الحضارة الإغريقية المبكرة .. من کیمیائی ما قبل التاريخ إلى الفيلسوف الكيميائي

Early Greek Civilization .. From the Prehistoric Chemist to the Chemical Philosopher

Early Greek Civilization

The Minoans, the ancient inhabitants of Crete, emerged as the first Aegean civilization (in the Aegean Sea region around 2000 BC). The Minoans were centered on the island of Crete, adjacent to the Greek peninsula, and were a rich and prosperous society. The Cretan soil produced vineyards and olive trees, and the Cretans obtained metals by trading vines, olive oil, timber, and opium with Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, and the eastern coast of the Mediterranean (17). The Cretans also knew cement and ceramics, and used these materials to create a sanitary system inside homes. This system was not available to northern Europe until the eighteenth century, and the main deity (god) was female, which made Minoan women enjoy complete equality with men, including practicing the craft of bullfighting and boxing.

This peaceful society was invaded and occupied by the Mycenaeans from mainland Greece around 1500 BC. As a military society, the Mycenaeans built fortified walls around Greek cities and focused their efforts on the production of daggers, swords, helmets, and armor. They extended their trade to the coasts of Asia Minor, Rhodes, Syria, and the central Mediterranean to supply their military forces. After about 1200 BC, a wave of invasions by Hellenistic Indo-European tribes from the Balkans led to the fall of the Asia Minor capital of Troy (the legendary Trojan War), and Greece entered a Dark Age that lasted for nearly 400 years. This period ended around 800 BC, when the Indo-European groups that had settled in their new homeland resumed trade with Asia and adopted a modified version of the Phoenician alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet provided a steady increase in the efficiency of writing and its ease of learning, along with its many uses, in addition to the cheapness of writing materials such as papyrus from Egypt, and this can be compared to the invention of movable type or the development of computers in the modern era (18). One product of this rich and new intellectual environment was the development of a class of teachers who taught the children of the rich for a fee. These teacher-philosophers sought to arrive at reasonable explanations for the observable world (much like teachers do today).