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The Language of the GenesSoon after the collapse of the Sumerians, the Greek polis or city-state appeared. Its philosophy — and its name — is at the basis of modern politics. The Iliad and the Odyssey are accounts of wars among the first poleis, which included Corinth, Sparta and Athens. Greece entered its classical age. This was a triumph in artistic, economic and political terms. Three thousand years ago Greece was the most densely populated country in Europe. Its inventive people expanded to form Greater Greece, Magna Graeca, an empire that extended from the Caucasus to Spain. Forty towns in southern Italy were Greek. They included Syracuse, then the biggest city in the world, and Sybaris, a byword for wealth. Patterns of blood groups and enzymes show that today's southern Italians and Sicilians are distinct from their compatriots to the north and share many genes with the population of modern Greece. The DNA of the first European states remains as a witness to their past. Sardinians, too, owe their distinctiveness to an ancient nation-state ...» |
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