The history of Athens offers a vast field of investigation to specialists, given the large number of documents that came to their attention.
Athens has been inhabited without interruption for at least 3 000 years. In the first millennium BC. AD, it became one of the main cities of ancient Greece and its cultural achievements during the fifth century BC. AD have created the foundations of Western civilization.
During the Middle Ages, the city declined before recovering under the Byzantine Empire. Athens has also been relatively prosperous during the Crusades in taking advantage of Italian trade. After a long period of decline under the Ottoman Empire, Athens has again emerged in the nineteenth century as the capital of the independent Greek state.
The formation of the name would, according to some, the Indo-European root ath-probably meaning “head” or “summit” because of the Acropolis fortress located at the top of the hill of the same name, would be the “core founder” of the city. This also explains the origin of the mythological legend about the birth of the eponymous goddess, Athena that output would be “army” of the head of Zeus.
According to Thucydides, the name of Athens would come from the plural Athena , because he said the city would have caused a cluster of villages which merged in a large city.
It was located in a fertile valley surrounded by rivers about 20 km from the Saronic Gulf, central Plains céphisiennes. To the east, located on Mount Hymettus and north Mount Penteli. The River Kifissos once flowed in the city. There have been many historical events during the long periode of Athens history.
The ancient Athens was very small compared to the modern megalopolis. It was, intramural, an area of 2 km from east to west and a little less from north to south at its peak, it had yet also “suburbs” outside the walls. The Acropolis, from the center of the city, stood to the south and the Agora to 400 meters north of it, in what is now the Monastiraki district. The hill of the Pnyx, which met the Ecclesia, the assembly of Athenian citizens, was in the west.
Traces of human occupation are attested from the Neolithic to the site of the Acropolis in the form of a small fort. But it is only following the Ionian invasions that Attica is organized in cities, including Cecropia, the future Athens.
C. 1400 BC. AD it became an important center of the Mycenaean civilization. Unlike other Mycenaean cities (including Mycenae and Pylos), it is not plundered or abandoned during the invasion of 1200 Doric Ave. AD
The Athenians said Ionian be “pure” and maintained that they had not mixed with Dorien. However, Athens lost the importance it had in Mycenaean times and then somewhat dark into oblivion, was once again a small fortified place.
In the eighth century BC. AD it becomes an important center of the Greek world because of its central location, its high on the Acropolis and access to the sea, an advantage over its rivals, the cities of Thebes and Sparta. Early in the first century it became a sovereign city-state, governed primarily by kings of Athens. They were at the head of Eupatridae (the “well born”), whose government was composed of a council which met on the hill of Ares, the Areopagus. This council elected representatives of the city, Archon and polémarques.
