Misplaced Pages

#900099

97-540: Korydallos ( Greek : Κορυδαλλός ; Latin : Corydallus ) is both a town and a municipality in the Piraeus regional unit, Greece . It is located in the southwestern part of Athens agglomeration. Korydallos is situated southeast of the mountain Aegaleo . It is located 7 km west of central Athens and 4.5 km north of Piraeus . The municipality has an area of 4.324 km. The main street Taxiarchon has become

194-577: A Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into the following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered

291-577: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with Latin words , they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary ; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin . Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian , which, by most accounts,

388-614: A display of victory. The "Repubbliche Marinare" ( Maritime republics ) of Amalfi , Gaeta , Venice , Genoa , Ancona , Pisa and Ragusa developed their own empires in the Mediterranean shores. The Islamic states had never been major naval powers, and trade from the east to Europe was soon in the hands of Italian traders, especially the Genoese and the Venetians, who profited immensely from it. The Republic of Pisa and later

485-508: A faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill . The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on

582-773: A fringe border region between the Roman Empire and the Persians. When Augustus founded the Roman Empire , the Mediterranean Sea began to be called Mare Nostrum ( Latin : "Our Sea") by the Romans. Their empire was centered on this sea and all the area was full of commerce and naval development. For the first time in history, an entire sea (the Mediterranean) was free of piracy. For several centuries,

679-575: A halt. However, the Norsemen developed the trade from Norway to the White Sea , while also trading in luxury goods from Spain and the Mediterranean. The Byzantines in the mid-8th century retook control of the area around the north-eastern part of the Mediterranean. Venetian ships from the 9th century armed themselves to counter the harassment by Arabs while concentrating trade of oriental goods at Venice. The powerful and long-lived Bulgarian Empire

776-590: A lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and

873-400: A limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in the nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by

970-584: A long history of cavalry warfare . The hetairoi ( Companion cavalry ) was considered the strongest of their time. Under Alexander the Great , this force turned east, and in a series of decisive battles, it routed the Persian forces and took over as the dominant empire of the Mediterranean. Their Macedonia empire included present-day Greece, Bulgaria, Egypt, the Phoenician lands and many other basin regions of

1067-459: A mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and a fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes ,

SECTION 10

#1732798142901

1164-638: A peripheral area to the main Muslim centers in the Middle East, but Al Andalus and Morocco soon broke from this distant control and became highly advanced societies in their own right. Between 831 and 1071, the Emirate of Sicily was one of the major centres of Islamic culture in the Mediterranean. After its conquest by the Christian Normans , the island developed its own distinct culture with

1261-579: A resistance, and the Muslim conquerors swept through those regions. At the far west, they crossed the sea taking Visigothic Hispania before being halted in southern France by the Franks . At its greatest extent, the Arab Empire controlled three-quarters of the Mediterranean coast, and fostered an economic interrelationship between the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean . Much of North Africa became

1358-429: A separate community. It was elevated to municipality status in 1946. The city now boasts a population of 100,000. Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized :  Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized :  Hellēnikḗ ) is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It

1455-539: A slave was a constant fear for peasants, fishermen and merchants. Those with money or who had financial backing only feared the lack of support, should they be threatened with abduction for ransom. There were several things which could happen to people in the Mediterranean region of the Middle Ages: Emperors would take large numbers of prisoners, parade them through the capital, hold feasts in honour of their capture and parade diplomats in front of them as

1552-404: A source of extreme wealth to the western powers, from which some of the Mediterranean states were largely cut off. The base of European power thus shifted northward and the once wealthy Italy became a peripheral area dominated by foreigners. The Ottoman Empire also began a slow decline that saw its North African possessions gain de facto independence and its European holdings gradually reduced by

1649-460: A state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki , the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in the early 19th century that

1746-428: A well known shopping center with many fashion shops and boutiques. People who live there are usually middle class families or the working class. Korydallos metro station of line 3 situated in the city. Also served by busses (OSY). Korydallos was founded in ancient times, and was one of the 100 municipalities of ancient Athens' democratic system at the end of the 6th century BC. Theophilos Corydalleus (1563–1646)

1843-683: Is 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 . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek

1940-1155: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern History of the Mediterranean region Lézignan-la-Cèbe in France, Orce in Spain, Monte Poggiolo in Italy and Kozarnika in Bulgaria are amongst

2037-763: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek . In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , 'whatever') from ότι ( óti , 'that'). Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,

SECTION 20

#1732798142901

2134-632: Is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near the Greek-Albanian border. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in

2231-734: The outremer region. Genoa, Venice and Pisa created colonies in regions controlled by the Crusaders and came to control the trade with the Orient. These colonies also allowed them to trade with the Eastern world. Though the fall of the Crusader states and attempts at banning of trade relations with Muslim states by the Popes temporarily disrupted the trade with the Orient, it however continued. The Zirid state in eastern Maghreb developed around

2328-678: The 8th millennium BC , of proto-urban centers such as Çatalhöyük . Urban civilizations proper begin to emerge in the Chalcolithic , in 5th-to-4th-millennium Egypt and in Mesopotamia . The Black Sea area is a cradle of the European civilization. The site of Solnitsata (5500 BC - 4200 BC) is believed to be the oldest town in Europe - prehistoric fortified ( walled ) stone settlement (prehistoric city ). The first gold artifacts in

2425-545: The Achaemenid Persian Empire . Persian dominance ended after the Greco-Persian War in the 5th century BC and Persia was crippled by Macedonia in the 4th century BC. The Odrysian Kingdom existed between the 5th century BC and the 1st century AD as the most important and powerful thracian state formation. From the 6th century BC up to including the first half of the 4th century BC, many of

2522-605: The Balkans and soon also began to spread through North Africa. North Africa had grown wealthy from the trade across the Sahara Desert , but the Portuguese , who, along with other Christian powers, had been engaged in a long campaign to evict the Muslims from Iberia, had found a method to circumvent this trade by trading directly with West Africa . This was enabled by a new type of ships, the caravel , that made trade in

2619-698: The Beylik of Tunis . Following the British capture of Gibraltar (1713), Malta (1814) and Cyprus (1878), the British Empire occupied Egypt as a result of the 1882 Anglo-Egyptian War . The Suez Canal was opened during this period, with far-reaching consequences for trade between Asia, East Africa and Europe. The Mediterranean countries were preferred because of the shorter route, and port cities such as Trieste with their direct, fast access to Central and Northern Europe were booming. Italy conquered Libya from

2716-562: The British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of the membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . 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 an official minority language in

2813-633: The Crown of Castile , the Crown of Aragón , the Kingdom of Portugal and the Republic of Genoa , it was characterized by changing alliances between the main actors. The iberian cities of Tarifa , Ceuta , Algeciras or Ronda and the African port of Ceuta were at stake. The Western Mediterranean sea was dominated by the Crown of Aragon : thanks to their possessions of Sicily , the Kingdom of Naples ,

2910-456: The Cypriots and Egyptians. Full Persian dominance in the Mediterranean ended after the Greco-Persian War in the 5th century BC, and Persia eventually lost all her influence in the Mediterranean in the late 4th century BC following Alexander's conquests. In the northernmost part of ancient Greece, in the ancient kingdom of Macedonia , technological and organizational skills were forged with

3007-624: The Egyptian Empire in Syria and Israel , the scission of long-distance trade contacts and sudden eclipse of literacy occurred between 1206 and 1150 BC. In the first phase of this period, almost every city between Troy and Gaza was violently destroyed, and often left unoccupied thereafter (for example, Hattusas , Mycenae , Ugarit ). The gradual end of the Dark Age that ensued saw the rise of settled Neo-Hittite Aramaean kingdoms of

Korydallos - Misplaced Pages Continue

3104-657: The European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute the objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek

3201-616: The High Middle Ages . The 12th century also saw increasing naval and trading progress on the part of Christian powers in the northern shores of the Mediterranean (including Genoa, Pisa, and Aragon ), seemingly offering a challenge to the balance of power in the Western Mediterranean. Slavery was a strategic and very important part of all Mediterranean societies during the Middle Ages. The threat of becoming

3298-630: The Holy Land . The Crusades were unsuccessful in this goal, but they were far more effective in weakening the already tottering Byzantine Empire that began to lose increasing amounts of territory to the Seljuk Turks and later to the Ottoman Turks . They also rearranged the balance of power in the Muslim world as Egypt once again emerged as a major power in the eastern Mediterranean. The Crusades led to flourishing of trade between Europe and

3395-516: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. 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. Linear B , attested as early as

3492-652: The Kingdom of Sardinia , the Balearic Islands , the Duchy of Athens the Duchy of Neopatria , and several northern African cities. In 1347 the Black Death spread from Constantinople across the mediterranean basin. Ottoman power continued to grow, and in 1453, the Byzantine Empire was extinguished with the fall of Constantinople . The Ottomans already controlled Greece, Bulgaria and much of

3589-662: The Republic of Ragusa used diplomacy to further trade and maintained a libertarian approach in civil matters to further sentiment in its inhabitants. The Republic of Venice got to dominate the eastern mediterranean shores after the Fourth Crusade . Between 1275 and 1344 a struggle for the control of the Strait of Gibraltar took place. Featuring the Marinid Sultanate , the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada ,

3686-586: The Roman–Persian Wars . In a series of rapid Muslim conquests , the Arab armies , motivated by Islam and led by the Caliphs and skilled military commanders such as Khalid ibn al-Walid , swept through most of the Middle East; reducing Byzantine lands by more than half and completely engulfing the Persian lands . The Arab invasions disrupted the trade relations between Western and Eastern Europe while cutting

3783-568: The Third Punic War , Rome then became the leading force in the Mediterranean region. The Romans soon spread east, taking Greece , and spreading Latin knowledge and ideas throughout the place. By this point the coastal trading cultures were thoroughly dominant over the inland river valleys that had once been the heart of the great powers. Egyptian power moved from the Nile cities to the coastal ones, especially Alexandria . Mesopotamia became

3880-472: The United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout the Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to

3977-468: The genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in the ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in

Korydallos - Misplaced Pages Continue

4074-409: The logographic system in the Far East (and later the abugida systems of India). Two of the most notable Mediterranean civilizations in classical antiquity were the Greek city-states and the Phoenicians whose cities were also city-states. The Greeks spread to the shores of the Black Sea , Southern Italy (the so-called " Magna Graecia ") Gaul and Asia Minor . The Phoenicians spread through

4171-417: The syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow the noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However,

4268-566: The 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian , South Slavic ( Macedonian / Bulgarian ) and Eastern Romance languages ( Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian ). Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics , physics , astronomy , democracy , philosophy , athletics , theatre, rhetoric , baptism , evangelist , etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as

4365-416: The Genoese had traded with Alexandria . The caliph al-Mustansir had allowed Amalfian merchants to reside in Jerusalem about 1060 in place of the Latin hospice . More organized and centralized states gradually began to form in Europe during the later Middle Ages . Motivated by religion and dreams of conquest, the kings of Europe launched a number of Crusades to try to roll back Muslim power and retake

4462-410: The Great (Darius I) is to be credited as the first Achaemenid king to invest in a Persian fleet. Even by then no true "imperial navy" had existed either in Greece or Egypt. Persia would become the first empire, under Darius, to inaugurate and deploy the first regular imperial navy. Both the Phoenicians and the Greeks provided the bulk of the naval forces of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, alongside

4559-486: The Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet , with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit

4656-442: The Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. 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. Greek has been written in

4753-410: The Late Bronze Age culture of the Near East to Iron Age Greece and Italy , but also further afield to Northwestern Africa and to Iberia , initiating the beginning of Mediterranean history now known as Classical Antiquity . They notably spread alphabetic writing , which would become the hallmark of the Mediterranean civilizations of the Iron Age, in contrast to the cuneiform writing of Assyria and

4850-423: The Levant during its wars with neighbouring Sassanid Persia . The rule through the 6th century AD saw climatic instability, causing inconsistent production, distribution, and a general economic decline. The Sasanians gained territory on Mediterranean land regularly, but the Eastern Romans remained superior in the Mediterranean sea for centuries. In the first quarter of the 7th century CE, the Sasanians took swaths of

4947-406: The Mediterranean and Asia Minor. The major centres of the Mediterranean at the time became part of Alexander's empire as a result. His empire quickly disintegrated, and the Middle East, Egypt, and Greece were soon again independent. Alexander's conquests spread Greek knowledge and ideas throughout the region. These eastern powers soon began to be overshadowed by those farther west. In North Africa,

SECTION 50

#1732798142901

5044-426: The Mediterranean into pro-American and pro-Soviet factions, with Turkey, Greece, Spain, Italy and France being NATO members. Syria was socialist and a pro-Soviet regime, offering the Soviets a port for their navy from an agreement in 1971. Yugoslavia was Communist but in neither the Soviet nor American camps. Egypt tilted towards the Soviets during the time of Nasser but then turned towards American influence during

5141-455: The Mediterranean region from the Eastern Romans during the Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628 , though the Sasanians lost territories by the end of the war. Ultimately, Byzantine domination in the region was forever finished by invasions of the Arabs and later the Turks. Another power was rising in the east, that of Islam , whilst the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanid Persian empires were both weakened by centuries of stalemate warfare during

5238-488: The Mediterranean was a "Roman Lake", surrounded on all sides by the empire. The empire began to crumble in the 3rd century. It recovered briefly only to begin its decline again. By 435 AD it has lost southern France and all of Iberia to the Visigoths, and much of North Africa to the Vandal, thus ending it's monopoly over the Mediterranean coast. Despite this, the Roman Empire did not collapse until May 29, 1453, AD. The Eastern Roman or Byzantine empire began its domination of

5335-422: The Ottoman Empire had succeeded in their objective of extending Muslim rule across the North African coast. The development of long-range seafaring had an influence upon the entire Mediterranean. While once all trade from the east had passed through the region, the circumnavigation of Africa allowed gold , spices , and dyes to be imported directly to the Atlantic ports of western Europe. The Americas were also

5432-505: The Ottoman expansion instead of ending it. The prized island of Cyprus became Ottoman in 1571. The last resistance in Tunisia ended in 1574 and almost a generation long siege in Crete pushed Venetians out of this strategic island in 1669. A balance of power was then established between the Spanish Crown and the Ottoman Empire until the 18th century, each dominating their respective half of Mediterranean, reducing Italian navies as naval powers increasingly more irrelevant. Furthermore,

5529-402: The Ottomans in 1911. Greece achieved independence in 1832 . The Ottoman Empire finally collapsed in the First World War , and its holdings were carved up among France and Britain. The rump state of the wider Ottoman Empire became the independent state of Turkey in 1923. Yugoslavia was created from the former Austro-Hungarian empire at the end of the First World War. During the first half of

5626-427: The World that Phoenicia was an early example of a "world-economy" surrounded by empires. The high point of Phoenician culture and sea power is usually placed ca. 1200–800 BC. Many of the most important Phoenician settlements had been established long before this: Byblos , Tyre , Sidon , Simyra , Arwad , and Berytus , all appear in the Amarna tablets . The Phoenicians and the Assyrians transported elements of

5723-404: The acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography . After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system),

5820-423: The arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek toponyms . The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian , and Turkish . During the older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from

5917-427: The catalyst that ended the Bronze Age a "catastrophe". The Bronze Age collapse may be seen in the context of a technological history that saw the slow, comparatively continuous spread of iron-working technology in the region, beginning with precocious iron-working in what is now Romania in the 13th and 12th centuries. The cultural collapse of the Mycenaean kingdoms , the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and Syria , and

SECTION 60

#1732798142901

6014-412: The city states in the Levant ( Canaan ). The Minoans are trading throughout much of the Mediterranean. The Bronze Age collapse is the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age , expressed by the collapse of palace economies of the Aegean and Anatolia , which were replaced after a hiatus by the isolated village cultures of the ancient Near East. Some have gone so far as to call

6111-495: The country. Prior to the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine ,

6208-441: The dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before

6305-528: The earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of the Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: Many aspects of

6402-457: The earliest from the Levant. The Bronze Age arises in this region during the final centuries of the 4th millennium BC. The urban civilizations of the Fertile Crescent now have writing systems and develop bureaucracy , by the mid-3rd millennium leading to the development of the earliest empires . In the 2nd millennium, the eastern coastlines of the Mediterranean are dominated by the Hittite and Egyptian empires, competing for control over

6499-476: The export of these commodities to the Islamic world. The Ottomans too forbade the export of weapons and other strategic items, declaring them memnu eşya or memnu olan to Christian states even in peace treaties, however friendly states could import some of the prohibited goods through capitulations . Despite these prohibitions, trade of contraband occurred on both sides. The European merchants traded in illegal goods with Muslims. The Ottomans were unable to suppress

6596-412: The extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than a foreign language. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, " Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English

6693-427: The former Phoenician colony of Carthage rose to dominate its surroundings with an empire that contained many of the former Phoenician holdings. However, it was a city on the Italian Peninsula , Rome , that would eventually dominate the entire Mediterranean basin. Spreading first through Italy, Rome defeated Carthage in the Punic Wars , despite Hannibal 's famous efforts against Rome in the Second Punic War . After

6790-411: The fusion of Latin and Byzantine influences. Palermo remained a leading artistic and commercial centre of the Mediterranean well into the Middle Ages. The Fatimids maintained trade relations with the Italian city-states like Amalfi and Genoa before the Crusades, according to the Cairo Geniza documents. A document dated 996 mentions Amalfian merchants living in Cairo . Another letter states that

6887-499: The great metropolis of Kairouan collapsed in mid 12th century, with a henceforth fragmented Ifriqiya becoming a ground for competing external powers from then on. The high Middle Ages also saw the successive rise of two Berber powers, the Almoravids and the Almohads , in the Western Maghreb, fostering the developments of cities such as Marrakech and Fez upon their control over Trans-Saharan trade . Cities in southern Iberia such as Almería (under Almoravid rule) also thrived in

6984-449: The language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to the modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it. Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows

7081-467: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A , has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek , is the earliest known form of Greek. Another similar system used to write

7178-452: The many other countries of the Greek diaspora . 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 the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around the 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is

7275-794: The mid-10th century BC, and the rise of the Neo-Assyrian Empire . While the cultural advances during the Bronze Age had mostly been confined to the eastern parts of the Mediterranean, with the Iron Age, the entire coastal region surrounding the Mediterranean now becomes involved, significantly due to the Phoenician expansion from the Levant, beginning in ca. the 12th century. Fernand Braudel remarked in The Perspective of

7372-465: 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 . Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks the infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of

7469-614: The oldest Paleolithic sites in Europe and are located around the Mediterranean Basin . There is evidence of stone tools on Crete in 130,000 years BC, which indicates that early humans were capable of using boats to reach the island. The cultural stage of civilization (organised society structured around urban centers) first arises in Southwest Asia, as an extension of the Neolithic trend, from as early as

7566-591: The regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. 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 recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . The phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary of

7663-655: The rough Atlantic waters profitable for the first time. The reduction in the Saharan trade weakened North Africa and made them an easy target for the Ottomans. Ceuta was ultimately taken by the Kingdom of Portugal in 1415, searching to undermine Castilian, Aragonese, and Genoese interests in the area. During the Middle Ages, rival Christian and Muslim kingdoms forbade the trade of particular goods to enemy kingdoms including weaponry and other contraband items. The popes forbade

7760-478: The significant Mediterranean peoples came under Achaemenid Persian rule, making them dominate the Mediterranean during all these years. The empire, founded by Cyrus the Great , would include Macedonia , Thrace and the western Black Sea coast (modern day southeastern and eastern Bulgaria ), Egypt, Anatolia , the Phoenician lands, the Levant , and many other basin regions of the Mediterranean later on. Darius

7857-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis , used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of

7954-712: The territorial gains of Austria and the Russian Empire. In the wake of the aftermath of the 1768–1774 Russo-Turkish War , the Russian empire gained direct access to the Black Sea. By the nineteenth century the European States were vastly more powerful, and began to colonize North Africa. France spread its power south by starting their conquest of the Regency of Algiers in 1830 and later gaining control over

8051-656: The time of Sadat . Israel and Egypt both received massive American military aid. American naval power made the Mediterranean a base for the United States Sixth Fleet during the Cold war. Today, the Mediterranean Sea is the southern border of the European Union and represents one of the largest area by Trade in the World. The Maltese prime minister described the Mediterranean sea as a "cemetery" due to

8148-532: The trade route with Oriental lands. This however had the indirect effect of promoting the trade across the Caspian Sea . The export of grains from Egypt was re-routed towards the Eastern world . Oriental goods like silk and spices were carried from Egypt to ports like Venice and Constantinople by sailors and Jewish merchants. The Viking raids further disrupted the trade in western Europe and brought it to

8245-670: The trade with smuggling being undertaken mainly in the winter when the Ottoman Navy stationed at the Istanbul Arsenal was unable to stop Ottoman and non-Ottoman vessels from indulging in the trade. The growing naval prowess of the European powers confronted further rapid Ottoman expansion in the region when the Battle of Lepanto checked the power of the Ottoman navy. However, as Braudel argued forcefully, this only slowed

8342-605: The twentieth century the Mediterranean was at the center of the expansion of the Kingdom of Italy , and was one of the main areas of battle during World War II between the Axis and the Allies . Post-world war period was marked by increasing activity in the Eastern Mediterranean, where naval actions formed part of ongoing Arab–Israeli conflict and Turkey had occupied the northern part of Cyprus . Cold War tensions split

8439-646: The western Mediterranean reaching North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula then beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. From the 6th century BC up to including the 5th century BC, many of the significant Mediterranean peoples were under Persian rule, making them dominate the Mediterranean during these years. Both the Phoenicians and some of the Greek city states in Asia Minor provided the naval forces of

8536-645: The world appear from the 5th millennium BC, such as those found in a burial site from 4569 to 4340 BC and one of the most important archaeological sites in world prehistory – the Varna Necropolis near Lake Varna in Bulgaria , thought to be the earliest "well-dated" find of gold artifacts. As of 1990, gold artifacts found at the Wadi Qana cave cemetery of the 4th millennium BC in the West Bank were

8633-574: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses , with some being exclusive between them. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or

8730-527: Was a philosopher who lived in Corydallos. 200 years later, Korydallos was known as Koutsoukari after the property owner of the greater area, Emmanouil Koutsikaris. After that it was renamed into Pachy after the next owner (Pachinas). In 1923, the town was renamed back into its ancient name, Korydallos. The population in 1928 was 2,500. Korydallos was part of the municipality of Athens until 1931 and from 1931 to 1934 of municipality of Piraeus, when it became

8827-557: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe

8924-556: Was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world . It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and

9021-539: Was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with the epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in

9118-638: Was the main European rival in the region of the Mediterranean Balkan peninsula between the 7th and the 14th centuries, creating an important cultural , political , linguistic and religious legacy during the Middle Ages . In Anatolia , the Muslim expansion was blocked by the still capable Byzantines with the help of the Tervel of Bulgaria . The Byzantine provinces of Roman Syria , North Africa , and Sicily, however, could not mount such

9215-580: Was under the control of the Frankish Empire ). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios . Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect

9312-637: Was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of the Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to

9409-621: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado , some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet . The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage

#900099