Ancient Greece Dbq Essay

Many of the ancient lands we learn about in school are situated in river valleys teeming with silt that’s just waiting for stuff to be grown in it. This doesn’t make things easy for them, exactly, but, at the very least, that part of their life is taken care of. They can get both water and food from these river valleys they call home, as well as wealth from trading their crops. This was the case for both Mesopotamia and Egypt. Ancient Greece, however, as stated in Document 1, did not have these advantages. Their rocky and mountainous terrain, while not helping them like the Nile or the Tigris and Euphrates did for their nations, influenced several important aspects of their lives.

One effect the geography of ancient Greece had on its inhabitants was the inability to grow much of anything. Because of their rough landscape and lack of fertile soil, ancient Greeks could not consider farming a major part of their economy, which set them apart from most of the cultures that came before them. This also meant that the few plants that did grow well in Greece were very important to the Greeks. As mentioned in Document 4, one such plant was the olive tree. The Greeks thought of olive trees as extremely valuable, and in a war, cutting down the other side’s olive trees was seen as one of the worst things you

Like most of the things about Greece’s geography, this did the opposite of make life simpler for the Greeks. Because of the mountains, the Greeks could not move around easily on land. As said in Document 5, this caused the polis, or city-states, to develop as separate communities with their own governments. The city-states were practically their own countries, and rather than living in harmony, as they might’ve if they didn’t feel so detached from each other, they were distrustful of each other. Several, like Sparta and Athens, who started the Peloponnesian Wars, were actively malicious toward one