He obtained enough to enable him to forecast the discovery of written characters, till then not suspected in Aegean civilization.

The traditional theory holds that John the Apostle — considered to have written the Gospel and the epistles of John — was exiled on Patmos in the Aegean archipelago during the reign of Domitian, and there wrote Revelation.

Native to the southern Balkans Western Asia Minor and the Aegean, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records.

He obtained enough to enable him to forecast the discovery of written characters, till then not suspected in Aegean civilization.

Because of a lack of written records, estimates of Cretan chronology are based on well-established Aegean and Ancient Near Eastern pottery styles, so that Cretan timelines have been made by seeking Cretan artifacts traded with other civilizations ( such as the Egyptians )-a well established occurrence.

showed that the book could bear the most minute scrutiny as an authority for the facts of the Aegean world, and that it was written with such judgment, skill, art and perception of truth as to be a model of historical statement ' ( The Bearing of Recent Discovery, p. 85 ).

Frequently, efforts to look for deeper linguistic origins of these languages will also attempt to integrate them into attested extinct languages of Europe, such as the Etruscan language of Northern Italy, the Ligurian language of Italy, the Lemnian language of the Aegean Island of Lemnos, the Minoan language aka Linear A of ancient Crete, the Sumerian language once spoken in Mesopotamia ( which is the oldest attested written language ), the language of the Indus River Valley civilization, the Elamite language of Iran, and the Hurrian language and Hattic language of Anatolia.

The potters of the Aegean islands thus stood apart from those of the mainland, and in Greece itself Argive, Corinthian, Attic, Boeotian, and other Geometric sequences have each their own hallmarks.

The subsequent Bronze Age civilizations of Greece and the Aegean Sea have given rise to the general term Aegean civilization.

Many of the islands in the Aegean have safe harbours and bays.

* Aegea, queen of the Amazons who was thought by some to have been the eponym of the Aegean Sea.

Representations of ships are not common, but several have been observed on Aegean gems, gem-sealings, frying pans and vases.

Aegean vases have been exhibited both at Sèvres and Neuchatel since about 1840, the provenance ( i. e. source or origin ) being in the one case Phylakope in Melos, in the other Cephalonia.

The American explorations of the Argive Heraeum, concluded in 1895, also failed to prove that site to have been important in the prehistoric time, though, as was to be expected from its neighbourhood to Mycenae itself, there were traces of occupation in the later Aegean periods.

E. Chantre in 1894 picked up lustreless ware, like that of Hissariik, in central Phtygia and at Pteria, and the English archaeological expeditions, sent subsequently into north-western Anatolia, have never failed to bring back ceramic specimens of Aegean appearance from the valleys of the Rhyndncus, Sangarius and Halys.

There have now been recognized in the collections at Cairo, Florence, London, Paris and Bologna several Egyptian imitations of the Aegean style which can be set off against the many debts which the centres of Aegean culture owed to Egypt.

Two Aegean vases were found at Sidon in 1885, and many fragments of Aegean and especially Cypriot pottery have been found during recent excavations of sites in Philistia by the Palestine Fund.

The condition of the Ottoman railways of the time was primitive, so most reinforcement would have to come by sea through the Aegean Sea.

Samos excavations have revealed votive offerings, many of them late 8th and 7th centuries BC, which show that Hera at Samos was not merely a local Greek goddess of the Aegean: the museum there contains figures of gods and suppliants and other votive offerings from Armenia, Babylon, Iran, Assyria, Egypt, testimony to the reputation which this sanctuary of Hera enjoyed and to the large influx of pilgrims.

It is also widely held by scholars that the island was not occupied by humans during the Middle Bronze Age ( 2300 – 1600 ), though researchers have recently suggested that the lack of evidence from this period may only demonstrate the lack of excavations on Chios and the northern Aegean.

Similar tracing techniques have allowed obsidian to be identified in Greece also as coming from Melos, Nisyros or Yiali, islands in the Aegean Sea.

Such wheels are known to have been used for portable cultic stands in the Aegean region during this period, and it is therefore assumed that this building served cultic functions.

The Aegean and Mediterranean coasts have cool, rainy winters and hot, moderately dry summers.

In fact, there was a total eclipse of the sun in the Aegean on March 5, 1223 BC, which Atreus might have twisted into a setting of the sun in the east.

The myths involving Jason have been interpreted by specialists as part of a class of myths that tell how the Hellenes of the distant heroic age, before the Trojan War, faced the challenges of the pre-Greek " Pelasgian " cultures of mainland Greece, the Aegean and Anatolia.

Greek colonies and communities have been historically established in most corners of the Mediterranean, but Greeks have always been centered around the Aegean Sea, where the Greek language has been spoken since antiquity.

The first slanting rays of the new day cannot yet dispel all the dark shadows which lie across the Aegean world ; ;

Though the spread of this type of decoration in the Aegean has not yet been precisely determined, it seems to appear first in the Cyclades, which were among the leading exporters of pottery throughout the century.

Thus, after two successful wars, Greece had doubled its territory by gaining most of Macedonia, Epirus, Crete and the rest of the Aegean islands, although the status of the latter remained as yet undetermined and a cause of tension with the Ottomans.

The Balkan Wars were followed by a rapid escalation between Greece and the Ottoman Empire over the as yet unclear status of the islands of the Eastern Aegean.

The Balkan Wars were followed by a rapid escalation between Greece and the Ottoman Empire over the as yet unclear status of the islands of the Eastern Aegean.

Commerce was practiced to some extent in very early times, as is proved by the distribution of Melian obsidian over all the Aegean area.

Sicily, ever since P. Orsi excavated the Sicel cemetery near Lentini in 1877, has proved a mine of early remains, among which appear in regular succession Aegean fabrics and motives of decoration from the period of the second stratum at Hissarlik.

Southeastern Sicily, ever since P. Orsi excavated the Sicel cemetery near Lentini in 1877, has proved a mine of early remains, among which appear in regular succession Aegean fabrics and motives of decoration from the period of the second stratum at Hissarlik.

The focus of novelty in this world now lay in the south-eastern districts of the Greek mainland, and by 800 virtually the entire Aegean, always excepting its northern shores, had accepted the Geometric style of pottery.

It is a peninsula bound by the Black Sea to the north, Georgia to the north-east, the Armenian Highland to the east, Mesopotamia to the south-east, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and the Aegean Sea to the west.

Aegean surface water circulates in a counter-clockwise gyre, with hypersaline Mediterranean water moving northward along the west coast of Turkey, before being displaced by less dense Black Sea outflow.

The physical oceanography of the Aegean Sea is controlled mainly by the regional climate, the fresh water discharge from major rivers draining southeastern Europe, and the seasonal variations in the Black Sea surface water outflow through the Dardanelles Strait.

Historic map of Aegean Sea by Piri Reis

The Aegean Sea was later invaded by the Persians and the Romans, and inhabited by the Byzantine Empire, the Bulgarians, the Venetians, the Genoeses, the Seljuq Turks, and the Ottoman Empire.

The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Aegean Sea to the west.

The Anatolian peninsula, also called Asia Minor, is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean Sea to the west, and the Sea of Marmara to the northwest, which separates Anatolia from Thrace in Europe.

The north western coasts of Anatolia were inhabited by Greeks of the Achaean / Mycenaean culture from the 20th century BC, related to the Greeks of south eastern Europe and the Aegean.

* 338 BC – A Macedonian army led by Philip II defeated the combined forces of Athens and Thebes in the Battle of Chaeronea, securing Macedonian hegemony in Greece and the Aegean.

He was born into the aristocratic, warrior class that dominated Mytilene, the strongest city-state on the island of Lesbos and, by the end of the seventh century BC, the most influential of all the North Aegean Greek cities, with a strong navy and colonies securing its trade-routes in the Hellespont.

Their non-Greek language is confirmed on the site by inscriptions in the Cypriot syllabary which alone in the Aegean world survived the Bronze Age collapse and continued to be used down to the 4th century BC.

* Excerpt on the geology of Athens from: A Geological Companion to Greece and the Aegean by Michael and Reynold Higgins, Cornell University Press, 1996

* Structures ; Ruins of palaces, palatial villas, houses, built dome-or cist-graves and fortifications ( Aegean islands, Greek mainland and northwestern Anatolia ), but not distinct temples ; small shrines, however, and temene ( religious enclosures, remains of one of which were probably found at Petsofa near Palaikastro by J. L. Myres in 1904 ) are represented on intaglios and frescoes.

When this discovery was followed up in 1870, on the neighbouring Santorin ( Thera ), by representatives of the French School at Athens, much pottery of a class now known immediately to precede the typical late Aegean ware, and many stone and metal objects, were found.

Melos, long marked as a source of early objects but not systematically excavated until taken in hand by the British School at Athens in 1896, yielded at Phylakope remains of all the Aegean periods, except the Neolithic.

A map of Cyprus in the later Bronze Age ( such as is given by J. L. Myres and M. O. Richter in Catalogue of the Cyprus Museum ) shows more than 25 settlements in and about the Mesaorea district alone, of which one, that at Enkomi, near the site of Salamis, has yielded the richest Aegean treasure in precious metal found outside Mycenae.

One land, however, has eclipsed all others in the Aegean by the wealth of its remains of all the prehistoric ages — Crete ; and so much so that, for the present, we must regard it as the fountainhead of Aegean civilization, and probably for long its political and social centre.