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Starting from a foreign script known as Linear A (used in Crete to record a native language known as Minoan), the Greeks devised, toward 1500 bce at the latest, a syllabic script to record their own language. In these respects Ancient Greek is conservative, as are, generally speaking, the western Indo-European languages (Italic and Celtic). Its linguistic features place it in a central region on the dialect map that can be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European; the ancient languages with which it has the most features in common are little-known ones such as Phrygian. By the time it emerged in the second half of the 2nd millennium bce, it had already acquired a completely distinct character from the parent Indo-European language. While it is possible that speakers of Hellenic or pre-Hellenic arrived earlier, there is no linguistic evidence of Hellenic prior to the first half of the 2nd millennium bce on what is now the Greek peninsula, where the language brought by the relevant people(s) developed into Greek. Greek Letters today are used for writing modern greek and symbols in mathematics and science.
- However, it was the combination of Orthodox Christianity with a specifically Greek identity that shaped the Greeks’ notion of themselves in the empire’s twilight years.
- Following the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent, the Greek alphabet appears in the 9th–8th century BC.
- The most obvious link between modern and ancient Greeks is their language, which has a documented tradition from at least the 14th century BC to the present day, albeit with a break during the Greek Dark Ages from which written records are absent (11th–8th cent. BC, though the Cypriot syllabary was in use during this period).
- 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.
- Ancient Greek civilization flourished from the period following Mycenaean civilization, which ended about 1200 BCE, to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BCE.
Timeline
The modern Greek state was created in 1829, when the Greeks liberated a part of their historic homelands, Peloponnese, from the Ottoman Empire. The relationship between ethnic Greek identity and Greek Orthodox religion continued after the creation of the modern Greek nation-state in 1830. For those that remained under the Ottoman Empire's millet system, religion was the defining characteristic of national groups (milletler), so the exonym "Greeks" (Rumlar from the name Rhomaioi) was applied by the Ottomans to all members of the Orthodox Church, regardless of their language or ethnic origin. Added to this, in the first half of the Ottoman period men of Greek origin made up a significant proportion of the Ottoman army, navy, and state bureaucracy, having been levied as adolescents (along with especially Albanians and Serbs) into Ottoman service through the devshirme.
Colonization and city-state formation
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.
Writing system
The genetic phenotype predictions matched the visual representations made by the Greeks of themselves, suggesting that art of this period reproduced phenotypes naturalistically. A 2023 study states that early Cretan farmers shared the same ancestry as other Neolithic Aegeans but received 'eastern' gene flow of Anatolian origin at the end of the Neolithic Age. Individuals from western Sicily additionally show similarities with peoples from the western part of the Peloponnese. Present-day Greeks share ~90% of their ancestry with them, suggesting continuity between the two time periods. This is corroborated by sequenced genomes of Middle Bronze Age individuals from northern Greece, who had a much higher proportion of steppe-related ancestry; the timing of this gene flow was estimated at ~2,300 BCE, and is consistent with the dominant linguistic theories explaining the emergence of the Proto-Greek language.
Roman Empire
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.
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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.
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.
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.
“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 gyros near me 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.
Greek language
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.