In 2000 B.C.E, the Greeks settled the lands that were surrounded by the waters of the Aegean Sea and created a culture that shaped Western heritage forever. The Greeks made history when they settled in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Asia Minor, and Syria-Palestine.

The first cultures in Greece arose in the later 3rd and 2nd millennia: the Minoans on Crete and the Mycenaean's on the mainland. These are the cultures that were the source of later Greek myths, and whose religious and social structures influenced so much of later Greece and Europe. The great palaces, fortifications and tombs are testimony to the achie

This was also destroyed, around 1500 BC, most likely by the terrible eruption of the volcano on Santorini.

Findings on Crete after 1900 revealed some 3000 clay tablets inscribed with two scripts, called Linear A and Linear B. The earlier of the two, employed by the Minoans, was Linear A and it was already flourishing about 1750BC. Minoans also added inked Linear A inscriptions to stone and terra-cotta vessels. The Linear B tablets found at Cnossus [on the island of Crete] are pedestrian documents (Kagan 23). A unique clay disk found at the site of Phaestos is often adduced as the earliest example of printing-that is, reproducing written text by using "letter" stamps; the disk was stamped on both sides, while still wet, with a series of seal stones comprising a set of 45 symbols.

Memories survived, however, and gave rise to the earliest monuments of Greek literature: Homer's epics, the Iliad and the odyssey (Kagan 24). The Mycenaeans, written by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey, called them the Achaeans. Their language, an early Greek dialect, was written in the Linear B script. In the age of the Trojan War described in Homer's epics, Mycenae was the home of King Agamemnon from the house of Atreus and the leading city in the Greek world. About 1200BC the supremacy of Mycenae came to an end, perhaps because of interstate rivalry, which was compounded about a century later by the successful invasion of another Greek people, the Dorians, from the north. About 468BC it was again besieged and destroyed, this time by the inhabitants of Árgos, and never rebuilt.

The Mycenaeans' most impressive legacy is magnificent gold jewelry and ornaments, most of which can be seen in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. The Mycenaeans wrote in what is called Linear B, which has been deciphered as an early form of Greek (Demand 34). Examples of Linear B have also been found on Crete, suggesting that Mycenaean invaders may have conquered the island, perhaps around 1500 BC, when many Minoan palaces were destroyed. Mycenaean influence stretched further than Crete: the Mycenaean city-states banded together to defeat Troy and thus to protect their trade routes to the Black Sea, and archaeological research has unearthed Mycenaean artifacts as far away as Egypt, Mesopotamia and Italy. The Mycenaean civilization came to an end during the 12th century BC, when Dorian tribes invaded Greece and swept all before them.

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Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page double spaced)