On To Greece Weekend Assignment

After the test we took on Friday, we have just finished our first chapter in Mr. Schick’s Western Civilization class. Our next unit is on The First European Civilization: the Greeks. The Greeks lifestyle was mainly based on farming and warfare, which was widespread in Western Europe. They began as Barbarian people. A Barbarian, as defined in our textbook, is  a term used to describe the distinctive way of life based on farming, warfare and tribal organization that became widespread around 2500 B.C.  There were people in Western Europe who were numerous and well organized enough to construct ceremonial monuments consisting of circles and rows of huge up right boulders. There were also massive earthen tombs and fortifications. These huge and very impressive megalithic structures are still here in the present day. Megaliths are massive rough cut stones that are used to construct monuments and tombs. The Greeks used these to build there structures. Tribes, in turn, formed loose alliances under warrior kings or queens of exceptionally powerful tribes, together with their battle comrades. A tribe is a social and political unit consisting of a group of communities held together by common interests, traditions, and real or mythical ties of kinship. It is thought that the reason of migration of Indo European nomads from the steppes, or better known as grasslands is that the Europeans cannot have had any sense of a common identity, but in time most of them came to share a distinctive way of life. From about the time of 2500 B.C. and forward< Indo European peoples moved into Europe just as they did into Asia Minor and Persia, and under the influence of the newcomers, the settled people of the region began to form into new ethnic groups whose way of life was a mixture of their traditional patterns and Indo European influences.