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It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (c.1400–1200 BC), Dark Ages (c.1200–800 BC), the Archaic or Epic period (c.800–500 BC), and the Classical period (c.500–300 BC). [ 2 ] Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers.
Greek (Modern Greek: Ελληνικά, romanized: Elliniká, pronounced; Ancient Greek: Ἑλληνική, romanized: Hellēnikḗ) is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent branch of it, native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy (in Calabria and Salento), southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, Caucasus, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean.
The Proto-Greek language was the most recent common ancestor of all Greek dialects. Proto-Greek split off from its nearest Indo-European relatives sometime during the European Bronze Age (c. 3rd millennium BC) and possibly even earlier, though it is unknown whether the characteristic Greek sound-changes occurred within the Greek peninsula or if Proto-Greek speakers themselves migrated into Greece.
Athens is one of the oldest named cities in the world, having been continuously inhabited for perhaps 5,000 years. Situated in southern Europe, Athens became the leading city of Ancient Greece in the first millennium BC, and its cultural achievements during the 5th century BC laid the foundations of Western civilization.
Attic Greek is the Greek dialect of the ancient region of Attica, including the polis of Athens. Often called classical Greek , it was the prestige dialect of the Greek world for centuries and remains the standard form of the language that is taught to students of ancient Greek.
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
Black-glaze Boeotian kantharos, 450–425 BC. The history of the Greek alphabet starts with the adoption of Phoenician letter forms in the 9th–8th centuries BC during early Archaic Greece and continues to the present day. The Greek alphabet was developed during the Iron Age, centuries after the loss of Linear B, the syllabic script that was ...
Ancient Greek in classical antiquity, before the development of the common Koine Greek of the Hellenistic period, was divided into several varieties.. Most of these varieties are known only from inscriptions, but a few of them, principally Aeolic, Doric, and Ionic, are also represented in the literary canon alongside the dominant Attic form of literary Greek.