The Sages of Ancient Greece

Sometime around the seventh century BCE, Greek civilization emerged in modern-day southern Italy, Greece, and Asia Minor (the western part of Turkey in Asia). This civilization was different in many respects from the Egyptian and Babylonian civilizations discussed in the previous chapter. The British writer H.G. Wells (1866–1946) observed that Egypt and Babylonia developed over a long and slow period, starting as primitive agricultural societies and eventually building up around a culture of temples and the priestly caste; the nomadic Greeks, on the other hand, came into their territory from abroad, and the peoples of the land they occupied were already developed in the ways of agriculture, seafaring, the formation of city-states, and even writing.