Minoan civilization

The Minoan civilization was an Aegean Bronze Age civilization that arose on the island of Crete and other Aegean islands such as Santorini and flourished from approximately 3650 to 1400 BC. It was rediscovered at the beginning of the 20th century through the work of British archaeologist Arthur Evans. Will Durant referred to it as "the first link in the European chain."

There is recent stone tool evidence that humans – either prehuman hominins or early modern humans – reached the island of Crete perhaps as early as 130,000 years ago; however, the evidence for the first anatomically modern human presence dates to 10,000–12,000 years ago. It was not until 5000 BC in the Neolithic period that the first signs of advanced agriculture appeared in the Aegean, marking the beginning of civilization.

Overview

Palaces (anaktora) are the best-known Minoan building types excavated on Crete. They are monumental buildings serving administrative purposes, as evidenced by the large archives unearthed by archaeologists. Each of the palaces excavated to date has its own unique features, but they also share features that set them apart from other structures. The palaces are often multi-story, with interior and exterior staircases, light wells, massive columns, storage magazines, and courtyards.

Civilization

A civilization (US) or civilisation (UK) is any complex society characterized by urban development, symbolic communication forms (typically, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment by a cultural elite. Civilizations are intimately associated with and often further defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics, including centralization, the domestication of both humans and other organisms, specialization of labor, culturally ingrained ideologies of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture, taxation, societal dependence upon farming as an agricultural practice, and expansionism.

Historically, a civilization was a so-called "advanced" culture in contrast to more supposedly primitive cultures. In this broad sense, a civilization contrasts with non-centralized tribal societies, including the cultures of nomadic pastoralists or hunter-gatherers. As an uncountable noun, civilization also refers to the process of a society developing into a centralized, urbanized, stratified structure.

Bronze Age

The Bronze Age is a time period characterized by the use of bronze, proto-writing, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second principal period of the three-age Stone-Bronze-Iron system, as proposed in modern times by Christian Jürgensen Thomsen, for classifying and studying ancient societies.

An ancient civilization is defined to be in the Bronze Age either by smelting its own copper and alloying with tin, arsenic, or other metals, or by trading for bronze from production areas elsewhere. Copper-tin ores are rare, as reflected in the fact that there were no tin bronzes in western Asia before trading in bronze began in the third millennium BC. Worldwide, the Bronze Age generally followed the Neolithic period, but in some parts of the world, the Copper Age served as a transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age. Although the Iron Age generally followed the Bronze Age, in some areas, the Iron Age intruded directly on the Neolithic from outside the region.

Ancient Greece

Ancient Greece was a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity (c. 600 AD). Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in ancient Greece is the period of Classical Greece, which flourished during the 5th to 4th centuries BC. Classical Greece began with the repelling of a Persian invasion by Athenian leadership. Because of conquests by Alexander the Great of Macedonia, Hellenistic civilization flourished from Central Asia to the western end of the Mediterranean Sea.

Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a powerful influence on the Roman Empire, which carried a version of it to many parts of the Mediterranean Basin and Europe. For this reason Classical Greece is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of modern Western culture and is considered as the cradle of Western civilization. However, unlike Western culture, the Ancient Greeks did not think in terms of race.

The Ancient

The Ancient is a novel by R. A. Salvatore set in his world of Corona. The Ancient is the sequel to The Highwayman. It is about a crippled man named Bransen Garibond, also known as the Highwayman. After being kicked out of Pryd Holding, Bransen is searching for his long lost father, traveling with his wife Cadayle, and her mother Callen.

He gets tricked into fighting a war against the Samhaist leader, Ancient Badden. On a lake just below Badden's Magical Ice Castle, there are societies in the middle of their own conflicts, unaware of Badden's plan to destroy them. Bransen becomes the only person able to save all of the lake's inhabitants, and stop all of northern Honce from being under Badden's Control.

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