An Overall Introduction To The Ancient Greek Letters

The physiognomy of many mountains, with few major rivers in the inland but a long and tortuous coastline, prompted the formation of the unique Marine Civilization in Ancient Greece. Its agriculture was underdeveloped for the rugged terrain, few plains, and inconvenient irrigation and so on. Once the limited agricultural resources could not sustain the pressure of the growing population, it spurred the large-scale colonial movements and commercial activities. In addition, it is the unique geographical condition that makes the Greece to form a city-state civilization, instead of a centralized civilization.The colonial movements and commercial activities inevitably led to the large-scale movements of population. The formation of the city-state civilization inevitably triggered off the communications among states. But how did the people of sub-states keep constant contact with their mother-states? How did the businessmen and their families know the good news from each other? How did the states keep the frequent communications? In my opinion, besides the normal methods such as going back home, sending ambassadors and so on, the letters undoubtedly played a very important role in communications among the city-states as well as the relatives. Meanwhile, the remaining letters become highly valuable resources for us to research on the diplomatic relations of the city-states and the lives of the private persons.Many foreign scholars have obtained the achievements, but I don’t find any related discourses in China. From this point, three parts will be given in this thesis to talk about it:The first part is mainly about the history of the letters. Beginning from the Renaissance, hitherto it includes many representative people and works for our Chinese scholars to have a whole controlling about study of the letters.The second part is the basic form, providing readers with a comprehensive knowledge of Ancient Greek letters by the discussions about format, writing materials, sending and so on.In the third part, from some new perspectives, such as civilization contact, art shows, transmitting vector and so on, the functions and values of letters will be discussed.In a word, I hope this paper will be helpful for other Chinese scholars to do further study about letters.