The Scythians or Scyths in composition) and sometimes also referred to as the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern Iranic equestrian nomadic people who had migrated during the 9th to 8th centuries BC from Central Asia to the Pontic Steppe in modern-day Ukraine and Southern Russia, where they remained established from the 7th century BC until the 3rd century BC.
In Greek mythology, an Amazonomachy is a mythological battle between the ancient Greeks and the Amazons, a nation of all-female warriors. The subject of Amazonomachies was popular in ancient Greek art and Roman art.
Sestos was an ancient city in Thrace. It was located at the Thracian Chersonese peninsula on the European coast of the Hellespont, opposite the ancient city of Abydos, and near the town of Eceabat in Turkey.
The Lenaia was an annual Athenian festival with a dramatic competition. It was one of the lesser festivals of Athens and Ionia in ancient Greece. The Lenaia took place in Athens in Gamelion, roughly corresponding to January. The festival was in honour of Dionysus Lenaios. There is also evidence the festival also took place in Delphi.
The ecclesia or ekklesia was the assembly of the citizens in city-states of ancient Greece.
Pottery, due to its relative durability, comprises a large part of the archaeological record of ancient Greece, and since there is so much of it, it has exerted a disproportionately large influence on our understanding of Greek society. The shards of pots discarded or buried in the 1st millennium BC are still the best guide available to understand the customary life and mind of the ancient Greeks. There were several vessels produced locally for everyday and kitchen use, yet finer pottery from regions such as Attica was imported by other civilizations throughout the Mediterranean, such as the Etruscans in Italy. There were a multitude of specific regional varieties, such as the South Italian ancient Greek pottery.
Red-figure pottery is a style of ancient Greek pottery in which the background of the pottery is painted black while the figures and details are left in the natural red or orange color of the clay.
Nikosthenes was a potter of Greek black- and red-figure pottery in the time window 550–510 BC. He signed as the potter on over 120 black-figure vases, but only nine red-figure. Most of his vases were painted by someone else, called Painter N. Beazley considers the painting "slovenly and dissolute;" that is, not of high quality. In addition, he is thought to have worked with the painters Anakles, Oltos, Lydos and Epiktetos. Six's technique is believed to have been invented in Nikosthenes' workshop, possibly by Nikosthenes himself, around 530 BC. He is considered transitional between black-figure and red-figure pottery.
White-ground technique is a style of white ancient Greek pottery and the painting in which figures appear on a white background. It developed in the region of Attica, dated to about 500 BC. It was especially associated with vases made for ritual and funerary use, if only because the painted surface was more fragile than in the other main techniques of black-figure and red-figure vase painting. Nevertheless, a wide range of subjects are depicted.
The Nessos Painter, also known as Netos or Nettos Painter, was a pioneer of Attic black-figure vase painting. He is considered to be the first Athenian to adopt the Corinthian style who went on to develop his own style and introduced innovations. The Nessos Painter is often known to be one of the original painters of black-figure. He only worked in this style, which is shown on his name vase in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. Most of the known Nessos Painter ceramics were found in funerary settings such as cemeteries and mortuaries.
A kalos inscription is a form of epigraph found on Attic vases and graffiti in antiquity, mainly during the Classical period from 550 to 450 BC. The word kalos (καλός), meaning 'handsome' or 'beautiful', was often accompanied by the name of a certain man, or sometimes simply by the word pais (παῖς), meaning the 'boy' or 'youth', without naming a particular person. The female version was kalē (καλή). The kalos inscriptions typically had an erotic connotation.
The Meidias Painter was an Athenian red-figure vase painter in Ancient Greece, active in the last quarter of the 5th century BCE. He is named after the potter whose signature is found on a large hydria of the Meidias Painter’s decoration, excavated from an Etruscan tomb. Eduard Gerhard first identified this inscription in 1839, and it was he who determined the scene on the vase was the rape of the daughters of Leukippos where previously it was thought to be the race of Hippomenes and Atalanta.
A phlyax play, also known as a hilarotragedy, was a burlesque dramatic form that developed in the Greek colonies of Magna Graecia in the 4th century BC. From the surviving fragments and titles of the plays, they appear to have been a form of mythological burlesque, which mixed figures from the Greek pantheon with the stock characters and situations of Attic New Comedy.
The Eurymedon vase is an Attic red-figure oinochoe, a wine jug attributed to the circle of the Triptolemos Painter made ca. 460 BC, which is now in the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (1981.173) in Hamburg, Germany. It depicts two figures; a bearded man, naked except for a mantle, holding his erection in his right hand and reaching forward with his left, while the second figure in the traditional dress of an Oriental archer bends forward at the hips and twists his upper body to face the viewer while holding his hands open-palmed up before him, level with his head. Between these figures is an inscription that reads εύρυμέδον ειμ[í] κυβα[---] έστεκα, restored by Schauenburg as "I am Eurymedon, I stand bent forward". This vase is a frequently-cited source suggestive of popular Greek attitudes during the Classical period to same-sex relations, gender roles, and Greco-Persian relations.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to ancient Greece:
Boeotian vase painting was a regional style of ancient Greek vase painting. Since the Geometric period, and up to the 4th century BC, the region of Boeotia produced vases with ornamental and figural painted decoration, usually of lesser quality than the vase paintings from other areas.
A kandys, plural kandyes, also called candys, kantuš, or Median robe, is a type of three-quarter-length Persian coat. It originally described a leather cloak with sleeves worn by men, but evolved into a garment worn by Athenian women. The kandys is sometimes compared to the much later 17th-19th century military pelisse as worn by Hussars, in the sense that it was a sleeved jacket or coat worn cloak-style.
Cydathenaeum or Kydathenaion was one of the demes in ancient Athens. It belonged in the phyle (tribe) Pandionis.
Slavery was a widely accepted practice in ancient Greece, as it was in contemporaneous societies. The principal use of slaves was in agriculture, but they were also used in stone quarries or mines, as domestic servants, or even as a public utility, as with the demosioi of Athens.
Targitaos or Scythes, was the ancestral god of the Scythians according to Scythian mythology. The ancient Greeks identified him with their own hero Hēraklēs.
