The First States
The Mycenaeans fought with the Minoans for almost 200 years (1640 - 1450 BC). The Mycenaeans emerged victorious in the end and sacked Knossos which became an outpost for the Mycenaean domination of Crete. The other palaces were destroyed by the Mycenaeans who went on to dominate not only Crete, but parts of Greece, and many of the Aegean Islands. Linear A was lost permanently, and replaced by the Mycenaean script, now known as Linear B. While examples of Linear A have been discovered, the language is unknown and there is not enough text to make a reliable decipherment. Linear B on the other hand has been deciphered and identified as an early version of Greek. By 1200 BC, wool manufacturing had reached Northern Europe from Mesopotamia; but this was the same time that the short lived success of the Mycenaeans came crashing down.
In 1200 BC, the most devastating barbarian invasion in European history overwhelmed the continent. Called the Sea Peoples, they swept through Europe as horrifically as the Middle East. Mycenaean civilization was utterly destroyed sending Greece into a 400 year long dark age during which all knowledge of Linear B was lost. When the Greeks emerged from this period they would have to borrow a script from their trading partners, the Phoenicians.
By 1000 BC, Greeks had learned iron working from Anatolia, and bronze working had spread throughout the Urnfield culture of the Celts in Western Europe. By 900 BC, the Greeks (if not Greece) began to emerge from their dark ages; Greek colonists along the western coast of Anatolia began to form the first city-states, though it would be another hundred years before these breakthroughs reached Greece. Meanwhile, the Phoenicians became the dominant power in the Western Mediterranean in 814 BC when Carthage was founded in North Africa. And the Celtic chiefdoms of Western Europe began the transition from the bronze-wielding Urnfield Culture to the Iron Age Hallstatt Culture in 750 BC.
Around 800 BC several major events occured. City-states emerge on the Greek mainland and the Greeks began to expand their colonization from the South of Italy all the way to the Black Sea. In the West, the Etruscan civilization emerged in Italy and a minor city-state was established in central Italy, Rome.
Then in 750 BC, the Greeks adapted the Phoenician letters to their own language. While the Phoenicians deserve due credit for their script, the Greeks revolutionized writing by creating the first alphabet. Where the Phoenician script was brilliant because it had only a handful of easy to learn letters, like previous scripts it had symbols only for consonants. The Greek alphabet kept things simple and borrowed from the Phoenician letter forms, but they were the first to recognize that the sounds which other languages tried to write into one symbol were actually a combination of vowels and consonants. The addition of vowels to written language was so ingenious and so "obvious" in hindsight, that virtually all languages are now written in this way. The Greeks were poets and students of language, avid learners, and inveterate innovators and their alphabet was so successful that no one has been able to improve on their system for almost three thousand years and counting. With their new alphabet in hand, Greek literature practically expoded; within 50 years both of the great European epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, had been set down and the Greeks were busily putting their oral mythology on paper for the ages.
Greece remained the center of European civilization, but the most important city-states were the Dorian military powers – semi-barbarian migrants that had conquered the Peloponnesian peninsula following the invasion of the Sea Peoples. In 657 BC, the city of Corinth emerged as the leading city-state on the Peloponnesian Peninsula, be a major city-state for 500 years. However, in 580 BC they were overtaken by Argos as the dominant city-state of the Peloponnese. Argos was at almost constant war with another city-state whose name would echo down for many long years in Greek history, Sparta. Their rivalry would dominate the Peloponnese until 500 BC. Then power throughout Greece shifted in a single night. A small city in the hinterlands beyond the Peloponnese revolted in 507 BC. Its name was Athens, and with the help of a desperate clique of oligarchs they would form the first democracy in world history. This began the period of Europe's experimentation with exotic forms of government and inaugurated the Ancient Era in European history.