In Greek-inhabited territory itself, Greeks came to play a leading role in the Ottoman Empire, due in part to the fact that the central hub of the empire, politically, culturally, and socially, was based on Western Thrace and Macedonia, both in Northern Greece, and of course was centred on the mainly Greek-populated, former Byzantine capital, Constantinople. The most notable example of the latter was the work of the two Byzantine Greek brothers, the monks Saints Cyril and Methodius from the port city of Thessalonica, capital of the theme of Thessalonica, who are credited today with formalizing the first Slavic alphabet. Byzantine grammarians were those principally responsible for carrying, in person and in writing, ancient Greek grammatical and literary studies to the West during the 15th century, giving the Italian Renaissance a major boost. These Byzantine Greeks were largely responsible for the preservation of the literature of the classical era. 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. After the Byzantines recaptured Constantinople, however, in 1261, Rhomaioi became again dominant as a term for self-description and there are few traces of Hellene (Έλληνας), such as in the writings of George Gemistos Plethon, who abandoned Christianity and in whose writings culminated the secular tendency in the interest in the classical past.
- There is an Ancient phase, subdivided into a Mycenaean period (texts in syllabic script attested from the 14th to the 13th century bce) and Archaic and Classical periods (beginning with the adoption of the alphabet, from the 8th to the 4th century bce); a Hellenistic and Roman phase (4th century bce to 4th century ce); a Byzantine phase (5th to 15th century ce); and a Modern phase.
- It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.
- Later, Greek-speaking people occupied most of the islands of the Aegean and, about 1000 bce, the west coast of Anatolia.
- 1600 BC, the Mycenaean Greeks borrowed from the Minoan civilization its syllabic writing system (Linear A) and developed their own syllabic script known as Linear B, providing the first and oldest written evidence of Greek.
- Because of the movements of Philhellenism and the Diafotismos in the 19th century, which emphasized the modern Greeks‘ ancient heritage, these foreign influences were excluded from official use via the creation of Katharevousa, a somewhat artificial form of Greek purged of all foreign influence and words, as the official language of the Greek state.
- 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.
Greeks
While the Alexandrian empire did not survive its creator's death intact, the cultural implications of the spread of Hellenism across much of the Middle East and Asia were to prove long lived as Greek became the lingua franca, a position it retained even in Roman times. Alexander's toppling of the Achaemenid Empire, after his victories at the battles of the Granicus, Issus and Gaugamela, and his advance as far as modern-day Pakistan and Tajikistan, provided an important outlet for Greek culture, via the creation of colonies and trade routes along the way. While the Greeks of the classical era understood themselves to belong to a common Hellenic genos, their first loyalty was to their city and they saw nothing incongruous about warring, often brutally, with other Greek city-states. It is so named because it set the standards by which Greek civilization would be judged in later eras. The Dorian invasion was followed by a poorly attested period of migrations, appropriately called the Greek Dark Ages, but by 800 BC the landscape of Archaic and Classical Greece was discernible. It is likely that one of the factors which contributed to the Mycenaean palatial collapse was linked to raids by groups known in historiography as the "Sea Peoples" who sailed into the eastern Mediterranean around 1180 BC.
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.
Phonological Features
They are part of a group of classical ethnicities, described by Anthony D. Smith as an "archetypal diaspora people". The cultural centers of the Greeks have included Athens, Thessalonica, Alexandria, Smyrna, and Constantinople at various periods. Many of these regions coincided to a large extent with the borders of the Byzantine Empire of the late 11th century and the Eastern Mediterranean areas of ancient Greek colonization. Until the early 20th century, Greeks were distributed between the Greek peninsula, the western coast of Asia Minor, the Black Sea coast, Cappadocia in central Anatolia, Egypt, the Balkans, Cyprus, and Constantinople. Greek colonies and communities have been historically established on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea, but the Greek people themselves have always been centered on the Aegean and Ionian seas, where the Greek language has been spoken since the Bronze Age. The language plays an essential role in the Orthodox Church and features prominently in Greek diaspora communities worldwide.
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.
Arts
The Byzantine Greeks' essential values were drawn from both Christianity and the Homeric tradition of ancient Greece. While this Latin term for the ancient Hellenes could be used neutrally, its use by Westerners from the 9th century onwards in order to challenge Byzantine claims to ancient Roman heritage rendered it a derogatory exonym for the Byzantines who barely used it, mostly in contexts relating to the West, such as texts relating to the Council of Florence, to present the Western viewpoint. During most of the Middle Ages, the Byzantine Greeks self-identified as Rhōmaîoi (Ῥωμαῖοι, "Romans", meaning citizens of the Roman Empire), a term which in the Greek language had become synonymous with Christian Greeks. While ethnic distinctions still existed in the Roman Empire, they became secondary to religious considerations, and the renewed empire used Christianity as a tool to support its cohesion and promote a robust Roman national identity. Greek science, technology and mathematics are generally considered to have reached their peak during the Hellenistic period. Greeks, however, remained aware of their past, chiefly through the study of the works of Homer and the classical authors.
Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records.
There is an Ancient phase, subdivided into a Mycenaean period (texts in syllabic script attested from the 14th to the 13th century bce) and Archaic and Classical periods (beginning with the adoption of the alphabet, from the 8th to the 4th century bce); a Hellenistic and Roman phase (4th century bce to 4th century ce); a Byzantine phase (5th to 15th century ce); and a Modern phase. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Slavic languages, Albanian and Eastern Romance languages (Romanian and Aromanian). The phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to the modern period. One is bound to notice, however, that archaeological finds tend to call into question the whole concept of a Dark Age by showing that certain features of Greek civilization once thought not to antedate about 800 bce can actually be pushed back by as much as two centuries. Thucydides, the great ancient historian of the 5th century bce, wrote a sketch of Greek history from the Trojan War to his own day, in which he notoriously fails, in the appropriate chapter, to signal any kind of dramatic rupture.
It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, Greek is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine. It is also an official minority language in the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë. It is also the official language of Cyprus (alongside Turkish) and the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English).
Classical
Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language.
Older historical research often proposed Dorian invasion caused the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, but this narrative has been abandoned in all contemporary research. 1600 BC, the Mycenaean Greeks borrowed from the Minoan civilization its syllabic writing system (Linear A) and developed their own syllabic script known as Linear B, providing the first and oldest written evidence of Greek. Both migrations occur at incisive periods, the Mycenaean at the transition to the Late Bronze Age and the Doric at the Bronze Age collapse. There were at least two migrations, the first being the Ionians and Achaeans, which resulted in Mycenaean Greece by the 16th greek restaurants jacksonville fl century BC, and the second, the Dorian invasion, around the 11th century BC, displacing the Arcadocypriot dialects, which descended from the Mycenaean period.
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.