“Unraveling the Mysteries: What Sparked the Dawn of Ancient Greece?”
In any event, it might surprise you to learn that the Greeks were not the first people living in Greece, and they were rather late arrivals. Greek sources acknowledged the presence of a people they named the Pelasgians. Herodotus records that they were barbarians with their own languages, but many decided to assimilate with the incoming Greeks. According to Homer in the Iliad Book 2, they were around during the Trojan war. Their fleet of ships is mentioned in the famous Catalogue of Ships, led by Achilles. Herodotus does write about them Hellenising in some areas like Attica, while maintaining their own cultures in others. Either way, we don’t know too much about the Pelasgians. They may have been one people, but more likely they were many peoples the Greeks lumped together as the indigenous population.
Another important pre-Greek people we need to look at when discussing the origins of the greeks are the Minoans. They were a civilization that developed on the island of Crete around 2000 BCE, and spread into the nearby Cyclades islands, meaning they were the first recognizable civilization in the Aegean. The Minoans did not call themselves that. Minoan is the name modern historians gave them based on the myth of the Cretan king Minos from the myth of the minotaur. For all we know that story has no relation to the Minoans because we don’t know much about them. They left a written language, in a script influenced by Egyptian Hieroglyphics we call Linear A, a similar pictographic script. The written language remained in use by the Minoans after they were incorporated into later Greek hegemony until 1300. As for culture, they worshipped different gods from the Greeks, with a central female deity. Like the Greeks after them, they relied on naval trade with their neighbors and seemed to have naval power in terms of warfare. Their political structure also seems to have been centralized around palaces in Crete, with the main palace in Knossos. With the construction of these palaces, a sophisticated form of political and economic organization centered on them developed with smaller palaces around Crete popping up as sub centers, with their influence spreading all the way to ancient Egypt. While we know little about their broader culture, the importance of the Minoans cannot be overstated, because the Greeks seem to have taken much that made the Minoans special and built on it.
