Ancient Greek civilization History, Map, Culture, Politics, Religion, Achievements, & Facts
This usage is sometimes called aljamiado, as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan, and Greek has a central position in it. However, the morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language.
The Greek language is the oldest recorded living language and its vocabulary has been the basis of many languages, including English as well as international scientific nomenclature. The Greek language serves as a living testament to a culture and history that has profoundly shaped Western civilization. Today, Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and is one of the 24 official languages of the European Union. The dative case exists in ancient forms but has been largely phased out in modern usage. The Greek language, known as “Ελληνικά” (Elliniká) in Greek, stands as one of the world’s oldest recorded living languages.
Arts
During the later years of the Eastern Roman Empire, areas such as Ionia and Constantinople experienced a Hellenic revival in language, philosophy, and literature and on classical models of thought and scholarship. The large Greek diaspora and merchant class were instrumental in transmitting the ideas of western romantic nationalism and philhellenism, which together with the conception of Hellenism, formulated during the last centuries of the Byzantine Empire, formed the basis of the Diafotismos and the current conception of Hellenism. Before the establishment of the modern Greek nation-state, the link between ancient and modern Greeks was emphasized by the scholars of Greek Enlightenment especially by Rigas Feraios.
Hebrew alphabet
The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian) or the Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan), but little definitive evidence has been found. The ancient language most closely related to it may be Ancient Macedonian, which, by most accounts, was a distinct dialect of Greek itself, related to the Northwest Doric group.
- There were at least two migrations, the first being the Ionians and Achaeans, which resulted in Mycenaean Greece by the 16th century BC, and the second, the Dorian invasion, around the 11th century BC, displacing the Arcadocypriot dialects, which descended from the Mycenaean period.
- The Greeks of the Classical and Hellenistic eras made seminal contributions to science and philosophy, laying the foundations of several western scientific traditions, such as astronomy, geography, historiography, mathematics, medicine, philosophy and political science.
- Modern Greek υ (ípsilon) is transliterated as i, indicating that the sound used today differs from that of the ancient υ.
- During the first centuries after Jesus Christ, the New Testament was originally written in Koine Greek, which remains the liturgical language of the Greek Orthodox Church, and most of the early Christians and Church Fathers were Greek-speaking.
Modern Usage and Cultural Importance
A genetic study by Clemente et al. (2021) found that in the Early Bronze Age, the populations of the Minoan, Helladic, and Cycladic civilizations in the Aegean, were genetically homogeneous. In a subsequent study, Lazaridis et al. (2022) concluded that around ~58.4–65.8% of the ancestry of the Mycenaeans came from Anatolian Neolithic Farmers (ANF), while the remainder mainly came from ancient populations related to the Caucasus Hunter-Gatherers (CHG) (~20.1–22.7%) and the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN) culture in the Levant (~7–14%). In their archaeogenetic study, Lazaridis et al. (2017) found that Minoans and Mycenaean Greeks were genetically highly similar, but not identical; modern Greeks resembled the Mycenaeans, but with some additional dilution of the early Neolithic ancestry. Panayotis Potagos was another explorer of modern times who was the first to reach Mbomu and Uele River from the north. Greek surnames began to appear in the 9th and 10th century, at first among ruling families, eventually supplanting the ancient tradition of using the father's name as disambiguator.
Writing System
“Colonial” Greek survived longest at Byzantium, as the official language of the Eastern Empire. After the conquest of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt by Alexander the Great, Greek was the standard language of the rulers in the new urban centres of these countries until the invasions of the Arabs and the Turks. Modern Greek υ (ípsilon) is transliterated as i, indicating that the sound used today differs from that of the ancient υ.
Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages. Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are highly-influential on the English language and remain the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary. They show that one corner of one island of Greece, at least, was neither impoverished nor isolated in a period usually thought to have been both. Phenomena such as the tension between Dorians and Ionians that have their origins in the Dark Age are a reminder that Greek civilization did not emerge either unannounced or uncontaminated by what had gone before. Equally important to the understanding of this period is the hostility to Dorians, usually on the part of Ionians, another linguistic and religious subgroup, whose most-famous city was Athens. Important for the understanding of the Archaic and Classical periods, however, is the powerful belief in Dorianism as a linguistic and religious concept.
The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, gyros king 2 menu making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language. It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek. Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. Beginning with the epics of Homer, ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world.
Latin alphabet
By Western standards, the term Greeks has traditionally referred to any native speakers of the Greek language, whether Mycenaean, Byzantine or modern Greek. The Eastern Roman Empire (today conventionally named the Byzantine Empire, a name not used during its own time) became increasingly influenced by Greek culture after the 7th century when Emperor Heraclius (r.  610–641 AD) decided to make Greek the empire's official language. The Hellenistic civilization was the next period of Greek civilization, the beginnings of which are usually placed at Alexander's death. The Classical period is also described as the "Golden Age" of Greek civilization, and its art, philosophy, architecture and literature would be instrumental in the formation and development of Western culture. The Greeks of classical antiquity idealized their Mycenaean ancestors and the Mycenaean period as a glorious era of heroes, closeness of the gods and material wealth. The Greeks speak the Greek language, which forms its own unique branch within the Indo-European family of languages, the Hellenic.
