The History of the Ancient World: Практическое пособие по английскому языку. Часть 1. Гончарова Л.Ю. - 11 стр.

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grab a charging bull by the horns and somersault backwards over the length of
the bull’s body.
      Minoan art provides fascinating insights into the nature of the society at the
time – men and women dressed for the warm climate, with women bare breasted and
men beardless. Ancient Cretans followed the Egyptian artistic convention of painting
males with red skins and females with white skins. Flowers, plants, sea creatures and
dolphins feature prominently in their art forms indicating that their society was
advanced and wealthy enough to concern itself beyond just basic survival activities.
      One interesting original produced by the Cretan palace of Knossos was a
running water sanitation system – the first “flushing” toilet in the world.
      The exact date of the collapse of the Cretan civilization is unfortunately not
recorded, but it stopped functioning as a cultural unit when the island was invaded by
an Indo-European Nordic tribe, the Mycenaeans, around the year 1500 BC.
      In 1900, a British archaeologist, Sir Arthur Evans, rediscovered Knossos and
found baked clay tablets with two types of writing, dating from around 2000 BC.
These are called Linear A and Linear B scripts, possibly the oldest identifiable forms
of European continental writing (if the “writing stone” found at the Caves of Mes
d’Azil in France is discounted).

      The City of Troy
       Around the year 750 BC, two great epics, the Illiad and the Odyssey, were set
down and attributed to the blind poet Homer. The Illiad describes the war between
the Greek city states and the city of Troy, while the Odyssey tells of the adventures of
an Ionian kind Odysseus, during his return journey home after the war with Troy
ended.
       For many years the city of Troy was thought to exist only in Homer’s poems
and was associated with the famous story of the Wooden Horse. The city of Troy
was, however, actually discovered in 1870 by an amateur archaeologist Heinrich
Schliemann. Instead of discovering just one city, Schliemann unearthed a total of
nine cities, all built on top of one another, indicating a whole period of history about
which very little is known.
       The earliest city on the site dates from about 3000 BC and the various cities
(called Troy I – IX) were alternatively destroyed by earthquakes, fire or war, as
recounted in Homer’s poems. It is difficult to state for sure how much of the wooden
horse story is true (where Greek soldiers are supposed to have infiltrated the city of
Troy hidden in a trick wooden horse after unsuccessfully having besieged Troy for
nearly ten years) but it is likely to have some basis in fact as Troy and many Greek
City States were at war with one another around the year 1200 BC.
       The last Trojan city, number IX, appears to have been a Greek and later a
Roman city known as Ilium. As with Crete, the date of the exact end of Troy has also
been lost with the passage of time.

      The Etruscans
      The Etruscans were one of the original Mediterranean and Proto-Nordic
peoples living in the Italian peninsula. Originally called the Villanovans (after a place