The period between the fall of the Mycenean civilizations and the readoption of writing in the eigth or seventh century BC. After the Trojan Wars the Mycenaeans went through a period of civil war, the country was weak and a tribe called the Dorians took over. Some speculate that Dorian invaders from the north with iron weapons laid waste the Mycenaean culture. Others look to internal dissent, uprising and rebellion, or perhaps some combination.
The period in which the beginnings of Greek monumental stone sculpture and other developments in the naturalistic representation of the human figure are found. During the Archaic Age the Greeks developed the most widespread and influential of their new political forms, the city-state, or polis . Rise of the aristocracies. Greek colonization of Southern Italy and Sicily begins. Archaic Period
Classical period of ancient Greek history, is fixed between about 500 B. C., when the Greeks began to come into conflict with the kingdom of Persia to the east, and the death of the Macedonian king and conqueror Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. In this period Athens reached its greatest political and cultural heights: the full development of the democratic system of government under the Athenian statesman Pericles; the building of the Parthenon on the Acropolis; the creation of the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides; and the founding of the philosophical schools of Socrates and Plato.