Greek Thunderstorm

No other land knows the striking seriousness of thunder streaking through the sky, silencing the world of mortals into submission, and settling the dubious debate between the gods over who rules the heavenly roost. No other power on earth is quite like the eternally emanating force of a searing lighting strike, thrown from the hand of a greek god, giving the men and women below every reason to empty themselves of their egos. Modern Greece traces its roots to the civilization of ancient Greece, generally considered the cradle of Western civilization. As such, it is the birthplace of democracy, Western philosophy, the Olympic Games, Western literature and historiography, political science, major scientific and mathematical principles, university education, coinage, and Western drama, including both tragedy and comedy. Greece was the first area in Europe where advanced early civilizations emerged, beginning with the Cycladic civilization of the Aegean Sea, the Minoan civilization in Crete and then the Mycenaean civilization on the mainland. While the area around Attica was inhabited during the Upper Paleolithic period (30000 –10000 BCE), archaeological evidence suggests that the small caves around the Acropolis rock and the Klepsythra spring were in use during the Neolithic Period (3000–2800 BCE). Later, various Greek kingdoms and city-states emerged across the Greek peninsula and spread to the shores of the Black Sea, South Italy and Asia Minor, reaching great levels of prosperity that resulted in an unprecedented cultural boom, that of classical Greece, expressed in architecture, drama, science and philosophy, and nurtured in Athens under a democratic environment.