when was the first olympic games held in ancient greece
Ancient Olympic Games The Olympic Games was originally meant as a festival, or celebration of/for Zeus; later, events such as a footrace, a javelin contest, and wrestling matches were added. The Olympic Games (Ancient Greek: Ὀλύμπια Olympia[1][2][3][4][5][6] "the Olympics" also Ancient Greek: Ὀλυμπιάς Olympias[4][5][6][7] "the Olympiad") were a series of athletic competitions among representatives of city-states and one of the Panhellenic Games of Ancient Greece. They were held in honor of Zeus, and the Greeks gave them a mythological origin. The first Olympics is traditionally dated to 776 BC.[8] They continued to be celebrated when Greece came under Roman rule, until the emperor Theodosius I suppressed them in 393 AD as part of the campaign to impose Christianity as the State religion of Rome. The games were held every four years, or olympiad, which became a unit of time in historical chronologies.
1968 Summer Olympics The 1968 Summer Olympics (Spanish: Juegos OlÃ­mpicos de Verano de 1968), officially known as the Games of the XIX Olympiad, were an international multi-sport event held in Mexico City, Mexico, in October 1968.
Olympic Games Greek interest in reviving the Olympic Games began with the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1821. It was first proposed by poet and newspaper editor Panagiotis Soutsos in his poem "Dialogue of the Dead", published in 1833.[31] Evangelos Zappas, a wealthy Greek-Romanian philanthropist, first wrote to King Otto of Greece, in 1856, offering to fund a permanent revival of the Olympic Games.[32] Zappas sponsored the first Olympic Games in 1859, which was held in an Athens city square. Athletes participated from Greece and the Ottoman Empire. Zappas funded the restoration of the ancient Panathenaic Stadium so that it could host all future Olympic Games.[32]
Athens Athens is home to two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Acropolis of Athens and the medieval Daphni Monastery. Landmarks of the modern era, dating back to the establishment of Athens as the capital of the independent Greek state in 1834, include the Hellenic Parliament and the so-called "architectural trilogy of Athens", consisting of the National Library of Greece, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and the Academy of Athens. Athens is also home to several museums and cultural institutions, such as the National Archeological Museum, featuring the world's largest collection of ancient Greek antiquities, the Acropolis Museum, the Museum of Cycladic Art, the Benaki Museum and the Byzantine and Christian Museum. Athens was the host city of the first modern-day Olympic Games in 1896, and 108 years later it welcomed home the 2004 Summer Olympics.[21]