Pride
Pride is an inwardly directed emotional term that carries two antithetical meanings. With a negative connotation pride refers to a foolishly and irrationally corrupt sense of one's personal value, status r accomplishments, used synonymously with hubris. In Judaism, pride is called the root of all evil. With a positive connotation, pride refers to a humble and content sense of attachment toward one's own or another's choices and actions, or toward a whole group of people, is a product of praise, independent self-reflection, a fulfilled feeling of belonging. Philosophers and social psychologists have noted that pride is a complex secondary emotion which requires the development of a sense of self and the mastery of relevant conceptual distinctions through language-based interaction with others; some social psychologists identify the nonverbal expression of pride as a means of sending a functional, automatically perceived signal of high social status. In contrast, pride could be defined as a lowly disagreement with the truth.
One definition of pride in the former sense comes from St. Augustine: "the love of one's own excellence". A similar definition comes from Meher Baba: "Pride is the specific feeling through which egoism manifests."Pride is sometimes viewed as corrupt or as a vice, sometimes as proper or as a virtue. While some philosophers such as Aristotle consider pride a profound virtue, some world religions consider pride's fraudulent form a sin, such as is expressed in Proverbs 11:2 of the Hebrew Bible; when viewed as a virtue, pride in one's abilities is known as virtuous pride, greatness of soul or magnanimity, but when viewed as a vice it is known to be self-idolatry, sadistic contempt, vanity or vainglory. Pride can manifest itself as a high opinion of one's nation and ethnicity. Proud comes from late Old English prut from Old French prud "brave, valiant", from Late Latin term prodis "useful", compared with the Latin prodesse "be of use"; the sense of "having a high opinion of oneself", not in French, may reflect the Anglo-Saxons' opinion of the Norman knights who called themselves "proud".
Aristotle identified pride as the crown of the virtues, distinguishing it from vanity and humility, thus: Now the man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them. The proud man is the man we have described. For he, worthy of little and thinks himself worthy of little is temperate, but not proud, he concludes that Pride seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues. Therefore it is hard to be proud. By contrast, Aristotle defined the vice of hubris as follows: to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; as for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: naive men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater. Thus, although pride and hubris are deemed the same thing, for Aristotle and many philosophers hubris is altogether an different thing from pride. Since pride is classified as an emotion or passion, it is pride both cognitive and evaluative and that its object, that which it cognizes and evaluates, is the self and its properties, or something the proud individual identifies with.
Like guilt and shame, it is described in the field as a self-conscious emotion that results from the evaluations of the self and one's behavior according to internal and external standards. This is further explained by the way pride results from satisfying or conforming to a standard while guilt or shame is an offshoot of defying it. An observation cites the lack of research that addresses pride because it is despised as well as valued in the individualist West where it is experienced as pleasurable. In psychological terms, positive pride is "a pleasant, sometimes exhilarating, emotion that results from a positive self-evaluation", it was added by Tracy et al. to the University of California, Set of Emotion Expressions in 2009, as one of three "self-conscious" emotions known to have recognizable expressions. The term "fiero" was coined by Italian psychologist Isabella Poggi to describe the pride experienced and expressed in the moments following a personal triumph over adversity. Facial expressions and gestures that demonstrate pride can involve a lifting of the chin, smiles, or arms on hips to demonstrate victory.
Individuals may implicitly grant status to others based on their expressions of pride in cases in which they wish to avoid doing so. Indeed, some studies show that the nonverbal expression of pride conveys a message, automatically perceived by others about a person's high social status in a group. Behaviorally, pride can be expressed by adopting an expanded posture in which the head is tilted back and the arms extended out from the body; this postural display is innate as it is shown in congenitally blind individuals who have lacked the opportunity to see it in others. A common understanding of pride is that it results from self-directed satisfaction with m
Ancient Greek
The Ancient Greek language includes the forms of Greek used in Ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BCE to the 6th century CE. It is roughly divided into the Archaic period, Classical period, Hellenistic period, it is succeeded by medieval Greek. Koine is regarded as a separate historical stage of its own, although in its earliest form it resembled Attic Greek and in its latest form it approaches Medieval Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects. Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians and philosophers, it has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article contains information about the Epic and Classical periods of the language. Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects; the main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic and Doric, many of them with several subdivisions.
Some dialects are found in standardized literary forms used in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are several historical forms. Homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek used in the epic poems, the "Iliad" and "Odyssey", in poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic and other Classical-era dialects; the origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period, they differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period is Mycenaean Greek, but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups existed in some form. Scholars assume that major Ancient Greek period dialect groups developed not than 1120 BCE, at the time of the Dorian invasion—and that their first appearances as precise alphabetic writing began in the 8th century BCE.
The invasion would not be "Dorian" unless the invaders had some cultural relationship to the historical Dorians. The invasion is known to have displaced population to the Attic-Ionic regions, who regarded themselves as descendants of the population displaced by or contending with the Dorians; the Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people—Dorians and Ionians, each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Allowing for their oversight of Arcadian, an obscure mountain dialect, Cypriot, far from the center of Greek scholarship, this division of people and language is quite similar to the results of modern archaeological-linguistic investigation. One standard formulation for the dialects is: West vs. non-west Greek is the strongest marked and earliest division, with non-west in subsets of Ionic-Attic and Aeolic vs. Arcadocypriot, or Aeolic and Arcado-Cypriot vs. Ionic-Attic. Non-west is called East Greek. Arcadocypriot descended more from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age.
Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect. Thessalian had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Pamphylian Greek, spoken in a small area on the southwestern coast of Anatolia and little preserved in inscriptions, may be either a fifth major dialect group, or it is Mycenaean Greek overlaid by Doric, with a non-Greek native influence. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, or to an island. Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric, Southern Peloponnesus Doric, Northern Peloponnesus Doric; the Lesbian dialect was Aeolic Greek. All the groups were represented by colonies beyond Greece proper as well, these colonies developed local characteristics under the influence of settlers or neighbors speaking different Greek dialects; the dialects outside the Ionic group are known from inscriptions, notable exceptions being: fragments of the works of the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos, in Aeolian, the poems of the Boeotian poet Pindar and other lyric poets in Doric.
After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the late 4th century BCE, a new international dialect known as Koine or Common Greek developed based on Attic Greek, but with influence from other dialects. This dialect replaced most of the older dialects, although Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language, spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek. By about the 6th century CE, the Koine had metamorphosized into Medieval Greek. Ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language at least related to Greek, but its exact relationship is unclear because of insufficient data: a dialect of Greek; the Macedonian dialect (or l
Xerxes I
Xerxes I, called Xerxes the Great, was the fifth king of kings of the Achaemenid dynasty of Persia. Like his predecessor Darius I, he ruled the empire at its territorial apex, he ruled from 486 BC until his assassination in 465 BC at the hands of Artabanus, the commander of the royal bodyguard. Xerxes I is one of the Persian kings identified as Ahasuerus in the biblical Book of Esther, he is notable in Western history for his failed invasion of Greece in 480 BC. His forces temporarily overran mainland Greece north of the Isthmus of Corinth until the losses at Salamis and Plataea a year reversed these gains and ended the second invasion decisively. Xerxes crushed revolts in Egypt and Babylon. Roman Ghirshman says that, "After this he ceased to use the title of'king of Babylon', calling himself simply'king of the Persians and the Medes'."Xerxes oversaw the completion of various construction projects at Susa and Persepolis. Xerxes was born to Darius Atossa. Darius and Atossa were both Achaemenids.
While Darius was preparing for another war against Greece, a revolt spurred in Egypt in 486 BC due to heavy taxes and the deportation of craftsmen to build the royal palaces at Susa and Perseopolis. Under Persian law, the king was required to choose a successor before setting out on dangerous expeditions; when Darius decided to leave, Darius prepared his tomb at Naqsh-e Rustam and appointed Xerxes, his eldest son by Atossa, as his successor. However, Darius could not lead the campaign due to his failing health and died in October 486 BC at the age of 64. Artobazan claimed the crown as the eldest of all the children. Xerxes was helped by a Spartan king in exile, present in Persia at the time, Eurypontid king Demaratus, who argued that the eldest son does not universally mean they have claim to the crown, as Spartan law states that the first son born while the father is king is the heir to the kingship; some modern scholars view the unusual decision of Darius to give the throne to Xerxes to be a result of his consideration of the unique positions that Cyrus the Great and his daughter Atossa enjoyed.
Artobazan was born to "Darius the subject", while Xerxes was the eldest son born in the purple after Darius's rise to the throne, Artobazan's mother was a commoner while Xerxes's mother was the daughter of the founder of the empire. Xerxes was crowned and succeeded his father in October–December 486 BC when he was about 36 years old; the transition of power to Xerxes was smooth due again in part to the great authority of Atossa and his accession of royal power was not challenged by any person at court or in the Achaemenian family, or any subject nation. Xerxes crushed revolts in Egypt and Babylon that had broken out the year before, appointed his brother Achaemenes as satrap over Egypt. In 484 BC, he outraged the Babylonians by violently confiscating and melting down the golden statue of Bel, the hands of which the rightful king of Babylon had to clasp each New Year's Day; this sacrilege led the Babylonians to rebel in 484 BC and 482 BC, so that in contemporary Babylonian documents, Xerxes refused his father's title of King of Babylon, being named rather as King of Persia and Media, Great King, King of Kings and King of Nations.
This comes from the Daiva Inscriptions of Xerxes, lines 6–13. Darius died while in the process of preparing a second army to invade the Greek mainland, leaving to his son the task of punishing the Athenians and Eretrians for their interference in the Ionian Revolt, the burning of Sardis, their victory over the Persians at Marathon. From 483 BC, Xerxes prepared his expedition: The Xerxes Canal was dug through the isthmus of the peninsula of Mount Athos, provisions were stored in the stations on the road through Thrace, two pontoon bridges known as Xerxes' Pontoon Bridges were built across the Hellespont. Soldiers of many nationalities served in the armies of Xerxes from all over his multi-ethnic massive Eurasian-sized empire and beyond, including the Assyrians, Babylonians, Jews, European Thracians, Achaean Greeks, Aegean islanders, Greeks from Pontus, Colchians and many more. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, Xerxes's first attempt to bridge the Hellespont ended in failure when a storm destroyed the flax and papyrus cables of the bridges.
In retaliation, Xerxes ordered the Hellespont whipped three hundred times, had fetters thrown into the water. Xerxes's second attempt to bridge the Hellespont was successful; the Carthaginian invasion of Sicily deprived Greece of the support of the powerful monarchs of Syracuse and Agrigentum. Many smaller Greek states, took the side of the Persians Thessaly and Argos. Xerxes was victorious during the initial battles. Xerxes set out in the spring of 480 BC from Sardis with a fleet and army which Herodotus estimated was one million strong along with 10,000 elite warriors named the Persian Immortals. More recent estimates place the Persian force at around 60,000 combatants. At the Battle of Thermopylae, a small force of Greek warriors led by King Leonidas of Sparta resisted the much larger Persian forces, but were defeated. According to Herodotus, the Persians brok
Neurosurgery
Neurosurgery, or neurological surgery, is the medical specialty concerned with the prevention, surgical treatment, rehabilitation of disorders which affect any portion of the nervous system including the brain, spinal cord, peripheral nerves, extra-cranial cerebrovascular system. In different countries, there are different requirements for an individual to practice neurosurgery, there are varying methods through which they must be educated. In most countries, neurosurgeon training requires a minimum period of seven years after graduating from medical school. In the United States, a neurosurgeon must complete four years of undergraduate education, four years of medical school, seven years of residency. Most, but not all, residency programs have some component of clinical research. Neurosurgeons may pursue additional training in the form of a fellowship, after residency or in some cases, as a senior resident; these fellowships include pediatric neurosurgery, trauma/neurocritical care and stereotactic surgery, surgical neuro-oncology, neurovascular surgery, skull-base surgery, peripheral nerve and spine surgery.
In the U. S. neurosurgery is considered a competitive specialty composed of 0.6% of all practicing physicians. In the United Kingdom, students must gain entry into medical school. MBBS qualification takes four to six years depending on the student's route; the newly qualified physician must complete foundation training lasting two years. Junior doctors apply to enter the neurosurgical pathway. Unlike most other surgical specialties, it has its own independent training pathway which takes around eight years. Neurosurgery remains amongst the most competitive medical specialties in which to obtain entry. Neurosurgery, or the premeditated incision into the head for pain relief, has been around for thousands of years, but notable advancements in neurosurgery have only come within the last hundred years; the Incas appear to have practiced a procedure known as trepanation since the late Stone age. During the Middle Ages in Arabia from 936 to 1013 AD, Al-Zahrawi performed surgical treatments of head injuries, skull fractures, spinal injuries, subdural effusions and headache.
There was not much advancement in neurosurgery until late 19th early 20th century, when electrodes were placed on the brain and superficial tumors were removed. History of electrodes in the brain: In 1878 Richard Canton discovered that electrical signals transmitted through an animal's brain. In 1950 Dr. Jose Delgado invented the first electrode, implanted in an animal's brain, using it to make it run and change direction. In 1972 the cochlear implant, a neurological prosthetic that allowed deaf people to hear was marketed for commercial use. In 1998 researcher Philip Kennedy implanted the first Brain Computer Interface into a human subject. History of tumor removal: In 1879 after locating it via neurological signs alone, Scottish surgeon William Macewen performed the first successful brain tumor removal. On November 25, 1884 after English physician Alexander Hughes Bennett used Macewen's technique to locate it, English surgeon Rickman Godlee performed the first primary brain tumor removal, which differs from Macewen's operation in that Bennett operated on the exposed brain, whereas Macewen operated outside of the "brain proper" via trepanation.
On March 16, 1907 Austrian surgeon Hermann Schloffer became the first to remove a pituitary tumor. The main advancements in neurosurgery came about as a result of crafted tools. Modern neurosurgical tools, or instruments, include chisels, dissectors, elevators, hooks, probes, suction tubes, power tools, robots. Most of these modern tools, like chisels, forcepts, hooks and probes, have been in medical practice for a long time; the main difference of these tools and post advancement in neurosurgery, were the precision in which they were crafted. These tools are crafted with edges. Other tools such as hand held power saws and robots have only been used inside of a neurological operating room; as an example, the University of Utah developed a device for computer-aided design / computer-aided manufacturing which uses an image-guided system to define a cutting tool path for a robotic cranial drill. General neurosurgery involves most neurosurgical conditions including neuro-trauma and other neuro-emergencies such as intracranial hemorrhage.
Most level 1 hospitals have this kind of practice. Specialized branches have developed to cater to difficult conditions; these specialized branches co-exist with general neurosurgery in more sophisticated hospitals. To practice advanced specialization within neurosurgery, additional higher fellowship training of one to two years is expected from the neurosurgeon; some of these divisions of neurosurgery are: Vascular neurosurgery includes clipping of aneurysms and performing carotid endarterectomy. Stereotactic neurosurgery, functional neurosurgery, epilepsy surgery (the latter includes partial or total corpus callosotomy – severing part or all of the corpus callosum to stop or lessen seizure spread and activity, the surgical removal of functional, physiological and/or anatomical pieces or divisions of the brain, called epileptic foci, that are operable and th
Aeschylus
Aeschylus was an ancient Greek tragedian. He is described as the father of tragedy. Academics' knowledge of the genre begins with his work, understanding of earlier tragedies is based on inferences from his surviving plays. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in the theater and allowed conflict among them. Only seven of his estimated seventy to ninety plays have survived, there is a long-standing debate regarding his authorship of one of these plays, Prometheus Bound, which some believe his son Euphorion wrote. Fragments of some other plays have survived in quotations and more continue to be discovered on Egyptian papyrus giving further insights into his work, he was the first dramatist to present plays as a trilogy. At least one of his plays was influenced by the Persians' second invasion of Greece; this work, The Persians, is the only surviving classical Greek tragedy concerned with contemporary events, a useful source of information about its period. The significance of war in Ancient Greek culture was so great that Aeschylus' epitaph commemorates his participation in the Greek victory at Marathon while making no mention of his success as a playwright.
Despite this, Aeschylus's work – the Oresteia – is acclaimed by modern critics and scholars. Aeschylus was born in c. 525 BC in Eleusis, a small town about 27 kilometers northwest of Athens, nestled in the fertile valleys of western Attica, though the date is most based on counting back forty years from his first victory in the Great Dionysia. His family was well established; as a youth, he worked at a vineyard until, according to the 2nd-century AD geographer Pausanias, the god Dionysus visited him in his sleep and commanded him to turn his attention to the nascent art of tragedy. As soon as he woke from the dream, the young Aeschylus began to write a tragedy, his first performance took place in 499 BC, when he was only 26 years old, he won his first victory at the City Dionysia in 484 BC. In 510 BC, when Aeschylus was 15 years old, Cleomenes I expelled the sons of Peisistratus from Athens, Cleisthenes came to power. Cleisthenes' reforms included a system of registration that emphasized the importance of the deme over family tradition.
In the last decade of the 6th century and his family were living in the deme of Eleusis. The Persian Wars played a large role in the playwright's career. In 490 BC, Aeschylus and his brother Cynegeirus fought to defend Athens against the invading army of Darius I of Persia at the Battle of Marathon; the Athenians emerged triumphant, a victory celebrated across the city-states of Greece. Cynegeirus, died in the battle, receiving a mortal wound while trying to prevent a Persian ship retreating from the shore, for which his countrymen extolled him as a hero. In 480 BC, Aeschylus was called into military service again, this time against Xerxes I's invading forces at the Battle of Salamis together with his younger brother Ameinias, he fought at the Battle of Plataea in 479 BC. Ion of Chios was his contribution in Salamis. Salamis holds a prominent place in The Persians, his oldest surviving play, performed in 472 BC and won first prize at the Dionysia. Aeschylus was one of many Greeks who were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient cult of Demeter based in his home town of Eleusis.
Initiates gained secret knowledge through these rites concerning the afterlife. Firm details of specific rites are sparse, as members were sworn under the penalty of death not to reveal anything about the Mysteries to non-initiates. According to Aristotle, Aeschylus was accused of revealing some of the cult's secrets on stage. Other sources claim that an angry mob tried to kill Aeschylus on the spot. Heracleides of Pontus asserts, he took refuge at the altar in the orchestra of the Theater of Dionysus. At his trial, he pleaded ignorance, he was acquitted, with the jury sympathetic to the military service of Aeschylus and his brothers during the Persian Wars. According to the 2nd-century AD author Aelian, Aeschylus's younger brother Ameinias helped to acquit Aeschylus by showing the jury the stump of the hand that he lost at Salamis, where he was voted bravest warrior; the truth is that the award for bravery at Salamis went not to Aeschylus' brother but to Ameinias of Pallene. Aeschylus travelled to Sicily once or twice in the 470s BC, having been invited by Hiero I of Syracuse, a major Greek city on the eastern side of the island.
By 473 BC, after the death of Phrynichus, one of his chief rivals, Aeschylus was the yearly favorite in the Dionysia, winning first prize in nearly every competition. In 472 BC, Aeschylus staged the production that included the Persians, with Pericles serving as choregos. In 458 BC, he returned to Sicily for the last time, visiting the city of Gela where he died in 456 or 455 BC. Valerius Maximus wrote that he was killed outside the city by a tortoise dropped by an eagle which had mistaken his ba
Honour
Honour is the idea of a bond between an individual and a society as a quality of a person, both of social teaching and of personal ethos, that manifests itself as a code of conduct, has various elements such as valor, chivalry and compassion. It is an abstract concept entailing a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects both the social standing and the self-evaluation of an individual or institution such as a family, regiment or nation. Accordingly, individuals are assigned worth and stature based on the harmony of their actions with a specific code of honour, the moral code of the society at large. Samuel Johnson, in his A Dictionary of the English Language, defined honour as having several senses, the first of, "nobility of soul, a scorn of meanness"; this sort of honour derives from the perceived virtuous conduct and personal integrity of the person endowed with it. On the other hand, Johnson defined honour in relationship to "reputation" and "fame"; this sort of honour is not so much a function of moral or ethical excellence, as it is a consequence of power.
With respect to sexuality, honour has traditionally been associated with "chastity" or "virginity", or in case of married men and women, "fidelity". Some have argued that honour should be seen more as a rhetoric, or set of possible actions, than as a code. Honour as a code of behaviour defines the duties of an individual within a social group. Margaret Visser observes that in an honour-based society "a person is what he or she is in the eyes of other people". A code of honour differs from a legal code socially defined and concerned with justice, in that honour remains implicit rather than explicit and objectified. One can distinguish honour from dignity, which Wordsworth assessed as measured against an individual's conscience rather than against the judgement of a community. Compare the sociological concept of "face". In the early medieval period, a lord's or lady's honour was the group of manors or lands he or she held. "The word was first used indicating an estate which gave its holder dignity and status."
For a person to say "on my honour" was not just an affirmation of his or her integrity and rank, but the veracity behind that phrase meant he or she was willing to offer up estates as pledge and guarantee. The concept of honour appears to have declined in importance in the modern West. Popular stereotypes would have it surviving more definitively in more tradition-bound cultures in a perception akin to Orientalism. Feudal or other agrarian societies, which focus upon land use and land ownership, may tend to "honour" more than do contemporary industrial societies. Note that Saint Anselm of Canterbury in Cur Deus Homo extended the concept of honour from his own feudal society to postulate God's honour. An emphasis on the importance of honour exists in such traditional institutions as the military and in organisations with a military ethos, such as Scouting organisations. Honour in the case of sexuality relates to fidelity: preservation of "honour" equates to maintenance of the virginity of singles and to the exclusive monogamy of the remainder of the population.
Further conceptions of this type of honour vary between cultures. Western observers see these honour killings as a way of men using the culture of honour to control female sexuality. Skinners, grave-diggers, barber-surgeons, linen-weavers, sow-gelders, latrine-cleaners, bailiffs and their families were among the "dishonourable people" in early modern German society. Various sociologists and anthropologists have contrasted cultures of honour with cultures of law. A culture of law has a body of laws which all members of society must obey, with punishments for transgressors; this requires a society with the structures required to enforce laws. A culture of law incorporates a social contract: members of society give up some aspects of their freedom to defend themselves and retaliate for injuries, on the understanding that society will apprehend and punish transgressors. An alternative to government enforcement of laws is community or individual enforcement of social norms. One way that honour functions is as a major factor of reputation.
In a system where there is no court that will authorize the use of force to guarantee the execution of contracts, an honourable reputation is valuable to promote trust among transaction partners. To dishonour an agreement could be economically ruinous, because all future potential transaction partners might stop trusting the party not to lie, steal their money or goods, not repay debts, mistreat the children they marry off, have children with other people, abandon their children, or fail to provide aid when needed. A dishonourable person might be shunned by the community as a way to punish bad behavior and create an incentive for others to maintain their honour. If one's honou
Greece
Greece the Hellenic Republic, self-identified and known as Hellas, is a country located in Southern and Southeast Europe, with a population of 11 million as of 2016. Athens is largest city, followed by Thessaloniki. Greece is located at the crossroads of Europe and Africa. Situated on the southern tip of the Balkan Peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, North Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, Turkey to the northeast; the Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, the Cretan Sea and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin and the 11th longest coastline in the world at 13,676 km in length, featuring a large number of islands, of which 227 are inhabited. Eighty percent of Greece is mountainous, with Mount Olympus being the highest peak at 2,918 metres; the country consists of nine geographic regions: Macedonia, Central Greece, the Peloponnese, Epirus, the Aegean Islands, Thrace and the Ionian Islands.
Greece is considered the cradle of Western civilisation, being the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy, Western literature, political science, major scientific and mathematical principles, Western drama and notably the Olympic Games. From the eighth century BC, the Greeks were organised into various independent city-states, known as poleis, which spanned the entire Mediterranean region and the Black Sea. Philip of Macedon united most of the Greek mainland in the fourth century BC, with his son Alexander the Great conquering much of the ancient world, from the eastern Mediterranean to India. Greece was annexed by Rome in the second century BC, becoming an integral part of the Roman Empire and its successor, the Byzantine Empire, in which Greek language and culture were dominant. Rooted in the first century A. D. the Greek Orthodox Church helped shape modern Greek identity and transmitted Greek traditions to the wider Orthodox World. Falling under Ottoman dominion in the mid-15th century, the modern nation state of Greece emerged in 1830 following a war of independence.
Greece's rich historical legacy is reflected by its 18 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The sovereign state of Greece is a unitary parliamentary republic and developed country with an advanced high-income economy, a high quality of life, a high standard of living. A founding member of the United Nations, Greece was the tenth member to join the European Communities and has been part of the Eurozone since 2001, it is a member of numerous other international institutions, including the Council of Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie. Greece's unique cultural heritage, large tourism industry, prominent shipping sector and geostrategic importance classify it as a middle power, it is the largest economy in the Balkans. The names for the nation of Greece and the Greek people differ from the names used in other languages and cultures.
The Greek name of the country is Hellas or Ellada, its official name is the Hellenic Republic. In English, the country is called Greece, which comes from Latin Graecia and means'the land of the Greeks'; the earliest evidence of the presence of human ancestors in the southern Balkans, dated to 270,000 BC, is to be found in the Petralona cave, in the Greek province of Macedonia. All three stages of the stone age are represented for example in the Franchthi Cave. Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC, are the oldest in Europe by several centuries, as Greece lies on the route via which farming spread from the Near East to Europe. Greece is home to the first advanced civilizations in Europe and is considered the birthplace of Western civilisation, beginning with the Cycladic civilization on the islands of the Aegean Sea at around 3200 BC, the Minoan civilization in Crete, the Mycenaean civilization on the mainland; these civilizations possessed writing, the Minoans writing in an undeciphered script known as Linear A, the Mycenaeans in Linear B, an early form of Greek.
The Mycenaeans absorbed the Minoans, but collapsed violently around 1200 BC, during a time of regional upheaval known as the Bronze Age collapse. This ushered from which written records are absent. Though the unearthed Linear B texts are too fragmentary for the reconstruction of the political landscape and can't support the existence of a larger state contemporary Hittite and Egyptian records suggest the presence of a single state under a "Great King" based in mainland Greece; the end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to the year of the first Olympic Games. The Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC. With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerged various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, which spread to the shores of the Black Sea, So
