Classical Antiquity - Archaic Period (8th To 6th Centuries BC)

Archaic Period (8th To 6th Centuries BC)

Further information: Iron Age Europe

The earliest period of classical antiquity takes place before the background of gradual re-appearance of historical sources following the Bronze Age collapse. The 8th and 7th centuries BC are still largely proto-historical, with the earliest Greek alphabetic inscriptions appearing in the first half of the 8th century. Homer is usually assumed to have lived in the 8th or 7th century, and his lifetime is often taken as marking the beginning of classical antiquity. In the same period falls the traditional date for the establishment of the Ancient Olympic Games, in 776 BC.

Read more about this topic:  Classical Antiquity

Famous quotes containing the words archaic, period and/or centuries:

    Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers’ glory—to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.
    Walter Lippmann (1889–1974)

    In a period of a people’s life that bears the designation “transitional,” the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.
    Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)

    Let these memorials of built stone music’s
    enduring instrument, of many centuries of
    patient cultivation of the earth, of English
    verse ...
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)