Greeks

323 BCE – 31 BCE

Alexander's empire splits among his generals, and Greek culture spreads from Egypt to Afghanistan.

336 BCE – 323 BCE

In thirteen years he conquers from Greece to the Indus, then dies at thirty-two.

480 BCE – 404 BCE

Democracy, tragedy, and philosophy in a single crowded century — Pericles, Sophocles, Socrates, Herodotus, Hippocrates.

750 BCE

The Iliad and Odyssey are set down, preserving oral tradition about a war four centuries earlier.

800 BCE

Greeks adapt the Phoenician script and add vowels, producing the ancestor of most European alphabets.

1,100 BCE – 800 BCE

Writing is lost, populations fall, and Greece goes quiet for three centuries.

1,200 BCE – 1,150 BCE

Within a few decades most of the eastern Mediterranean's palace states fail. Nobody fully knows why.

1,600 BCE

A massive volcanic eruption on Santorini devastates the region and may lie behind the Atlantis story.

1,600 BCE – 1,100 BCE

Warrior kingdoms on the mainland, literate in Linear B, and the historical setting for the Trojan War.

1,900 BCE

A sprawling complex of corridors and storerooms — plausibly the seed of the labyrinth myth.

2,700 BCE – 1,450 BCE

A palace civilisation on Crete with plumbing, frescoes and a script nobody has read.