THE AGE OF GRECO-ANATOLIAN CIVILIZATION
The Greeks of the Mycenaean period, called Achaeans by Homer,
had established commercial factories on the west coast of Anatolia as early as the second
half of the 2nd millennium BC. It seems that the Achaeans tried in vain to conquer lands
in Asia Minor, and Homer's Iliad could be considered as a poetic account of these
unsuccessful operations. However, not long after the destruction of the Trojan kingdom and
the dissolution of the Hittite Empire, the Anatolian peoples were no longer in a position
to withstand Greek expansion. By the 11th century, therefore, as recent excavations have
revealed, the Greeks had founded Miletus, Ephesus, Smyrna
and many other cities on the western shores of Asia Minor.
When the Milesians began to colonize the Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts about the
middle of the 7th century BC the Eastern Greek or Ionian world reached its zenith. The
wealth accruing from trade and industrial production was the basis for the prosperity
which developed during the 6th century in Anatolia. The originality of Eastern Greek art
and culture owes a considerable debt to its long-standing contacts with the Phrygian,
Lydian, Lycian and Carian cultures of Anatolia. With the help of many Near Eastern
influences (Assyrian, Hittite, Urartian, Babylonian, Syrian, Aramaean, Phoenician and
Egyptian) the Ionian cities produced in the 6th century BC not only a magnificent body of
poetry and a unique art but also laid the foundations of the exact sciences. The Milesian Thales,
whose father Hexamyes was a Carian, founded abstract geometry and succeeded, for the first
time in the world, in predicting a total eclipse of the sun, identified by many modern
astronomers with that of 28th May, 585 BC. The discovery of a positive way of thinking and
research entirely independent from superstitious belief and wholly based on the objective
observation of nature is the most important achievement of mankind. As a result of these
scientific activities in the 6th century BC. the cultural leadership of the world passed
from the Near East to the Ionian cities of Anatolia.
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