• a quarter of the peninsula is fertile valleys, but only 20% is arable.
• Greek diet consists of grain, grapes, olives, and fish.
• lack of resources most likely led to Greek colonization
• Temperatures ranged from the 40s to the 80s.
• Their influence began around 2000bc
• Mycenae is located on a rocky ridge  on Peloponnesus
• Mycenaean kings dominated Greece from 1600-1100bc
• 1400bc, Mycenaean invaded Crete and absorbed Minoan Culture
• Trojan war, fought around 1200bc
• part of Greek mythology- until the 91th century, most historians thought it was fictional. 
• Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera were given the "apple of discord"
• Paris judged Aphrodite as the fairest
• Aphrodite made Helen fall in love with Paris who took her back to Troy
• Around 1200 bc, the mysterious sea people began to invade Mycenae, and burnt palaces
• Dorians moved into the region, dominating from 1500-750
• Under the Dorians; trade based economy collapsed and writing disappeared for 400 years
• Homer lived during the Greek dark ages and composed stories of the Trojan war 750-700bc
• The Iliad- the last conquest of the Mycenaean(Trojan war)
• The Odyssey- Odysseus attempts to return from the Trojan war but gets lost.
• the odyssey was 12,110 lines of dactylic hexameter
• Homer may have been mythical as well, the "Homeric question"
• His epics may have been the culmination of many generations of storytelling.