Literacy had been lost and the Mycenaean script forgotten, but the Ancient Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, modifying it to create the Greek alphabet.
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12 Facts About Ancient Greeks
2.
In 480 BC, the first major battle of the invasion was fought at Thermopylae, where a small rearguard of Ancient Greeks, led by three hundred Spartans, held a crucial pass guarding the heart of Greece for several days; at the same time Gelon, tyrant of Syracuse, defeated the Carthaginian invasion at the Battle of Himera.
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3.
Ancient Greeks conquered Persia, defeating Darius III at the Battle of Issus in 333, and after the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 proclaimed himself king of Asia.
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4.
Many Ancient Greeks migrated to Alexandria, Antioch and the many other new Hellenistic cities founded in Alexander's wake, as far away as present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom and the Indo-Greek Kingdom survived until the end of the first century BC.
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5.
From about 750 BC the Ancient Greeks began 250 years of expansion, settling colonies in all directions.
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6.
Ancient Greeks Greece consisted of several hundred relatively independent city-states .
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7.
Furthermore, the Ancient Greeks were very aware of their tribal origins; Herodotus was able to extensively categorise the city-states by tribe.
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8.
The eventual triumph of the Ancient Greeks was achieved by alliances of city-states, allowing the pooling of resources and division of labor.
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9.
Homer's poetry, though it was developed around the same time that the Ancient Greeks developed writing, would have been composed orally; the first poet to certainly compose their work in writing was Archilochus, a lyric poet from the mid-seventh century BC.
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10.
Ancient Greeks developed astronomy, which they treated as a branch of mathematics, to a highly sophisticated level.
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11.
Ancient Greeks is referred to as the "father of medicine" in recognition of his lasting contributions to the field as the founder of the Hippocratic school of medicine.
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12.
The Ancient Greeks were polytheistic, worshipping many gods, but as early as the sixth century BC a pantheon of twelve Olympians began to develop.
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