Hellenistic period

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

the era of Greek history and culture from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE to the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BCE, characterised by the spread of Greek language, art, philosophy, and political forms across a vast territory stretching from Greece and Egypt to Central Asia and northwestern India; the Hellenistic world was shaped by the successor kingdoms — the Ptolemaic in Egypt, the Seleucid in Asia, the Antigonid in Macedon — that divided Alexander's empire and blended Greek culture with local Egyptian, Persian, Babylonian, and Indian traditions; intellectual achievements of the period include Euclidean geometry, Archimedean physics, the heliocentric theory of Aristarchus, and the poetry and scholarship of the Library of Alexandria; the Hellenistic era created the cultural common ground on which Christianity and later Islam would develop