Greece
From CreationWiki, the encyclopedia of creation science
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Language
With the people of Greece not all descendents of the ancient Greeks because of the many invaders from Balkan and the merging of the groups of time the modern language is vernacular Greek. There are some Turkish speaking groups also some Greeks who speak English and French.
Location
Greece is located in the south eastern parts of Europe. It is part of the Balkan Peninsula with the Ionian Sea to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean Sea to the east, and Macedonia to the north.
About 80% is mountains of hills which makes Greece the most mountainous country in Europe. The western side of Greece ha lakes and consists of wetlands. Toward the center of the western side there are high, steep peeks with many canyons between them. Some of the mountains are the Meteora and the Vikos gorge; the Vikos gorge is also the second largest one on earth next to the Grand Canyon at the largest.
Mount Olympus is the highest mountain in Greece, reaching 2,919 meters above sea level. There is another high mountain range in the north in the eastern Macedonia and Thrae called the Rhodope.
50% of Greece is covered in forest which provides homes fro the Western Europe brown bear, lynx, wolves, roe deer, wild goats, foxes, wild boar. And on the sea level you will find seals and sea turtles.
Climate
Ancient Greece
Religion
The people of the region attempted to explain the world through the laws of nature. They made important discoveries in science. They developed democracy, where people govern themselves rather than being ruled by a king.
The Mount Olympus gods:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Aphrodite | goddess of love and beauty |
| Apollo | god of sun and music |
| Artemis | virgin moon goddess of the hunt, wild animals, healing, wilderness, chastity, and childbirth |
| Athena | goddess of wisdom, strategy |
| Ares | god of war |
| Hephaestus | god of blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals and metallurgy, and fire |
| Hera | goddess of marriage, the patriarchal bond of her own subordination |
| Hermes | god of boundaries and of the travelers, shepherds and cowherds, of orators, literature, poets, athletics, weights, measures, invention, the cunning of thieves, the messenger from the gods to humans |
| Poseidon | god of the sea |
| Zeus | the leader of the gods and god of the sky and thunder |
There are fourteen gods recognized on Mount Olympus but only twelve are listed above because there was only twelve gods at one time. The other four gods were Hestia, Demeter, Dionysus, and Hades. Hestia gave her spot as a goddess to Dionysus so she could live with humans. But later she became the watcher of the fire at Mount Olympus. Demeter spent six mounts in the underworld; this caused winter, but then returned to Mount Olympus to be with her mother. And Hades was the god of the underworld and with him living there it made him very weak to go the Mount Olympus.
The Greek religion had no real bases. It was a flexible practice it had no clergies, no sacred text or moral code for the people to follow. Scholars think that their religion was based off on legendary tales written by Greek authors. But each city-state has its own divinities. This helped keep the people of the city-state together as a community.
The Greeks worshipped oracles, lesser divinities, demi-gods, and heroes. They also had a great faith in the idea of an afterlife, a place where your soul would live after death.
Life
The people of ancient Greece tried to explain the world by using nature. They also made some science discoveries. The Greeks developed a democracy that had the people make their own decisions. They were to rule themselves instead of being ruled by a king.
People
Men: Men ran the government or if not in politics the men worked the fields. Watching over the crops, sailing, hunting, manufacturing, or in trade. In their free time they would go to or have drinking parties that the women were not allowed to attend and they would go to the Olympic Games.
Women: Women were very limited in their freedom. They could see other female friends for short periods of time, and go to wedding, funerals, and religious festivals. The women were in charge of the house; their only concerns were to house and the children. But they didn’t actually do the housework themselves, they had male slaves who guarded the door and tutored the male children and the female slaves cooked, cleaned, and worked the fields.
Unlike the men women were not allowed at the Olympic Games because the participants didn’t wear cloths. But the women could participate in the chariot races only if they owned a horse and then they could win a prize.
Children: In ancient Greece you were considered a child till you were thirty years old. When a child was born there was a party in the household, the father would do a ritual dance with the child. And friends and family would send gifts. And to let the community know what the gender of the child was they would decorate the doorway with wreath of olives for a boy and for a girl there would be wreath of wool
Modern Greece
In modern Greece the official language is Standard Modern Greek. Greece has about 14-17 million people and Greek is spoken by about 95% of the population but there are people who also speak English and Turkish.
Written Greek has an alphabet that consists of 24 letters each like in English have a upper and lower case. There are two diacritical symbols in the language, there is the acute accent; this shows stress and the diaeresis; this makes the vowel letter not a part of a digraph.
Related References
- http://www.crystalinks.com/greece.html
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greece
- http://www.ancientgreece.com/html/mythology_frame.htm
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Greek
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