Greeks

• 1. Arrival In The Balkans

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  The Proto-Greeks arrived at the area now called Greece, in the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, at the end of the 3rd millennium BC between 2200 and 1900 BC. This sequence of migrations into the Greek mainland during the 2nd millennium BC has to be reconstructed on the basis of the ancient Greek dialects, as they presented themselves centuries later and are therefore subject to some uncertainties. 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. Both migrations occur at incisive periods, the Mycenaean at the transition to the Late Bronze Age and the Doric at the Bronze Age collapse. The Mycenaeans quickly penetrated the Aegean Sea and, by the 15th century BC, had reached Rhodes, Crete, Cyprus and the shores of Asia Minor. Around 1200 BC, the Dorians, another Greek-speaking people, followed from Epirus.

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• 2. The Golden Century

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  The classical period of Greek civilization covers a time spanning from the early 5th century BC to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BC. It is so named because it set the standards by which Greek civilization would be judged in later eras. At the battles of Marathon, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Platea, some Greek city-states formed a victorious alliance led by Sparta and Athens. The Peloponnesian War, the large scale civil war between the two most powerful Greek city-states Athens and Sparta and their allies, left both greatly weakened. A brief Spartan hegemony, and then a short-lived Theban hegemony, followed up until the Battle of Mantinea in 362 BC. After the rise of Macedon and the Battle of Chaeronea, most of the feuding Greek city-states became members of the Hellenic league under the leadership of Philip, the Argead king of Macedon, in order to invade the Achaemenid Empire. The campaign was led successfully by his son Alexander the Great, as Philip was assassinated in 336 BC. 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.

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• 3. Roman Identity Shifts

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  From the early centuries of the Common Era, the Greeks self-identified as Romans (Greek: Rhōmaîoi). By that time, the name Hellenes denoted pagans but was revived as an ethnonym in the 11th century. During most of the Middle Ages, the Byzantine Greeks self-identified as Rhōmaîoi, meaning citizens of the Roman Empire, a term which in the Greek language had become synonymous with Christian Greeks. The Eastern Roman Empire became increasingly influenced by Greek culture after the 7th century when Emperor Heraclius decided to make Greek the empire's official language. 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. A distinct Greek identity re-emerged in the 11th century in educated circles and became more forceful after the fall of Constantinople to the Crusaders of the Fourth Crusade in 1204. In the Empire of Nicaea, a small circle of the elite used the term Hellene as a term of self-identification.

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• 4. Ottum Rule And Independence

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  Following the Fall of Constantinople on the 29th of May 1453, many Greeks sought better employment and education opportunities by leaving for the West, particularly Italy, Central Europe, Germany and Russia. As a direct consequence of this situation, Greek-speakers came to play a hugely important role in the Ottoman trading and diplomatic establishment, as well as in the church. 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 into Ottoman service through the devshirme. For those that remained under the Ottoman Empire's millet system, religion was the defining characteristic of national groups, so the exonym Greeks was applied by the Ottomans to all members of the Orthodox Church. The modern Greek state was created in 1829, when the Greeks liberated a part of their historic homelands, Peloponnese, from the Ottoman Empire. A century later, when the Treaty of Lausanne was signed between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the two countries agreed to use religion as the determinant for ethnic identity for the purposes of population exchange.

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• 5. Global Diaspora Patterns

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  The total number of Greeks living outside Greece and Cyprus today is a contentious issue. Where census figures are available, they show around three million Greeks outside Greece and Cyprus. Estimates provided by the SAE , World Council of Hellenes Abroad put the figure at around seven million worldwide. Important centres include New York City, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Sydney, Melbourne, London, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Auckland, and Sao Paulo. In 2010, the Hellenic Parliament introduced a law that allowed members of the diaspora to vote in Greek elections; this law was repealed in early 2014. During and after the Greek War of Independence, Greeks of the diaspora were important in establishing the fledgling state, raising funds and awareness abroad. In the 20th century, many Greeks left their traditional homelands for economic reasons resulting in large migrations from Greece and Cyprus to the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Canada, Germany, and South Africa, especially after the Second World War, the Greek Civil War, and the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus in 1974.

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• 6. Linguistic Continuity

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  Most Greeks speak the Greek language, an independent branch of the Indo-European languages, with its closest relations possibly being Armenian or the Indo-Iranian languages. It has the longest documented history of any living language and Greek literature has a continuous history of over 2,500 years. The oldest inscriptions in Greek are in the Linear B script, dated as far back as 1450 BC. Following the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent, the Greek alphabet appears in the 9th, 8th century BC. The Greek alphabet derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and in turn became the parent alphabet of the Latin, Cyrillic, and several other alphabets. Modern Greek has, in addition to Standard Modern Greek or Dimotiki, a wide variety of dialects of varying levels of mutual intelligibility, including Cypriot, Pontic, Cappadocian, Griko and Tsakonian. In 1976, however, the Hellenic Parliament voted to make the spoken Dimotiki the official language, making Katharevousa obsolete.

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• 7. Scientific Contributions

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  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. As of 2007, Greece had the eighth highest percentage of tertiary enrollment in the world while Greeks of the Diaspora are equally active in the field of education. Notable Greek scientists of modern times include physician Georgios Papanicolaou, mathematician Constantin Carathéodory, chemists Leonidas Zervas and K. C. Nicolaou, computer scientists Michael Dertouzos and Nicholas Negroponte, and physicist-mathematician Demetrios Christodoulou. The scholarly tradition of the Greek academies was maintained during Roman times with several academic institutions in Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and other centers of Greek learning, while Byzantine science was essentially a continuation of classical science. The University of Constantinople was Christian Europe's first secular institution of higher learning since no theological subjects were taught.

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• 8. Genetic Lineage Studies

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  In their archaeogenetic study, Lazaridis et al. 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. A genetic study by Clemente et al. found that in the Early Bronze Age, the populations of the Minoan, Helladic, and Cycladic civilizations in the Aegean, were genetically homogeneous. Present-day Greeks share approximately 90% of their ancestry with them, suggesting continuity between the two time periods. A study from 2013 for prediction of hair and eye colour from DNA of the Greek people showed that the self-reported phenotype frequencies according to hair and eye colour categories varied widely. Another study from 2012 included 150 dental school students from the University of Athens, and the results showed that light hair colour was predominant in 10.7% of the students. A 2017 study found that Bronze Age Aegean populations had mostly dark hair and eyes. The genetic phenotype predictions matched the visual representations made by the Greeks of themselves, suggesting that art of this period reproduced phenotypes naturalistically.

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