Yay, for the first time ever I got every question right!

10/12 without guessing. You're going to get a lot of static about the Wiltshire monument, which was in use, built, rebuilt for an extended period of time. The present stones represent a late configuration. Here's a pretty decent book on it.

Thanks, Michael, very interesting. I got 8 right.

No. 8 was easy, clue being "dynasty", which meant I had to change my answer for no. 2 because I didn't think you would have China twice; anyway, I still got it wrong.

I learned something new because I had never heard of the Olmecs (should I be admitting this?)

Aah, Paul Robeson and "Joahua fit the battle of Jericho"!! I feel like getting my old vinyl out but I haven't got a player.

I'm sure Glenn Beck has heard of the Battle of Thermopylae.

Of course that should be "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho."

Got 9 right. For more on Salamis (and Thermopylae) read Persian Fire by Tom Holland, it's an excellent popular history book, and really captures the idea that things that happened then are still resonating to this day...

11 out of 12, with a fair number of educated guesses.

1. The Ptolemies were ruling Egypt by 300BC, and I didn't think it was the oldest one.
2. Didn't know this, but Damascus is one of the oldest cities in the world, so it made sense for it to be somewhere nearby.
3 & 4 Was pretty sure about these
5. I knew they developed the postal service; horse riding seemed likelier to have come from the steppes.
6&7 Knew these
8 Didn't know for sure, but it wasn't Rome and dynasties sounded like China.
9 Guessed the Lighthouse, since I assumed it would be easier to build that higher than a statue.
10. I'll be really picky and point out that the Persian advance wasn't finally halted until they were defeated at Plataea the following year. But Salamis was the crucial battle, since it cut off the army from being supplied by sea, and sufficiently discouraged Xerxes that he went back home and left the rest to his generals, pretty much accepting defeat.
11. Oops - the only question about my own country and I get it wrong. Went for 6500BC
12. Knew this.

Only 6/12. I'm hopeless on ancient history. I have however been listening to a marathon podcast about Rome from it's founding to the fall of Byzantium in the 1400's. Good stuff.

http://www.learnoutloud.com/Podcast-Directory/History/European-History/The-History-of-Rome-Podcast/25263

9 out of 12, not bad (though a couple of lucky guesses there).

A couple of years ago there was an edit war on Wikipedia about the Greco-Persian wars, with both sides blaming each other for starting it. 2,488 years later, yes. (So the Irak war arguments could go for some time yet I'm afraid...)

The only source pretty much we have on it is Herodotus' Histories which is a wonderful read I'd recomend to anyone. It's fantastic because it has one foot in mythology and one in proper, researched history, so it's pretty much the birth of history right there on the page. And it's so vivid they're still making (admittedly crap) comic books and films out of it.

Herodotus incidentally takes the time to speculate on where the Greeks came from before they lived in Greece. The idea of "indigenous" populations seemed ridiculous in those days - everyone moved around.

Gore Vidal's Creation actually covers a number of these questions and is a darn good read too. Covers Periclean Athens, The Persian Wars, Confucius and Buddha, all of whom were roughly contempary

Very good quiz. Thank you !

My attempt:

1a. The New Kingdom. Been to Egypt etc. Wonderful.

2b. Byblos it is.

3c. Turkey guaranteed.

4. False, as it was in Mesopotamia (land of two rivers). I have 'a little apple to peel' with American fighter pilots who used Assyrian bas-relief walls for target practice while invading and staying in Iraq. Sigh. Barbarians!!!!

5. Could have guessed. All I can say, that I think it is East - very East.

6b. Sumaria is in Israel. Sumer must be in Iraq.

7c. Jericho.

8a. China.

9. Not sure.

10c. Salamis? I am guessing.

11a. Been there done that, and have also been to Avebury.

12. Been to Mexico, visited the Aztec exhibition in London. Cannot answer this question.

11/12, Byblos tripped me up. Good one, Michael.

Shame on you on not knowing Salamis, though. Marathon kept the Persian hordes away for only 10 years; Thermopylai was a suicidal delaying action; but Salamis destroyed Persian naval power and kept them away for good. Actually it also took the land battle of Plataiai that finished off the remnants of the Persian army, and the naval raid at Mykale on the Asia Minor coast that destroyed the remnants of the fleet. But Salamis was the decisive action. The Athenians paid a heavy price: they staked everything on the naval battle, evacuating the population and allowing the Persians to utterly destroy Athens. But the gamble worked. The Persians never again ventured into Europe; the most they could do was buy influence by giving large subsidies to the Spartans, who used the treasonous gold to build a navy with which defeat the Athenians in the Peloponnesian war. Lots of lessons there about unity and the corrupting nature of money.

There is a story about Salamis that links the three great tragic poets of Athens. Aischylos fought at Salamis; Sophokles was part of the chorus of wreathed youths that celebrated the victory; and Euripides was born on that day. The last seems too much of a coincidence, but he was at least born that same year.

(BTW I used direct transliterations of names and places, rather than the latinized ones in common use).

BTW I used direct transliterations of names and places, rather than the latinized ones in common use.

Yes, well done. Goodness me, this isn't the Dog and Duck.

Goodness me, this isn't the Dog and Duck.

Come again? The what?

Only explaining why the spellings look different than usual. Anyway, I am Greek so I'll spell Greek names the way I want, so there.

yobro:

I'll spell Greek names the way I want

And Damntheral will spell Irak the French way!!

Be careful we don't end up with a Tower of Babel, spelling-wise that is.

8

There is a great poem about Thermopylae, as an allegory for our lives, by a guy named Constantine Cavavy.

I highly recommend it.

There is also a new book out about the Athenian Navy and how it fostered both the growth of athenian Democracy and the growth of the Athenian Empire.

That is called "...Masters of the Sea...". something like that.

damntheral:
The question "where did the Greeks come from" is a good one. The language and part of the religious culture came from wherever the rest of the Indoeuropeans came, probably Russia/Central Asia. The way I learned it in school, bands of raiding nomads bearing horses came south in two main waves, one in the Bronze and one in the Iron Age. They of course washed over the previous population, whom Herodotus calls Pelasgoi. As usual, the earlier population was bigger and has left it genetic footprint (cultural too). DNA analysis shows that the latter probably came from the Middle East and also settled in other places, including Iberia, where the majority of British DNA seems to come from. Every nation is a genetic and cultural palimpsest.

Thanks for this very interesting quiz.
I really enjoyed it, and I also learnt a bit (scored 10/12).

One comment:
I did this quiz on a piece of paper.
It would be great if the guardian can reproduce a quiz functionality like this one.

Finally, thanks again as you also helped me realize that I have to improve the Phrygian Cap page on my site. : )

Eight - Started off badly, then coasted. Interesting stuff. Glad I read that set of kid encyclopedias many decades ago.

It would be great if the guardian can reproduce a quiz functionality like this one.

I'm just glad the "Post your comment" button is working again.

jennyanydots:
fair enough--it's just hard to break early habits.

lefthalfback:
Cavafy? "A guy"? Only one of the greatest poets of early modernism, who directly influenced T.S. Elliot and Lawrence Durrell, among others, and the two Greek poets who won the Nobel prize (Seferis and Elytis).
Very good of you to mention him, though. His work uses classical history extensively as allegories. Other than Thermopylae, other great poems of his are "Ithaca," "The Trojans," and "God abandons Anthony." (see, I can make myself spell things the English way). Of couse he also left a large body of fairly frank homoerotic poems--but our teachers didn't dwell on those.

10/12 - not too bad as I didn't guess more than one of those. Bit surprised that the Mausoleum was the tallest of the three as the other two would seem to have functional reasons to be particularly high.

11/12
I got the ones I knew, I messed up the one I guessed wrong. Dang Frenchies!

I second the recomendation for Tom Holland's book, it is an excellent readable history of an interesting time. Of course as a Brit I don't like to admit that we didn't come up with the wooden walls of a boat as a defensive line...

Byblos, Lebanon came as a surprise.

Good book about the Persian war by Tom Holland:
http://www.amazon.com/Persian-Fire-First-Empire-Battle/dp/0385513119

WalthamstowLad: The lighthouse was the correct answer for no. 9. It does take a lot of scrolling up and down to correct the quiz.
I batted .500, knocked the easy ones out of the park and on the ones I missed, I advanced my knowledge.
Triple Crown threat.

@jennyanddots
Argh, I did, didn't I? The tragic thing is, as every time I write the word down, I took a couple of seconds to try and remember which spelling is which but I still got it wrong.

One thing that puzzles me about European history is it seems to be an endless flow of westwards migrations/invasions, many of which seem to originate from central Asia or Eastern Europe. Why? Why were there always more people in the East?

yobro-

Yes- I really liked "Ithaca" and "God Abandons Anthony".

I read them in College, in a Greek Literature in Translation course.

We did read some of the others too, but there wasn't much discussion about them. In fact, this was a long time ago, and some of us had to re-read them to be quite sure that he wasn't talking about young women.

That was a great class that really influenced me. I particularly recall the "...Melian Dialogue..." and the plays of Euripdies and the rest. Great, powerful stuff.

Listen, since you are a Greek, what do you think about th ewritings of Victor Davis Hanson, who takes a somewhat contrarian view about the significance of Athens?

I did find his writing about the Theban defeat of the Spartans to be quite interesting.

BastilleDay,

Thank you for the link to your quiz! I tried it and I achieved 100%. Phew. Pride restored!!

Not good. Not good at all.

I seem to have a very superficial education.

LHB:
I haven't read or even heard of VD (?!) Hanson. But I'm sure a contrarian view is possible and even justified.

Athens is revered because of democracy and the flowering of culture in a fairly short period, which also led to the dominance of its dialect (Attic basically obliterated all other dialects from Hellenistic times, none of which survives except for a tiny remnant of Doric, called Tsakonika, almost extinct).

However, there are plenty of things about Athens that were not so great. Slavery and the position of women are of course part of that, but it's a bit unfair to judge them by modern standards. More important is the political and economic underpinning of the Atnenian flowring. Athenians recognised the importance at naval power before and especially after Salamis. They built up their navy, adapting their constitution to its demands. For example, every free male had equal rights; the very rich paid heavy taxes, the poor through service as rowers. Athenian ships were manned by free men who fought for their own rights, not for wages or because of chains and whips. (BTW, the relatively rich and middle class served as cavalry and infantry respectively, providing their own horses and arms). So Athens used its navy to domenate the Delian confederacy, but it wasn't really an alliance: they taxed everyone heavily to finance things like the building of the Acropolis, and brutally punished anyone who wanted out. By the time the Pelopnnesian war started, Sparta could find enough disgruntled "allies" to side with it, and with Persian gold they built a string enough navy to defeat the Athenians at sea (they had to, since the Athenians refused to fight pitched land battles).

Anyway, after the defeat, Athens never regained military and political supremacy. From then on it was the Boeotians and the Macedonians, and ultimately the Romans who dominated. The Spartans, soon after their naval triumphs, reverted to their default inward-looking state (a brutal totalitarian system constantly in fear of serf revolts), so they ultimately became irrelevant. Philip and Alexander of Macedon, and finally the Romans, basically ignored them.

So militarily Athens was a flash in the pan, always too small to win a land war, and bankrupted by trying to maintain a strong enough navy, which at its peak was partly financed by plundering colonies. A little like the British Empire in fact, only shorter.

I could talk about this for a long time, but I'd better stop.

domenate? jeez, I'm slipping.

other typos too--apologies everyone.

Ten of 12. Can't believe I blew the Themostocles one, even knowing he was the Athenian naval commander.

"Athens never regained military and political supremacy. From then on it was the Boeotians and the Macedonians, and ultimately the Romans who dominated. The Spartans, soon after their naval triumphs, reverted to their default inward-looking state (a brutal totalitarian system constantly in fear of serf revolts), so they ultimately became irrelevant. Philip and Alexander of Macedon, and finally the Romans, basically ignored them."

Nice little summary, yobro. Good job summarizing so much in so few words.

And today Athens is the Greek capital and honored as the seed of the democratic form of government used by nations around the world (Which is not to say democracy - under some other, non-Greek name - would not have arisen anyway. But Athens gets naming rights.)

And the mighty and much-feared Sparta is today a tiny and dusty crossroad. I have never once heard anyone say they wanted to visit Greece and see the sights of Sparta.

StephenMorrill
27 Aug 2010, 4:16PM

To be fair, I don't think the Spartans left a whole lot worth visiting - they weren't known for their building (unless I'm misrecalling?)

damntheral:

One thing that puzzles me about European history is it seems to be an endless flow of westwards migrations/invasions, many of which seem to originate from central Asia or Eastern Europe. Why? Why were there always more people in the East?

My understanding of this is that the open plains of Russia and Central Asia favoured nomads on horseback, who were mobile and could raid settled populations. They migrated partly because of greed, partly because they were constantly under pressure from other nomads. They kept coming because they could achieve what they wanted in small numbers, not because there were more people in the East. They would come in, conquer, then settle in and lord it over the locals, then get mostly assimilated. Examples abound. The great mediaeval Germanic and Slavic migrations happened under pressure from the Huns and Avars. Not a trace of the Huns and Avars survives. The Bulgars also came from Central Asia too, but became completely Slavicised.

You can see this story in people's DNA, The numbers of migrants from these areas was small, and they usually form a small minority ofthe genome.

yobro- Victor Davis Hansen might be worth a read. he is a big believer in the value of the Greek yeoman-farmer infantryman. However, his writing is prolix in the extreme.

He has a book called -The Soul of Battle. It focuses on 3 great citizen armies- the Theban Army that broke Sparta-Sherman's Army of the Tennessee and Patton's 7th Army.

As for the Thebans- they crushed the Spartans at some battle in Boetia-and then marched into the Peloponeese to freethe Helots, who built a great fortified city to protect themselves.

I believe that the Theban general was Epaminondas?

Got 9 of 12 today, MT you skunked me on nos. 2, 4 and 9.

From my engineering education I should have known no. 9. Dang.

The battle of Salamis ended the Persian invasion because the Athenians cornered and just about destroyed the entire Persian fleet (which probably included ships from many vassal states such as the Phoenicians). It was one of the most decisive battles in history.
They came out of it with true bragging rights and became a bit arrogant, built a sizable empire based on sea power. Yobro summarized it well.

One more detail on their decline: it really began when they invaded Syracuse over in Sicily, got bogged down in a two-year siege and paid heavily for something they should have left alone. If anyone is drawing historical parallels, this one has been worrying me ever since we invaded Iraq.

The Spartans and their allies jumped on the opportunity, soon after that siege. The Athenians could have won that war, pre-Syracuse.

And Yobro, I just read your '4:24pm' post. A great book on those waves of invasions is Harold Lamb's The March of the Barbarians (1941).

snoopster:
Sparta was a strange cult of the elite warrior. Everything was designed to maintain that. Spartan citizens (a minuscule minority) lived their entire lives, from the age of 5 or so, in barracks, eating crappy food and training, then visiting their wives once in a while to father more warriors. All the work was done by helots, who were serfs treated with incredible brutality (hunting them for sport like animals was a rite of passage). Spartans were proud of being almost illiterate, produced no art or literature to speak of (except for battle paeans), and did not have a real economy. Their money was iron bars (by design), so they weren't exactly great traders. Outsiders other than envoys were not allowed to visit. What I found amazing was that they managed to organize the Peloponnesian alliance, negotiate with the Persians and build a powerful navy at all, given how insular they were. Maybe Herodotus and other historians exaggerated a bit about how uncouth they were--somehow they trained enough diplomats and planners to do that.

BTW, the miltary dictators who ruled Greece in 1967-74 absolutely loved the Spartans, it's all they talked about. Talking about Athens would get around to the subject of democracy, you see.

snoopster:
Sparta was a strange cult of the elite warrior. Everything was designed to maintain that. Spartan citizens (a minuscule minority) lived their entire lives, from the age of 5 or so, in barracks, eating crappy food and training, then visiting their wives once in a while to father more warriors. All the work was done by helots, who were serfs treated with incredible brutality (hunting them for sport like animals was a rite of passage). Spartans were proud of being almost illiterate, produced no art or literature to speak of (except for battle paeans), and did not have a real economy. Their money was iron bars (by design), so they weren't exactly great traders. Outsiders other than envoys were not allowed to visit. What I found amazing was that they managed to organize the Peloponnesian alliance, negotiate with the Persians and build a powerful navy at all, given how insular they were. Maybe Herodotus and other historians exaggerated a bit about how uncouth they were--somehow they trained enough diplomats and planners to do that.

BTW, the miltary dictators who ruled Greece in 1967-74 absolutely loved the Spartans, it's all they talked about. Talking about Athens would get around to the subject of democracy, you see.

LHB:
Yes, the battle of Leuctra and Epameinondas, the Oblique Phalanx and all that. You've read your history. Theban dominance did not last long, though. Mantineia, where Epameinondas died, was only 15 years later. Another 26 years and Philip II of Macedon crushed them and every other city-state at Chaeroneia. Alexander was only 18 then, commanding the cavalry, and he spent the next 15 years cutting a bloody swathe through most of the known world. Eventful times, those were.

The Stonehenge questions was hard to answer because it was built in stages between 2800 - 1800 BC. They keep discovering earlier layers to the site. Lots of info if you Google it.

It's striking that Stonehenge is around the same age as the pyramids at Giza - shows the head start the Egyptians had on the whole civilisation thing.

yobro
27 Aug 2010, 4:38PM

I knew all that, I was just pointing out that the reason know one visits Sparta to see the sights is that they weren't big on impressive, lasting buildings.

ohsocynical
27 Aug 2010, 4:50PM

to be fair though, only one answer was close.

KevinNevada:
Good point about the Sicilian expedition. An excellent book on this war is (you got it) The Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan (single volume--he also wrote a monumental four-volume history too).

The Peloponnesian War looms large in my mind. As a middle- and high-schooler I was forced to read very large parts of both Thucydides' History and Xenophon's Hellenica in the original. Was a bit of a slog at the time, but it was thrilling too, and I am thankful for it. It's amazing how these two more or less created the discipline of history (Herodotus, whom I also had to read in parts. was a bit of a gullible fabulist, as others have pointed out).

yobro- I still recall laughing at the Spartan ambassador's alnguage in "...The Lysistrata..."

"...Hold on thar, boys. I gotta do me some plowin'....",

snoopster and others:
Apologies for spouting off stuff that you may know already. My default setting is to do that just in case. Drives my wife batty. I'll stop now.

LHB--yes, Aristophanes had a great time portraying them as hicks, uncouth dialect and all--it takes some skill to reproduce that in English, or modern Greek for that matter.

Yobro;
Oh please, spout on. The rest of do. :o)

With any luck, we can keep this history thread churning happily along, all weekend. After all, there's nothing significant happening in DC, aside from Glenn Beck and his pack of fools making arses of themselves.

And, thanks for mentioning John Kagan. I've discovered his writing a bit late, but he really has become a major writer in military history. (Teaching at Sandhurst, with full access to that library, was a good start.)

I'm plowing through his A History of Warfare now (published 1993). He is a truly original thinker.

PS- if this finally posts, it will be my 4th attempt. The G's software is acting up again. If this posts several times, my apologies to all.

I got the Stonehenge question wrong. I was sure Tony Robinson said it was older. I love that ancient history, but I hate memorizing dates.