GEOGRAPHY Geography in Ancient Greece looks very weird as if it were to appear to be smashed into many different pieces, which was then washed into the Aegean Sea and then have developed many different islands throughout Ancient Greece, the land of Ancient Greece is a peninsula. Ancient Greece was not far from any piece of water. Only 1/5 of the land was able to be farmed due to the hilly and mountainous terrain. Because of this problem, Greece was really good at trading since farming was not a good option to generate what they needed. Instead of water separating them, it was their hilly mountains. They were not able to communicate with other community’s due to these very hilly mountains. Because of this limited communication, each community thought that they were their own individual country, which led to each community creating their own rules and beliefs’. In Ancient Rome the very first settlers did not originally pick the land to create a big Empire. They thought it could be a good place to live and the soil was perfect for farming. They felt the location would also make it very easy to defend. The Timber River from Italy flowed through Ancient Rome which was ideal for farming. The city's low-lying position partly explains the general lack of high defense towers -the surrounding hills are higher anyway. The towers which were built through late antiquity and middle ages were later substituted by religious domes which, at least in spirit, bring the heavens down to earth. North of Rome, soldiers, travelers, merchants, and citizens had to cross the forbidding Alps. If they wanted to to go in any other direction, the Romans had to take the Tyrrhenian Sea. At the empire's height, thousands of miles of sea and land trade routes were needed to connect the far empire and allow goods to be transported. This required a network of roads and ships, along with a large bureaucracy to manage it all. In the end, it was the size of the empire that was its undoing. It was too large to protect with invaders coming in from the north and east, which were hundreds of miles from the capital. Rome and Greece have many geographical advantages, Rome had very hilly mountains and the Hadrian’s Wall but Greece and their peninsula made it very hard for invaders to break into their Empire. |