Did ancient Greece really give us Western civilization, or did we choose to see it that way?

Greece gave a great deal, but "Western civilization begins in Greece" is a story we told later, and it leaves out most of the journey. Ancient Greece and Rome are widely regarded by Westerners as the birthplaces of Western civilization. Yet the West is an evolving concept, not a rigid region with fixed borders and members, and the earliest reference to the term "Western world" in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1586.

Even the Greeks did not start from nothing. The Greek alphabet, used since the late 9th or early 8th century BC, was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet. Increasing contact with non-Greek peoples, especially in the Near East, inspired developments in art and architecture, the adoption of coinage, and the development of the Greek alphabet.

Nor did Greek ideas wait to be rediscovered. Greek became the lingua franca of the Hellenistic region and the predominant language of the Byzantine Empire until 1453. In the 8th to 10th centuries, a large, well-funded effort in Baghdad translated a significant volume of Greek texts into Arabic. When the Renaissance poet Petrarch believed he was recovering an obscured classical past, the classical tradition had in fact continued uninterrupted during the Middle Ages.

So the honest answer is yes and no. Greece did produce a body of ideas that many cultures have drawn on. But the line from Athens to "the West" runs through Hellenistic kingdoms, Byzantium, Baghdad and Renaissance Italy, and the line itself is something later generations drew.