Page 13 - Resources

These kings had palaces to live in and collected taxes which they stored in big

storerooms. The palaces had big stone walls around them. The stones were so big
that later Greeks thought the walls must have been built by
giants, whom they called Cyclops.

Some Greeks learned to write, in a sort of hieroglyphics called
Linear B, so that they could keep records of what taxes had
been collected. The kings made their people build paved roads.

In addition to maybe working as soldiers for other countries, the Greeks seem to
have sailed around the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea picking fights with
people on their own, and taking their gold, and probably also taking the people they

met as slaves.

One of these raids, around 1250 BC, may have been to attack the city of Troy, in
northern Turkey. Stories about the Trojan War (the war with Troy) were passed down
for hundreds of years by singers until they were written down by the poet Homer

around 700 BC.

Homer says that when the Greek soldiers came back from the Trojan War they found
that Greece was in very bad shape, with a lot of robbers and crime. There may be

some truth in this, because archaeology shows that around 1200 BC most of the
Greek palaces were destroyed, including the one at Mycenae.
We don't know why this happened, but many people think that there was a general
economic depression in the other countries of the Eastern Mediterranean and West

Asia around this time, especially in Egypt and in the Hittite kingdom. A lot of people
seem to have fallen on hard times. Maybe the Greeks found themselves out of work.

www.historyforkids.org

Ancient Greek Environment

Greece, unlike Egypt or Mesopotamia, is not a place that is easy to live in.

The soil is not very good for growing things, there are a lot

of mountains that make it hard to walk from one place to
another, and there is never enough fresh water. Because of
this, people did not settle in Greece as early as they moved
to Egypt and the Fertile Crescent.

On the other hand, what Greece does have is a lot of coastline
(beaches). No part of Greece is more than about forty miles
from the sea; a couple of days walking. There are a lot of small

(Greek Grandeur, Hebrew Heart) 11