It is probably no mistake that the Greek city of Thebes shares its name with an even older Egyptian city. Indeed, it may have been settled by Phoenician travelers who had been to Egypt. Legend holds that King Cadmus (KAD-muhs), the mythical founder of Thebes, introduced the Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks, who developed their own version of it.
There is even a legend of a sphinx in Thebes. Like the sphinx of Egypt, this one had the body of a lion and the head of a human—a woman and not a pharaoh in the case of the Grecian sphinx. Nor was she merely a statue, but rather a monster that terrorized travelers coming to Thebes. To each she asked a riddle: "What animal is it that in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?" Those who could not answer correctly—and no one could—were killed. It took the great hero Oedipus (ED-i-puhs)
To solve the riddle, which so angered the Sphinx that she killed herself. His answer? See below.
Certainly there is no question that the Greeks were influenced by older cultures of Africa and the East. Thus Herodotus wrote that "the names of all the gods have been known in Egypt from the beginning of time." An Ionian trading colony was established at Naucratis (NAW-kruh-tis) on the Nile delta in the mid-600s B. c. The colony gave the Greeks exposure not only to the civilization of Egypt (whose Great Pyramids were as old to them as the ancient Greeks are to modern people) but also to the brilliant civilizations of the East, such as Babylon.
The answer to the Riddle of the Sphinx: The creature is man, who in childhood creeps on all fours, as an adult walks on two legs, and in old age walks with the aid of a cane.
But as with that later era, the Dark Ages in Greece carried with them the elements that would lead to a great cultural flowering in centuries to come. Also as in the later Dark Ages, civilization never really died out. A few Mycenaeans held on in the mountainous region of Arcadia (ahr-KAY-dee-uh) in the central Peloponnese, and farther east, in Attica—specifically, in an insignificant village named Athens. Other Mycenaeans traveled farther east, across the Aegean to Asia Minor. There they founded a number of cities in a region they called Ionia, just south of Lydia.
As the name suggests, the people of Ionia spoke the Ionian dialect, as did those of Athens. The Ionian town of Miletus (mi-LEE-tuhs) would become the birthplace of philosophy in the 500s b. c. Much earlier, it would be the place where the Greek religion reached full definition. It would also be in Ionia that the first great writers of the Western world, the poets Homer and Hesiod (HEE-see-uhd), established a literary tradition based on the gods and their deeds.
World History
