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Ancient Greek literature is literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period , are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey , set in an idealized archaic past today identified as ...
An example, in English, of boustrophedon as used in inscriptions in ancient Greece (Lines 2 and 4 read right-to-left.) Boustrophedon (/ ˌ b uː s t r ə ˈ f iː d ən / [1]) is a style of writing in which alternate lines of writing are reversed, with letters also written in reverse, mirror-style. This is in contrast to modern European ...
The earliest extant examples of ancient Greek writing (c. 1450 BC) are in the syllabic script Linear B. Beginning in the 8th century BC, however, the Greek alphabet became standard, albeit with some variation among dialects. Early texts are written in boustrophedon style, but left-to-right became standard during the classic period.
All ancient Greek literature was to some degree oral in nature, and the earliest literature was completely so. [2] The Greeks created poetry before making use of writing for literary purposes. Poems created in the Preclassical period were meant to be sung or recited (writing was little known before the 7th century BC).
Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 BC to 1450 BC. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It evolved into Linear B, which was used by the Mycenaeans to write an early form of Greek. It was discovered by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in 1900.
For example, a phrase written in scriptio continua as collectamexiliopubem may be interpreted as collectam ex Ilio pubem, meaning 'a people gathered from Troy', or collectam exilio pubem, 'a people gathered for exile'. Thus, readers had to be much more cognisant of the context to which the text referred.
Zyranna Zateli is widely considered one of the most exciting Greek authors writing today. [288] [289] She won critics and readers alike with the short-story collection Last Year's Fiancée (1984), [288] but her most famous work is the novel At Twilight they Return (1993), which falls under the genre of magical realism. [290]
A complication of Greek grammar is that different Greek authors wrote in different dialects, all of which have slightly different grammatical forms (see Ancient Greek dialects). For example, the history of Herodotus and medical works of Hippocrates are written in Ionic, the poems of Sappho in Aeolic, and the odes of Pindar in Doric; the poems ...