphi