Pocket Museum: Ancient Greece presents more than 200 objects currently housed in public collections around the world that offer both context and immediacy to the rich culture of Ancient Greece. From the bifacial hand tools of the Lower Palaeolithic to the Hellenistic Great Altar of Pergamon, the artifacts presented here reveal a complex sociocultural history of shifting priorities, spiritual beliefs, and cultural traditions; the influence on material culture of isolation and internationalism, of technological advance and decline, and of prosperity and adversity. They also reflect the transmission of shared social-cultural ideals across vast distances through relationships maintained for centuries at a time - objects from across the Greek world, valued in life and in death. Pocket Museum: Ancient Greece also offers an insight into the history of collecting and methods of interpretation, examining how the perception of objects has changed over time. Beautifully illustrated with photographs of each featured artifact, this is an absorbing introduction to a culture that has exerted an unparalleled influence on Western civilization.

Table of Contents

1. From hunter-gatherers to the first farming communities (250,000-3200 BCE) * 2. Emergence of Civilization: Early Bronze Age in Greece, Crete and Cyclades (3200-2000 BCE) * 3. The Middle and Late Bronze Age in the Aegean (2000-1200 BCE) * 4. Post-palatial Bronze Age and Transition to Early Iron Age (1200-700 BCE) * 5. The Rise of the Polis: the Archaic and Classical period (700-250 BCE) * 6. The Hellenistic World (250 BCE-1 CE)