One of the most striking things about Classical Greek civilization is just how radically different it was from every other ancient civilization. On the one hand, the standard ancient civilizations — China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Harappan, Inca, Maya, Aztec — shared the same basic structure: a king running the show with lots of peasants, a standard religion, taxes, armies with frequent wars, both foreign and civil, etc, etc.
But Greek civilization had important elements that simply don’t show up in any of the other early civilizations.
National Identity
The Greeks were politically divided up into a mess of city-states, but they still identified as a nation, and they could unite against a common enemy. They saw themselves as Greeks. None of the other early civilizations had this feature. The didn’t think of themselves as Chinese or Sumerians or Mayans or Egyptians; they were simply subjects of the king, emperor, pharoah, or whatever.
Public Games
The Greeks loved public games. The Olympics were just one expression of this. There were plenty of local games as well. One of the classic stories from Erasmus tells of Parmenio’s Pig, in which a village had an annual contest in which contestants vied in mimicking the squeals of a pig. Parmenio hid a piglet under his tunic and squeezed the piglet to make it squeal, while he mouthed along with it. They awarded the prize to another contestant. Perhaps other civilizations had such games — but if they did, they certainly didn’t write about them.
Rhetoric
The ability to sway people with a compelling speech was unique to Greek society. In every other society, you didn’t need to convince anybody of anything; physical force was all that mattered. But the Greeks revered the great orator who could rally the crowd to an idea. Up-and-coming Greek youths studied the art of speech-making. Nobody else ever had anything like that.
Finance
Sure, all the other civilizations had some form of trade; it’s the only way to permit economic specialization. But the Greeks took financial concepts much further. They invented coinage. Before the Greeks, precious metals were used for mercantile purposes, but not in any formal manner. Ancient Mesopotamian law specified various fines in shekels of silver — a shekel was a unit of weight. But there were always disputes regarding the true weight of any amount of silver or gold, as well as its purity. Coins created by the government were in standard sizes with standard purities, and so provided a reliable unit of value.
But that was just the beginning. The Greeks also invented the idea of finance, in which several parties could combine their resources to achieve economic goals. A banker would provide the capital for a merchant, who would use the capital to hire space on a ship and purchase goods for trading purposes. To make this work, the Greeks had to develop legal systems to deal with the complexities of multi-party financial arrangements. No previous civilization had anything as sophisticated as the Greek financial system.
Abstraction
This is surely one of the most original concepts the Greeks developed. It is difficult for people today to appreciate just how revolutionary the Greek development of abstraction was. Every other civilization dealt in terms of instances, not principles. Here are some examples of the difference between instantiation and abstraction:
Ancient laws were long lists of specific actions with specific punishments assigned to them, but there were few general catagories. Most ancient civilizations did have the concept of debt, but that was about as abstract as they got. The Greeks developed such concepts as liability (incurring debt through misbehavior); formal trials (a defined process for resolving legal disputes); and formal contracts specifying obligations between two parties.
Perhaps the most striking of Greek abstractions was the concept of proof. We are so familiar with the concept that we never pause to wonder that, before the Greeks, the concept was unknown. Decisions were made on whatever gut feelings seemed most powerful. The Greek concept of proof was initially not as rigorous as we use it to mean in, say, logic or mathematics. But they invented the abstract notion that any conclusion had to be based on a formal step-by-step process combining facts in a reasonable way. This was rationalism, a purely Greek invention. Aristotle formalized the concept of rationalism to produce logic.
Greek philosophy developed concepts of abstraction far, far beyond anything that any other civilization every accomplished. Plato’s theory of forms declared that the abstraction was the reality and all of the instances were imperfect expressions of that abstract truth. Thus, there were lots of individual chairs, but the reality lay in “chair-ness”, a pure abstraction of the concept of a chair.
The pinnacle of Greek abstraction came with Euclid’s book, The Elements of Geometry. In it, he laid down a rigorous, step by step exposition of geometry, using rigorous proofs at every step. It was a tour de force in rigorous abstract thought.
Curiosity
No other civilization institutionalized curiosity. Chinese civilization treated curiosity as a kind of intellectual masturbation, somehow shameful. The Greeks reveled in curiosity. They inquired into anything and everything. Aristotle exemplified this with his prolific writings on just about everything: astronomy, biology, politics, drama, and more.
The Individual
Other than the powerful, we know very little about individuals in other ancient civilizations. Sure, we have long lists of kings and conquerers, but less exalted individuals seldom appear in their histories. But we know a great many individual Greeks. Not just rulers and generals and great thinkers — all manner of secondary characters show up in Greek literature. Perhaps this merely reflects the great amount of literature the Greeks left us. But we have even more ancient Chinese literature, without so many everyday schmucks showing up.