This course presents a (necessarily partial) survey of the main historical developments that shaped the ancient Greek world, from the Bronze Age to the end of the 4th century, as well as a selection of key concepts essential for understanding the social, cultural, and economic world of the ancient Greeks. Primarily, the course will proceed thematically rather than chronologically, to highlight the way that certain phenomena such as urbanism, agriculture, politics, gender, and religion operated across different historical periods. As well as being descriptive, the course will also adopt a critical stance toward prominent controversies in classical scholarship, such as: the historicity of the Trojan War and its relationship to Homeric poetry; the role of slaves, metics, and other marginalized figures in Athenian society; and the complicated nature of intersecting identity (gender, race) and its expression in the Greek world.