The Apidima Cave in Mani, in southern Greece, has been suggested to contain the oldest remains of early modern humans outside of Africa, dated to 200,000 years ago.[16] However others suggest the remains represent archaic humans.[17] All three stages of the Stone Age are represented in Greece, for example in the Franchthi Cave.[18] Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC,[19] are the oldest in Europe, as Greece lies on the route by which farming spread from the Near East to Europe.[20]

Greece is home to the first advanced civilizations in Europe and considered the birthplace of Western civilisation,[21][22] beginning with the Cycladic culture on the islands of the Aegean Sea around 3200 BC,[23] the Minoan civilization in Crete (2700–1500 BC),[24][25] and then the Mycenaean civilization on the mainland (1600–1100 BC).[25] These civilizations possessed writing, the Minoans using an undeciphered script known as Linear A, and the Mycenaeans writing the earliest attested form of Greek in Linear B.[26] Contemporary Hittite and Egyptian records suggest the presence of a single state under a "Great King" based in mainland Greece.[27][28]

Ancient Greece
Main article: Ancient Greece
See also: Greek Dark Ages, Archaic Greece, Classical Greece, and Hellenistic Greece
The collapse of the Mycenean civilization ushered in the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent. The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BC, the year of the first Olympic Games.[29] The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC.[30][31] There emerged kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, which spread to the shores of the Black Sea, Magna Graecia in southern Italy and Asia Minor. These reached great prosperity that resulted in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science, mathematics and philosophy. In 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the world's first democratic system of government in Athens.[32][33]


The Parthenon on the Acropolis of Athens, icon of classical Greece
By 500 BC, the Persian Empire controlled the Greek city states in Asia Minor and Macedonia.[34] Attempts by Greek city-states of Asia Minor to overthrow Persian rule failed, and Persia invaded the states of mainland Greece in 492 BC, but was forced to withdraw after defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. In response, the Greek city-states formed the Hellenic League in 481 BC, led by Sparta, which was the first recorded union of Greek states since the mythical union of the Trojan War.[35][36] The second Persian invasion of Greece was decisively defeated in 480-79 BC, at Salamis and Plataea, marking the eventual withdrawal of the Persians from all their European territories. The Greek victories in the Greco-Persian Wars are a pivotal moment in history,[37] as the 50 years of peace afterwards