Ancient Greece (Greek: Ελλάς) was a period of Greek history and civilization that lasted from the Greek Dark Ages around the 13th-9th century BC to the late 6th century AD and the end of the Classical Age. Immediately after that, the early medieval period began, followed by the Byzantine era. Roughly three centuries after the collapse of the Late Bronze Age in Mycenaean Greece, an urban Greek polis (city-state) began to form in the 8th century BC, leading to the Archaic period and the colonization of the Mediterranean basin. This was followed by the period of Classical Greece, an era that began with the Greco-Persian Wars, and lasted from the fifth to the fourth centuries BC. Because of the conquests made by Alexander the Great in Macedonia, Hellenistic civilization flourished from Central Asia to the western end of the Mediterranean. The Hellenistic period ended with the conquests and conquest of the eastern Mediterranean countries by the Roman Republic, which established the Roman province of Macedonia in Roman Greece, and later the province of Achaea during the Roman Empire. Classical Greek culture, especially philosophy, had a strong influence on ancient Rome, which carried a copy of it to many parts of the Mediterranean basin and Europe. For this reason, Classical Greece is generally considered the abiotic culture that provided the basis of modern Western culture and is considered the cradle of Western civilization. Classical Greek culture gave a lot of importance to knowledge. Science and religion were not separate and getting close to the truth meant getting close to God. In this context, they understood the importance of mathematics as a tool for obtaining more reliable ("divine") knowledge. Greek culture, in a few centuries and with a limited population, was able to explore and make progress in many areas of science, mathematics, philosophy, literature, and knowledge in general.