A Little History of the World

Gombrich introduces the history of Ancient Greece by discussing one of our best sources on the subject: their poetry. The famous poems of Ancient Greece were first told in chanted hexameter, shared over many years. Some were eventually written down and remain very important literary works, like The Iliad, which is attributed to a Greek poet named Homer. Stories like The Iliad tell of epic battles and love stories from ancient times, but none of it could be proven to be more than mere fiction until a 19th-century German businessman named Schliemann set out to prove otherwise. He raised money to travel to Greece and seek out Troy, the city described in The Iliad. He uncovered palaces and royal tombs of Mycenae and found Troy, dated to around 1400 B.C.

In comparing them to the Egyptians, Gombrich says that the seafaring people of Greece were not as interested in preserving their traditional styles and often incorporated ideas and techniques that they discovered at home or abroad. The artifacts discovered by Schliemann are believed to have been made on the nearby island of Crete. By 1200 B.C, new tribes came from the North and ruled over these Greek cities.