This paper compares and contrasts the development of civilization in ancient Greece with that in China and India. It will compare them in terms of parallel levels of complexity, rather than in terms of absolute dates.
The civilization of ancient Greece did not begin from scratch. Rather, it built on and in some ways continued the foundations laid by the Cretan civilization, which was an outpost of Mesopotamian (more than Egyptian) civilization, and dominated the Aegean area between approximately 2500 and 1500 B.C. During this millennium, the Greek-speaking people had been emigrating slowly and peaceably, for the most part down into the peninsula of Greece. When the Cretan hegemony collapsed, perhaps because of a natural disaster, the Greeks took over administration of the Cretan cities on the mainland as well as the writing system (Linear A), which they naturally used to write their own language (Linear B).
By about 1200 B.C., all the great civilizations of the Near East were in a state of severe decline or collapse. The tale of the Trojan War may well record an occasion when the Greeks captured and looted one of the last remaining outposts of the Hittite Empire. This began a Dark Age, until about 800 B.C., during which almost all writings of the earlier civilization were lost, and the Greeks lost knowledge of the Linear B system. In fact, until Schliemann dug up Troy in the nineteenth century, setting up the era of modern archaeology, virtually no one in Europe knew that there had even been civilizations before about 800 B.C.
During this Dark Age, the Greeks, living on a rocky peninsula where large-scale agriculture was impossible, invented a new economic system based on olive oil, which was almost the petroleum of the ancient world. They sent out colonies to Anatolia and all around the Black Sea, as well as to Italy, all of which grew olives and exported olive oil. By about 800 B.C., a new, non-aristocratic merchan...