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76-644: The name Ethiopia itself is Greek and means "of burned face". It is first attested in the Homeric epics but it is unlikely to have referred to any particular nation, but rather, to people of African descent in general. Beginning in the Hellenistic age around the third century BC, Greek culture permeated the regions of ancient Ethiopia. Greeks established colonies in Ethiopia, with Ptolemais Theron and Axum becoming major capitals of Ethiopian Greek culture. In

152-473: A Greek Orthodox church in the same city (St. Froumendios). The school has about 120 students, many of whom receive scholarships to continue their studies in Greece. However there is an increasing initiative by Greeks to take advantage of the investment opportunities currently available in Ethiopia. Aethiopia Ancient Aethiopia , ( Greek : Αἰθιοπία , romanized :  Aithiopía ) first appears as

228-577: 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,

304-669: A dark age, in which Ethiopian Greek culture disappeared; the Axumite Empire finally collapsed around 960 AD. Despite its position as one of the foremost empires of late antiquity, Axum fell into obscurity as Ethiopia remained isolated throughout the Middle Ages. Later Abyssinian Greeks were attested in the 1700s, largely descending from Greek craftsmen and sailors residing in Abyssinia, who facilitated commerce between Abyssinia and Europe. The explorer James Bruce reported that

380-558: 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 , 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

456-560: 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

532-487: 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 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

608-635: A geographical term in classical documents in reference to skin color of inhabitants in upper Nile of northern Sudan , areas south of the Sahara , and certain areas in Asia. Its earliest mention is in the works of Homer : twice in the Iliad , and three times in the Odyssey . The Greek historian Herodotus uses the appellation to refer to regions south of Egypt when describing "Aethiopians," indicating Nubia , not

684-620: A language compounded of the tongues of both countries". Herodotus also refers to "the Aethiopians of Asia" (or "Ethiopians of the East"), who are said to be straight-haired, whereas the Aethiopians from Libya (Africa) have "the woolliest hair of all men". Herodotus wrote with regard to the inhabitants of Libya: "One thing I can add about this far country [Libya]: so far as one knows, it is inhabited by four races, and four only, of which two are indigenous and two not. The indigenous peoples are

760-723: A marketplace the Ethiopians and Egyptians would trade and barter products. It was seen that "those who live at the border of the two countries are not quite black, but of the same color as each other, since they are less black than the Ethiopians, but more so than the Egyptians." Several personalities in Greek and medieval literature were identified as Aethiopian, including several rulers, male and female: Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized :  Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized :  Hellēnikḗ )

836-521: A number of Greek refugees from Smyrna had also arrived in Gondar during the reign of Emperor Iyasu II . The Smyrniot refugees included twelve silversmiths, whom the emperor put to work producing a variety of items for both his court and the churches of Gondar. Abyssinian Greeks held many of the highest positions in the Abyssinian Empire ; the principal Abyssinian Greek community stayed with

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912-435: Is all of the inhabited land found to the south of Egypt, beginning at Elephantine. He describes a capital at Meroë , adding that the only deities worshipped there were Zeus ( Amun ) and Dionysus ( Osiris ). He relates that in the reign of Pharaoh Psamtik I ( c.  650 BCE ), many Egyptian soldiers deserted their country and settled amidst the Aethiopians. Herodotus also remarked on shared cultural practices between

988-804: 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 , the United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout

1064-773: Is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It 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

1140-479: Is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before 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

1216-458: Is now known as the Maghreb and the desert to the south. Homer ( c.  8th century BC ) is the first to mention "Aethiopians" ( Αἰθίοπες , Αἰθιοπῆες ), writing that they are to be found at the east and west extremities of the world, divided by the sea into "eastern" (at the sunrise) and "western" (at the sunset). In Book 1 of the Iliad , Thetis visits Olympus to meet Zeus , but

1292-519: 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 the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to

1368-526: Is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and 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

1444-763: 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,

1520-650: 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 . 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

1596-540: The Abyssinian Emperor in the capital, Gondar. Emperor Theodore II specifically made known that he favored the Abyssinian Greeks, because of their virility and integrity of character. Greek diaspora Constantinople and Asia Minor : Africa : Other regions : Other groups : Other languages The Ethiopian Greek community saw its heyday in the early part of the 20th century with

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1672-495: 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 a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It

1748-516: 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

1824-595: The Indus River , Indian Ocean , and Red Sea , circumnavigating the Arabian Peninsula . He mentioned "Aethiopians", though his writings on them have not survived. Hecataeus of Miletus ( c.  500 BC ) is also said to have written a book about 'Aethiopia,' but his writing is now known only through quotations from later authors. He stated that 'Aethiopia' was located to the east of the Nile , as far as

1900-543: The Indus Valley and that there were no people in the region by that name prior to their arrival. Physiognomonics , a Greek treatise traditionally attributed to Aristotle , but now of disputed ownership made an observation on the physical nature of the Egyptians and Ethiopians with the view that "Those who are too black are cowards, like for the instance, the Egyptians and Ethopians" The Greek travelogue from

1976-492: 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 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

2052-433: The "second Ethiopia" because of its 'black-skinned' population. Stephanus of Byzantium , from the 6th-century AD, had written that "Ethiopia was the first established country on earth; and the Ethiopians were the first to set up the worship of the gods and to establish laws." Manilius, a Roman poet wrote in his Astronomicon "The Ethiopians stain the world and depict a race of men steeped in darkness; less sun-burnt are

2128-579: The 1st-century AD that "The appearance of the inhabitants is also not very different in India and Ethiopia: the southern Indians are rather more like Ethiopians as they are black to look on, and their hair is black; only they are not so snub-nosed or woolly-haired as the Ethiopians; the northern Indians are most like the Egyptians physically". Also the Roman Christian historian and theologian Saint Jerome along with Sophronius referred to Colchis as

2204-638: The 1st-century AD, known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea , initially describes the littoral , based on its author's intimate knowledge of the area. However, the Periplus does not mention any dark-skinned "Ethiopians" among the area's inhabitants. They only later appear in Ptolemy 's Geographia in a region far south, around the " Bantu nucleus" of northern Mozambique . Arrian , wrote in

2280-470: The 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is 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

2356-399: The Aethiopians "who dwelt in that part of Libya (Africa) which borders upon the southern sea." They found a strong and healthy people. Although Cambyses then campaigned toward their country, by not preparing enough provisions for the long march, his army completely failed and returned quickly. In Book 3, Herodotus defines "Aethiopia" as the farthest region of "Libya" (i.e. Africa): Where

Ethiopian Greeks - Misplaced Pages Continue

2432-632: The Egyptians and Ethiopians: For it is plain to see that Colchians are Egyptians; and this that I say I myself noted before I heard it from others. When I began to think on this matter, I inquired of both peoples; and the Colchians remembered the Egyptians better than the Egyptians remembered the Colchians; the Egyptians said that they held the Colchians to be part of Sesostris' army. I myself guessed it to be so, partly because they are dark-skinned and woolly-haired; though that indeed goes for nothing, seeing that other peoples, too, are such; but my better proof

2508-618: The Egyptians, in order that we may omit nothing in our discussion of their antiquities". Achilles Tatius described the complexion of the Egyptian herdsmen near Alexandria as "dark-coloured (yet not absolutely black like an Indian but more like a bastard Ethiopian)". With regard to the Ethiopians, Strabo indicates that they looked similar to Indians , remarking "those who are in Asia (South India), and those who are in Africa, do not differ from each other." Pliny in turn asserts that

2584-894: The French Academy of Science. The Very Rev. L.S. Babte Mariam Workeneh was the Secretary General and Nicolas Geoprgkas, President of the Greek Community in Addis Ababa was the Treasurer. H.I.H. Merid Asfa Wossen Crown Prince of Ethiopia was the Patron and H.B. Archbishop Theophilos of Harar and Acting Patriarch of Ethiopia was the Chairman. To promote the scholarly works concerning Ethiopia and Greece and their historical and ecclesiastical heritage and achievements

2660-486: 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

2736-425: 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 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

2812-495: 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

2888-629: 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 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

2964-685: 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 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

3040-573: The Greeks since the time of Homer . The term was applied to such peoples within the range of observation of the ancient geographers , primarily in what was then Nubia (in ancient Sudan ). With the expansion of geographical knowledge, the exonym successively extended to certain other areas below the Sahara. In classical antiquity, the term Africa did not refer to any part of sub-Saharan Africa, but in its widest sense to instead to Ancient Libya —what

3116-613: The Libyans and Ethiopians, the former occupying the northerly, the latter the more southerly parts; the immigrants are the Phoenicians and Greeks." The Egyptian priest Manetho ( c.  300 BC ) listed Kushite (25th) dynasty, calling it the "Aethiopian dynasty," and Esarhaddon the early 7th century BC ruler of the Neo-Assyrian Empire describes deporting all "Aethiopians" from Egypt upon conquering Egypt from

Ethiopian Greeks - Misplaced Pages Continue

3192-666: The Nubian Kushite Empire which formed the 25th Dynasty. Moreover, when the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek (c. 200 BC), the Hebrew appellation "Kush, Kushite" became in Greek "Aethiopia, Aethiopians", appearing as "Ethiopia, Ethiopians" in the English King James Version . Agatharchides provides a relatively detailed description of the gold mining system of Aethiopia. His text

3268-574: The Red Sea and Indian Ocean. He is also quoted as relating a myth in which the Skiapods ('Shade feet'), whose feet were supposedly large enough to serve as shade, lived there. In his Histories ( c.  440 BC ), Herodotus presents some of the most ancient and detailed information about "Aethiopia". He relates that he personally traveled up the Nile to the border of Egypt as far as Elephantine (modern Aswan ). In his view, "Aethiopia"

3344-524: The Year Book ABBA SLAMA was published from 1970 to 1976. In the post-war period the community grew to 3,000 persons. It suffered during the revolution that overthrew Haile Selassie in 1974, when the hostility of the Derg towards all foreign communities drastically reduced its size to the current population of about 500. Today there is still a Greek school located in the capital as well as

3420-404: 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),

3496-402: The ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in 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

3572-518: The city of Axum , many obelisks, statues, and architecture made in Egyptian Greek style still mark the landscape. As the Islamic conquest of North Africa severed Axum's link with the Greek world in the seventh century, Greek culture and knowledge waned; Muslim presence in the Red Sea also caused Axum to suffer economically and it declined in power. Axum's final three centuries are considered

3648-404: The early 19th century that 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

3724-618: The epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in 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

3800-722: The establishment of the Holy Metropolis of Axum by the Patriarchate of Alexandria in 1908 and of the Greek organizations in Addis Ababa (1918) and Dire Dawa (1921). In 1969, an Association of Ethio Hellenic Studies was formed. The Founder President of the Association was Greek Metropolitan Methodios Fouyas of Aksum and the Vice presidents were Rev. Fr. Dr. V.C. Samuel, Dean of the Faculty of Theology and Dr. P. Petrides of

3876-452: The following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered 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

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3952-439: The infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of 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

4028-467: 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

4104-466: The lord of oracles, but deceivers, to the end that men whose thought passes their utterance might be subject to the gods and suffer harm -- Aethiopians and Libyans and mare-milking Scythians. For verily Epaphus was the child of the almighty Son of Cronos, and from him sprang the dark Libyans, and high-souled Aethiopians, and the Underground-folk and feeble Pygmies. All these are the offspring of

4180-649: The lord, the Loud-thunderer. The Assyrian king Esarhaddon when conquering Egypt and destroying the Kushite Empire states how he "deported all 'Aethiopians' from Egypt, leaving not one to pay homage to me". He was talking about the Nubian 25th Dynasty rather than people from modern Ethiopia. In 515 BC, Scylax of Caryanda , on orders from Darius I of the Achaemenid Empire , sailed along

4256-422: The meeting is postponed, as Zeus and other gods are absent, visiting the land of the Aethiopians. And in Book 1 of the Odyssey, Athena convinces Zeus to let Odysseus finally return home only because Poseidon is away in Aithiopia and unable to object. Hesiod ( c.  8th century BC ) speaks of Memnon as the "King of the Aethiopians." In The Catalogues of Women , he stated that the Egyptian king Epaphus

4332-458: 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 the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek

4408-447: The modern nation of Ethiopia . The Greek name Aithiopia ( Αἰθιοπία , from Αἰθίοψ , Aithíops ) is a compound derived of two Greek words: αἴθω , aíthō , 'I burn' + ὤψ , ṓps , 'face'. According to the Perseus Project , this designation properly translates in noun form as burnt-face and in adjectival form as red-brown . As such, it was used as a vague term for darker skinned populations than

4484-441: 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 a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and

4560-424: The natives of India; the land of Egypt, flooded by the Nile, darkens bodies more mildly owing to the inundation of its fields: it is a country nearer to us and its moderate climate imparts a medium tone." Philostratus (c. 170 – c. 245 AD) had written in his journeys and life of Apollonios of Tyana , he had at one point arrived at "the crossing point between Ethiopia and Egypt, which is called Kaminos", where at

4636-399: The noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However, 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

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4712-408: The objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek 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

4788-706: The older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from 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

4864-408: The place-name "Aethiopia" was derived from one "Aethiop, a son of Vulcan " (the Greek god Hephaestus ). He also writes that the "Queen of the Ethiopians" bore the title Kandake , and avers (incorrectly) that the Ethiopians had conquered ancient Syria and the Mediterranean . Following Strabo, the Greco-Roman historian Eusebius claims that the Ethiopians had emigrated into the Red Sea area from

4940-461: The second century BC, Ptolemy III Euergetes annexed several northern Ethiopian cities such as Tigray and the port of Adulis , which became major trading hubs for Ethiopian Greeks. After the Romans annexed the Ptolemaic Empire, the Axumite king Zoskales ( Ancient Greek : Ζωσκάλης ) established the Axumite Empire ( Ancient Greek : Ἀξωμίτης ) (c. 100 AD–c. 960 AD), which maintained Ethiopian Greek culture and used Greek as its lingua franca . In

5016-409: The south declines towards the setting sun lies the country called Aethiopia, the last inhabited land in that direction. There gold is obtained in great plenty, huge elephants abound, with wild trees of all sorts, and ebony ; and the men are taller, handsomer, and longer lived than anywhere else. Herodotus also wrote that the Ammonians of Siwa Oasis are "colonists from Egypt and Aethiopia and speak

5092-437: 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

5168-515: 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

5244-423: 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 the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of

5320-442: 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

5396-427: Was brought into Egypt by Osiris". He recounted this story that attributes the origins of Egyptian civilization to migrants from the south, which in this context corresponds to the Kingdom of Kush . Diodorus Siculus also discussed the similar cultural practices between the Ethiopians and Egyptians such as the writing systems as he states "We must now speak about the Ethiopian writing which is called hieroglyphic among

5472-439: Was copied almost verbatim by virtually all subsequent ancient writers on the area, including Diodorus Siculus and Photius . Diodorus Siculus in his work Bibliotheca Historica , reported that the Ethiopians claimed that Egypt was an early colony, and that the Ethiopians also cited evidence that they were more ancient than the Egyptians as he wrote: "The Ethiopians say that the Egyptians are one of their colonies which

5548-418: Was that the Colchians and Egyptians and Ethiopians are the only nations that have from the first practised circumcision”. Herodotus further states that that out of "three hundred and thirty kings" of Egypt, there had been 18 Ethiopian kings, one native Egyptian queen, and the rest had been Egyptian men. Herodotus tells us that king Cambyses II ( c.  570 BC ) of the Achaemenid Empire sent spies to

5624-516: Was the progenitor of the Aethiopians and other dark-skinned tribes of Libya . He wrote: The Sons of Boreas pursued the Harpies to the lands of the Massagetae and of the proud Half-Dog men, of the Underground-folk and of the feeble Pygmies; and to the tribes of the boundless Black-skins and the Libyans. Huge Earth bare these to Epaphus -- soothsaying people, knowing seercraft by the will of Zeus

5700-580: 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

5776-673: 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

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