The History of the Ancient World: Практическое пособие по английскому языку. Часть 1. Гончарова Л.Ю. - 19 стр.

                                           19
       The Balts occupied the northern coast of the continent (giving their name
to the Baltic Sea) and the Scandinavian countries (dominating them, with the notable
exception of Finland).
       Of all the European peoples who settled in Europe around 2000 BC, a group
which became known as the Slavs settled the closest to the ancestral homeland in
southern Russia. The land they settled – today known as the Ukraine and Byelorussia
– was ideal for cereal farming and this encouraged the settlers to turn to agriculture
rather than war or conquest. Originally, the Slavs were a virtually pure Indo-
European people, and only later were certain elements of the Slavic population mixed
to a small degree with Mongolian conquerors, creating a number of mixed-race
peoples who quite incorrectly have become to be regarded as “typically Slavic”.

      Indo-European Invaders in Southern Europe
       A tribe of Indo-Europeans called the Latini penetrated as far as Italy, taking
control of that peninsula and mixing with the existing original European populations
in Italy, and creating what was later to become the world’s greatest empire – Rome.
The Latini gave their name to the language they carried with them – Latin. In an act
of irony, Roman military power was to later overwhelm their distant Indo-European
cousins, the Celts in France and Britain, but was in turn to be overrun by the
descendants of the Indo-European Germans.
       The Greek mainland fell before an invasion of Indo-Europeans called the
Mycenae – this tribe were the first to establish the basis upon which the classical
Grecian age was to be built, albeit only after yet another wave of Nordic invaders: the
Dorics.
       The period from the rime of the Dorian invasion (1100 BC) to about 750 BC, is
known to historians as the Homeric Age, because little is known about it except from
the writings of the poet Homer, in his epic poems the Illiad and the Odyssey.
Homeric age man was apparently warlike, brave and desirous of hardship. The
economies of the time were essentially agricultural systems with a government made
up of tribal kings and advisors drawn from important noble families. It was at about
this time that the city state, or polis, was started. Each city had an elevated fortified
site, known as acropolis – where the city’s important inhabitants could take refuge or
gather to worship their gods. In time, the place directly below the acropolis developed
a residential and trading area known as the asty. The asty and the acropolis combined
under one central jurisdictive rule, and this unit became known as the polis. The very
word politics is derived from the Greek word, polis.

      Celtic Heritage
      The Indo-European tribes may have had a common root, but this did not stop
them fighting with each other as much as with anybody else, with each tribe being
headed by a king and further divided by class into Druids (priests), warrior nobles,
and commoners.
      The Roman Conquest of south-eastern Europe, France and Britain effectively
destroyed the Celtic heritage. The Celts were not as literate as the Romans and thus
had less of the organizational skills or abilities of their conquerors.