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136-509: Black Athena has been heavily criticised and rejected by academics. They often highlight the fact that there is no archaeological or historical evidence for ancient Egyptian colonization of mainland Greece or the Aegean Islands . Academic reviews of Bernal's work overwhelmingly reject his heavy reliance on ancient Greek mythology , speculative assertions, and handling of archaeological, linguistic, and historical data. Bernal rejects

272-577: 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

408-565: A social science and a branch of the humanities . It is usually considered an independent academic discipline , but may also be classified as part of anthropology (in North America – the four-field approach ), history or geography . Archaeologists study human prehistory and history, from the development of the first stone tools at Lomekwi in East Africa 3.3 million years ago up until recent decades. Archaeology

544-420: A 2017 study from Harvard University led by leading population geneticist Iosif Lazaridis, the full genomes of 19 Bronze Age individuals, including Minoans from Crete and Mycenaeans from mainland Greece were extracted and analysed. With regards to Bernal's claims, the authors concluded that: Proposed migrations, such as settlement by Egyptian or Phoenician colonists, are not discernible in [the] data as there

680-464: A basic level of analysis, artifacts found are cleaned, catalogued and compared to published collections. This comparison process often involves classifying them typologically and identifying other sites with similar artifact assemblages. However, a much more comprehensive range of analytical techniques are available through archaeological science , meaning that artifacts can be dated and their compositions examined. Bones, plants, and pollen collected from

816-577: 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,

952-563: A big impact throughout Europe. However, prior to the development of modern techniques, excavations tended to be haphazard; the importance of concepts such as stratification and context were overlooked. In the mid-18th century, the German Johann Joachim Winckelmann lived in Rome and devoted himself to the study of Roman antiquities, gradually acquiring an unrivalled knowledge of ancient art. Then, he visited

1088-401: A clear objective as to what the archaeologists are looking to achieve must be agreed upon. This done, a site is surveyed to find out as much as possible about it and the surrounding area. Second, an excavation may take place to uncover any archaeological features buried under the ground. And, third, the information collected during the excavation is studied and evaluated in an attempt to achieve

1224-519: A collection of essays edited by Mary Lefkowitz and her colleague Guy MacLean Rogers. Critics voice their strongest doubts over Bernal's approach to language and word derivations (etymologies). Cambridge Egyptologist John D. Ray has accused Bernal's work of having a confirmation bias . Edith Hall compares Bernal's thesis to the myth of the Olympian gods overwhelming the Titans and Giants , which

1360-508: 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

1496-451: A field survey. Regional survey is the attempt to systematically locate previously unknown sites in a region. Site survey is the attempt to systematically locate features of interest, such as houses and middens , within a site. Each of these two goals may be accomplished with largely the same methods. Survey was not widely practised in the early days of archaeology. Cultural historians and prior researchers were usually content with discovering

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1632-484: A lack of public interest, and opposition to the excavation of human remains. In Ancient Mesopotamia , a foundation deposit of the Akkadian Empire ruler Naram-Sin (ruled c.  2200 BC ) was discovered and analysed by king Nabonidus , c.  550 BC , who is thus known as the first archaeologist. Not only did he lead the first excavations which were to find the foundation deposits of

1768-528: A large region or site can be expensive, so archaeologists often employ sampling methods.) As with other forms of non-destructive archaeology, survey avoids ethical issues (of particular concern to descendant peoples) associated with destroying a site through excavation. It is the only way to gather some forms of information, such as settlement patterns and settlement structure. Survey data are commonly assembled into maps , which may show surface features and/or artifact distribution. The simplest survey technique

1904-590: 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

2040-400: 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

2176-442: A margin of approximately seven to three. It might be inferred that this ratio testifies to the inherent implausibility of Bernal's hypotheses. After all, an ideologically disparate collection of academicians concur that Bernal's theories are simply untenable. Yet the existence of this scholarly consensus must be qualified by one telling fact. What is significant — note this — is that the majority of Bernal's defendants have emanated from

2312-459: 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 ,

2448-407: A peasant in a Cretan field in the second millennium BC. Just because they come across things from a very different society does not mean they pack up and start building the extraordinary edifices archaeologists have called Minoan palaces. [...] What did the articles mean to the peasant? Were they considered as being from another ‘society’ at all? Perhaps the boundaries which we apply to the geography of

2584-527: A response to criticism of his earlier works. After the publication of this volume, according to scholar A.K Jayesh, "Bernal’s critics had realized the futility of their enterprise and given up: neither the response, nor the final instalment of Black Athena – aimed to furnish linguistic evidence for the claim that close to forty percent of the Greek vocabulary with no known Indo=European cognates has its roots, in fact, in Afroasiatic languages – elicited much of

2720-518: A response". The Egyptologist John Baines has, while rejecting his overall thesis, praised Bernal for the fact that he studied ancient Greece in a wider cultural and geographical context, which Baines asserts classicists tend not to do. Thomas McEvilley concluded in 2002 that while Bernal's "analysis of earlier periods of anti-Semitic attitude in regard to ancient Near Eastern culture may remain valuable, his attempt ... to derive Greek philosophy from Africa seems so glaringly unsupported by evidence that it

2856-445: A site can all be analyzed using the methods of zooarchaeology , paleoethnobotany , palynology and stable isotopes while any texts can usually be deciphered . 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

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2992-504: A site excavated depends greatly on the country and "method statement" issued. Sampling is even more important in excavation than in survey. Sometimes large mechanical equipment, such as backhoes ( JCBs ), is used in excavation, especially to remove the topsoil ( overburden ), though this method is increasingly used with great caution. Following this rather dramatic step, the exposed area is usually hand-cleaned with trowels or hoes to ensure that all features are apparent. The next task

3128-414: A site reveals its stratigraphy; if a site was occupied by a succession of distinct cultures, artifacts from more recent cultures will lie above those from more ancient cultures. Excavation is the most expensive phase of archaeological research, in relative terms. Also, as a destructive process, it carries ethical concerns. As a result, very few sites are excavated in their entirety. Again the percentage of

3264-408: A sole source. The material record may be closer to a fair representation of society, though it is subject to its own biases, such as sampling bias and differential preservation. Often, archaeology provides the only means to learn of the existence and behaviors of people of the past. Across the millennia many thousands of cultures and societies and billions of people have come and gone of which there

3400-460: 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

3536-527: A stone wall, will develop more slowly, while those above other types of features (such as middens ) may develop more rapidly. Photographs of ripening grain , which changes colour rapidly at maturation, have revealed buried structures with great precision. Aerial photographs taken at different times of day will help show the outlines of structures by changes in shadows. Aerial survey also employs ultraviolet , infrared , ground-penetrating radar wavelengths, Lidar and thermography . Geophysical survey can be

3672-487: A systematic guide to the ruins and topography of ancient Rome in the early 15th century, for which he has been called an early founder of archaeology. Antiquarians of the 16th century, including John Leland and William Camden , conducted surveys of the English countryside, drawing, describing and interpreting the monuments that they encountered. The OED first cites "archaeologist" from 1824; this soon took over as

3808-495: A wide range of influences, including systems theory , neo-evolutionary thought , [35] phenomenology , postmodernism , agency theory , cognitive science , structural functionalism , Marxism , gender-based and feminist archaeology , queer theory , postcolonial thoughts , materiality , and posthumanism . An archaeological investigation usually involves several distinct phases, each of which employs its own variety of methods. Before any practical work can begin, however,

3944-606: Is distinct from palaeontology , which is the study of fossil remains. Archaeology is particularly important for learning about prehistoric societies, for which, by definition, there are no written records. Prehistory includes over 99% of the human past, from the Paleolithic until the advent of literacy in societies around the world. Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time. Derived from Greek,

4080-454: Is likely to pass without leaving a trace." Classicist and linguist Jean-Fabrice Nardelli, in one of the very few reviews of Black Athena's third volume, writes that Bernal's "faith in his ability to pinpoint sound shifts in (P)IE matching, or stemming from, Afroasiatic and in the rightness of multilateral lexical comparisons à la Greenberg over the standard comparative method , looks misplaced; for he has not checked his facts and stands at

4216-451: Is little or no written record or existing records are misrepresentative or incomplete. Writing as it is known today did not exist in human civilization until the 4th millennium BC, in a relatively small number of technologically advanced civilizations. In contrast, Homo sapiens has existed for at least 200,000 years, and other species of Homo for millions of years (see Human evolution ). These civilizations are, not coincidentally,

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4352-881: Is no archaeological evidence that would clearly indicate a colonization which Bernal suggests. He himself says: “Here again, it should be made clear that, as with archaeological evidence, there are no smoking guns. There are no contemporary documents of the type 'X the Egyptian/Phoenician arrived at this place in Greece and established a city/kingdom (t)here', explicitly confirming the Ancient Model. Nor, for that matter, are there others denying it”. Bernal also dedicates Black Athena to V. Gordon Childe and his book does fall into Childe's outdated paradigm of culture-historical archaeology . Michael Shanks criticized this outdated approach to archaeology stating: Imagine

4488-507: Is no measurable Levantine or African influence in the Minoans and Mycenaeans, thus rejecting the hypothesis that the cultures of the Aegean were seeded by migrants from the old civilisations of these regions. Nevertheless, since 2010, other scholars have argued for the ongoing relevance of Bernal's work, even while disagreeing with many of its specifics. In African Athena: New Agendas (2011),

4624-426: Is no one approach to archaeological theory that has been adhered to by all archaeologists. When archaeology developed in the late 19th century, the first approach to archaeological theory to be practised was that of cultural-historical archaeology , which held the goal of explaining why cultures changed and adapted rather than just highlighting the fact that they did, therefore emphasizing historical particularism . In

4760-443: Is reflected or emitted from the observed scene. Passive instruments sense only radiation emitted by the object being viewed or reflected by the object from a source other than the instrument. Active instruments emit energy and record what is reflected. Satellite imagery is an example of passive remote sensing. Here are two active remote sensing instruments: The archaeological project then continues (or alternatively, begins) with

4896-708: 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,

5032-428: Is surface survey. It involves combing an area, usually on foot but sometimes with the use of mechanized transport, to search for features or artifacts visible on the surface. Surface survey cannot detect sites or features that are completely buried under earth, or overgrown with vegetation. Surface survey may also include mini-excavation techniques such as augers , corers, and shovel test pits. If no materials are found,

5168-596: Is through archaeology. Because archaeology is the study of past human activity, it stretches back to about 2.5 million years ago when the first stone tools are found – The Oldowan Industry . Many important developments in human history occurred during prehistory, such as the evolution of humanity during the Paleolithic period, when the hominins developed from the australopithecines in Africa and eventually into modern Homo sapiens . Archaeology also sheds light on many of humanity's technological advances, for instance

5304-579: 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

5440-431: Is to form a site plan and then use it to help decide the method of excavation. Features dug into the natural subsoil are normally excavated in portions to produce a visible archaeological section for recording. A feature, for example a pit or a ditch, consists of two parts: the cut and the fill . The cut describes the edge of the feature, where the feature meets the natural soil. It is the feature's boundary. The fill

5576-420: Is what the feature is filled with, and will often appear quite distinct from the natural soil. The cut and fill are given consecutive numbers for recording purposes. Scaled plans and sections of individual features are all drawn on site, black and white and colour photographs of them are taken, and recording sheets are filled in describing the context of each. All this information serves as a permanent record of

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5712-562: 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

5848-758: The Church of Rome with the Greek Testament . Greek was seen as a sacred Christian tongue which Protestants could plausibly claim was more Christian than Latin . Many French students of Ancient Greece in the 17th century were brought up as Huguenots . The study of Ancient Greece especially in Protestant countries created an alliance between Greece and Protestant Christianity which tended to exclude other influences. The idea of progress . The antiquity of Egypt and Mesopotamia had previously made those civilizations particularly worthy of respect and admiration, but

5984-657: 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

6120-516: 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

6256-780: 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

6392-468: 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

6528-417: 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,

6664-580: The trench method , on several Native American burial mounds in Virginia . His excavations were prompted by the "Moundbuilders" question ; however, his careful methods led him to admit he saw no reason why ancestors of the Native Americans of his time could not have raised those mounds. One of the major achievements of 19th-century archaeology was the development of stratigraphy . The idea of overlapping strata tracing back to successive periods

6800-559: The 1870s. These scholars individuated nine different cities that had overlapped with one another, from prehistory to the Hellenistic period . Meanwhile, the work of Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos in Crete revealed the ancient existence of an equally advanced Minoan civilization . The next major figure in the development of archaeology was Sir Mortimer Wheeler , whose highly disciplined approach to excavation and systematic coverage in

6936-642: The 1920s and 1930s brought the science on swiftly. Wheeler developed the grid system of excavation , which was further improved by his student Kathleen Kenyon . Archaeology became a professional activity in the first half of the 20th century, and it became possible to study archaeology as a subject in universities and even schools. By the end of the 20th century nearly all professional archaeologists, at least in developed countries, were graduates. Further adaptation and innovation in archaeology continued in this period, when maritime archaeology and urban archaeology became more prevalent and rescue archaeology

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7072-566: 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

7208-697: The Dark Age—not because they are racists, but because all the evidence is against it… Bernal’s denunciations, delivered with a uniformly spiteful tone, give his work the same moral and scholarly status as the Aryan science of the Third Reich or the Lysenkoite genetics of Stalinist Russia; that is, none whatever. In 2001, Bernal published Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to Critics as

7344-788: The Great was very interested in Egypt; Plutarch himself wrote a work On Isis and Osiris , part of the Moralia , which is a major source on Egypt. Admiration for Egypt was widespread in the Hellenistic and Roman civilizations, especially in the Neoplatonic school. Hermeticism was based on writings attributed to Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus , the so-called Hermetica or Hermetic corpus . These pro-Egyptian currents influenced Christianity , Judaism and Islam , as well as Renaissance figures such as Copernicus , Ficino and Giordano Bruno . It

7480-544: 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

7616-549: 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

7752-593: 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 is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek

7888-505: The Song period, were revived in the 17th century during the Qing dynasty , but were always considered a branch of Chinese historiography rather than a separate discipline of archaeology. In Renaissance Europe , philosophical interest in the remains of Greco - Roman civilization and the rediscovery of classical culture began in the late Middle Ages , with humanism . Cyriacus of Ancona

8024-676: The Spanish military engineer Roque Joaquín de Alcubierre in the ancient towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum , both of which had been covered by ash during the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 . These excavations began in 1748 in Pompeii, while in Herculaneum they began in 1738. The discovery of entire towns, complete with utensils and even human shapes, as well the unearthing of frescos , had

8160-767: The UK, metal detectorists have been solicited for involvement in the Portable Antiquities Scheme . Regional survey in underwater archaeology uses geophysical or remote sensing devices such as marine magnetometer, side-scan sonar , or sub-bottom sonar. Archaeological excavation existed even when the field was still the domain of amateurs, and it remains the source of the majority of data recovered in most field projects. It can reveal several types of information usually not accessible to survey, such as stratigraphy , three-dimensional structure, and verifiably primary context. Modern excavation techniques require that

8296-426: The ability to use fire, the development of stone tools , the discovery of metallurgy , the beginnings of religion and the creation of agriculture . Without archaeology, little or nothing would be known about the use of material culture by humanity that pre-dates writing. However, it is not only prehistoric, pre-literate cultures that can be studied using archaeology but historic, literate cultures as well, through

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8432-619: The academic community. While some reviewers contend that studies of the origin of Greek civilization were tainted by a foundation of 19th century racism, many have criticized Bernal for what they perceive to be the speculative nature of his hypothesis, unsystematic and linguistically incompetent handling of etymologies and a naive handling of ancient myth and historiography. The claims made in Black Athena were heavily questioned inter alia in Black Athena Revisited (1996),

8568-404: 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),

8704-408: The archaeological excavations being conducted at Pompeii and Herculaneum . He was one of the founders of scientific archaeology and first applied the categories of style on a large, systematic basis to the history of art He was one of the first to separate Greek art into periods and time classifications. Winckelmann has been called both "The prophet and founding hero of modern archaeology " and

8840-434: The area surveyed is deemed sterile . Aerial survey is conducted using cameras attached to airplanes , balloons , UAVs , or even Kites . A bird's-eye view is useful for quick mapping of large or complex sites. Aerial photographs are used to document the status of the archaeological dig. Aerial imaging can also detect many things not visible from the surface. Plants growing above a buried human-made structure, such as

8976-664: The arrival in Argos from Egypt of the Danaids , daughters of Danaus . Cadmus was believed to have introduced the Asiatic Phoenician alphabet to Greece. Herodotus also mentions Eastern influences. Thucydides did not, which Bernal explains with his nationalistic wish to set up a sharp distinction between Greeks and barbarians . Plutarch attacked Herodotus' view that the Greeks had learned from barbarians. Yet Alexander

9112-479: 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

9248-560: The artifacts they had found in chronological order. A major figure in the development of archaeology into a rigorous science was army officer and ethnologist Augustus Pitt Rivers , who began excavations on his land in England in the 1880s. Highly methodical by the standards of the time, he is widely regarded as the first scientific archaeologist. He arranged his artifacts by type or " Typology (archaeology) ", and within types chronologically. This style of arrangement, designed to highlight

9384-563: The best-known; they are open to the inquiry of historians for centuries, while the study of pre-historic cultures has arisen only recently. Within a literate civilization many events and important human practices may not be officially recorded. Any knowledge of the early years of human civilization – the development of agriculture, cult practices of folk religion, the rise of the first cities – must come from archaeology. In addition to their scientific importance, archaeological remains sometimes have political or cultural significance to descendants of

9520-539: The concept of the Greek Miracle, and would be reclaimed as whites and Europeans. Romanticism . Romantics saw humans as essentially divided in national or ethnic groups. The German philosopher Herder encouraged Germans to be proud of their origins, their language and their national characteristics or national genius . Romantics longed for small, virtuous and "pure" communities in remote and cold places: Switzerland, North Germany and Scotland. When considering

9656-564: The contributors argue that some of the issues that Bernal's books raise have been neglected until relatively recently. These researchers have begun to examine Bernal's trilogy through a more constructive lens, and that it still holds some importance. Archaeology Archaeology or archeology is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture . The archaeological record consists of artifacts , architecture , biofacts or ecofacts, sites , and cultural landscapes . Archaeology can be considered both

9792-796: 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 ,

9928-547: The culture is assumed to have developed from a comparable amalgamation of elements. However, Bernal attempts to emphasize North African elements in Ancient Near Eastern culture and denounces the alleged Eurocentrism of 19th and 20th century research, including the very slogan "Ex Oriente Lux" of Orientalists which, according to Bernal, betrays "the Western appropriation of ancient Near Eastern culture for

10064-441: 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

10200-528: 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

10336-473: The early 20th century, many archaeologists who studied past societies with direct continuing links to existing ones (such as those of Native Americans , Siberians , Mesoamericans etc.) followed the direct historical approach , compared the continuity between the past and contemporary ethnic and cultural groups. In the 1960s, an archaeological movement largely led by American archaeologists like Lewis Binford and Kent Flannery arose that rebelled against

10472-459: The eastern Mediterranean are not sensible for understanding the second millennium BC when there was a widespread cultural mix joining Aegean, Levant and Egypt in a social system which included all three as essential components. In her review "The Use and Abuse of Black Athena" Professor of Classics Molly Myerowitz Levine states that: Volume 1 of Black Athena is an extraordinarily interesting and dangerous book: interesting in its sweeping sociology of

10608-469: The emergence of the idea of progress portrayed later civilizations as more advanced and therefore better. Earlier cultures came to be seen as based on superstition and dogmatism. Racism . The Atlantic slave trade and later European colonialism required the intellectual justification of racism. It became paramount to divorce Africans and Africa from high civilisation, and Egypt from Africa itself. Ancient Greeks would be divorced from Ancient Egypt through

10744-643: The empirical evidence that existed for the understanding of the past, encapsulated in the motto of the 18th century antiquary, Sir Richard Colt Hoare : "We speak from facts, not theory". Tentative steps towards the systematization of archaeology as a science took place during the Enlightenment period in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. In Imperial China during the Song dynasty (960–1279), figures such as Ouyang Xiu and Zhao Mingcheng established

10880-399: The end of his introduction to Black Athena wrote that, “the political purpose of Black Athena is, of course, to lessen European cultural arrogance”. According to historian David Gress : The truth is that the classicists had no problem whatsoever with Linear B, nor with Egyptian influence on Mycenae. What they could not and cannot accept, however, is continuity of Afroasiatic influences across

11016-644: The established cultural-history archaeology. They proposed a "New Archaeology", which would be more "scientific" and "anthropological", with hypothesis testing and the scientific method very important parts of what became known as processual archaeology . In the 1980s, a new postmodern movement arose led by the British archaeologists Michael Shanks , Christopher Tilley , Daniel Miller , and Ian Hodder , which has become known as post-processual archaeology . It questioned processualism's appeals to scientific positivism and impartiality, and emphasized

11152-463: The evidence he presented. An observation of this nature raises the issues of authority, credentials and evidence – all aspects of the scholarly enterprise that Bernal seeks to ignore, minimize or reject. According to Christina Riggs , Black Athena was embraced by Afrocentrists and postcolonial studies even as archaeology, Egyptology and classical scholarship rejected much of Bernal's evidence and, implicitly or explicitly, his central thesis. There

11288-581: The evolutionary trends in human artifacts, was of enormous significance for the accurate dating of the objects. His most important methodological innovation was his insistence that all artifacts, not just beautiful or unique ones, be collected and catalogued. William Flinders Petrie is another man who may legitimately be called the Father of Archaeology. His painstaking recording and study of artifacts, both in Egypt and later in Palestine , laid down many of

11424-412: 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

11560-474: The fact that Bernal speaks of a unified Ancient Greek people and speaks of "Hellenic nationalism" and "national pride" in the 5th century BC which does not have any historical backing as the Greeks were not unified until the Hellenistic period and the tensions between different poleis was sometimes so great that it escalated into wars like the Peloponnesian War . The book also ignited a debate in

11696-538: The father of the discipline of art history . The father of archaeological excavation was William Cunnington (1754–1810). He undertook excavations in Wiltshire from around 1798, funded by Sir Richard Colt Hoare. Cunnington made meticulous recordings of Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows , and the terms he used to categorize and describe them are still used by archaeologists today. Future U.S. President Thomas Jefferson also did his own excavations in 1784 using

11832-765: The fifteenth century, and the general accuracy of his records entitles him to be called the founding father of modern classical archeology." He traveled throughout Greece and all around the Eastern Mediterranean, to record his findings on ancient buildings, statues and inscriptions, including archaeological remains still unknown to his time: the Parthenon , Delphi , the Egyptian pyramids , the hieroglyphics . He noted down his archaeological discoveries in his diary, Commentaria (in six volumes). Flavio Biondo , an Italian Renaissance humanist historian, created

11968-528: The first history books of India. One of the first sites to undergo archaeological excavation was Stonehenge and other megalithic monuments in England. John Aubrey (1626–1697) was a pioneer archaeologist who recorded numerous megalithic and other field monuments in southern England. He was also ahead of his time in the analysis of his findings. He attempted to chart the chronological stylistic evolution of handwriting, medieval architecture, costume, and shield-shapes. Excavations were also carried out by

12104-570: The hero-author, the indefatigable neophyte detective, rereads the files and reworks the clues to uncover the truth that had long been covered up by a contemptibly corrupt and lazy police department (contemporary classicists). Paul Oskar Kristeller , writing in the Journal of the History of Ideas , states that Bernal’s work is full of gross errors and that it has not received the criticism it deserves due to political reasons. Scholars also criticized

12240-478: The historiography of early Greece from the fifth century B.C.E. to the present; dangerous, because in reopening the nineteenth-century discourse on race and origins, the work, sadly, inevitably, has become part of the problem of racism rather than the solution that its author envisioned... every element of the enormously complex plot meshed perfectly to create a story with good guys (Herodotus, Egyptians, Semites) and bad guys (Aryans, racist German philologists); in which

12376-475: The ideas behind modern archaeological recording; he remarked that "I believe the true line of research lies in the noting and comparison of the smallest details." Petrie developed the system of dating layers based on pottery and ceramic findings , which revolutionized the chronological basis of Egyptology . Petrie was the first to scientifically investigate the Great Pyramid in Egypt during the 1880s. He

12512-472: The importance of a more self-critical theoretical reflexivity . However, this approach has been criticized by processualists as lacking scientific rigor, and the validity of both processualism and post-processualism is still under debate. Meanwhile, another theory, known as historical processualism , has emerged seeking to incorporate a focus on process and post-processual archaeology's emphasis of reflexivity and history. Archaeological theory now borrows from

12648-813: The influence from the Ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians to the Ancient Greeks, and a tradition of acknowledgement of those links from Antiquity to the Enlightenment. Bernal uses linguistic evidence to support his claim of a link between Ancient Greece and earlier Egyptian and Phoenician civilizations. The Classical Greek language arose from the Proto-Greek language with influences from the Anatolian languages such as Hittite , Luwian , Hurrian and Hattian that were spoken nearby, and

12784-449: 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

12920-467: 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

13056-444: The lives and interests of the populace. Writings that were produced by people more representative of the general population were unlikely to find their way into libraries and be preserved there for posterity. Thus, written records tend to reflect the biases, assumptions, cultural values and possibly deceptions of a limited range of individuals, usually a small fraction of the larger population. Hence, written records cannot be trusted as

13192-671: The locations of monumental sites from the local populace, and excavating only the plainly visible features there. Gordon Willey pioneered the technique of regional settlement pattern survey in 1949 in the Viru Valley of coastal Peru , and survey of all levels became prominent with the rise of processual archaeology some years later. Survey work has many benefits if performed as a preliminary exercise to, or even in place of, excavation. It requires relatively little time and expense, because it does not require processing large volumes of soil to search out artifacts. (Nevertheless, surveying

13328-452: 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

13464-495: The mercy of sources notorious for their quirks and errors. He notes that Bernal suffers from "proneness to blunders [which] further compromises his construct". Nardelli concludes that Bernal "applies no method but ad hoc reasoning based on contingency " and that "[t]he book is full of red herrings that betray its quality". A number of archaeogenetic studies in the modern era have since refuted Bernal's hypotheses of an Egyptian or Phoenician colonisation of Greece. For instance,

13600-465: 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

13736-724: The most effective way to see beneath the ground. Magnetometers detect minute deviations in the Earth's magnetic field caused by iron artifacts, kilns , some types of stone structures , and even ditches and middens. Devices that measure the electrical resistivity of the soil are also widely used. Archaeological features whose electrical resistivity contrasts with that of surrounding soils can be detected and mapped. Some archaeological features (such as those composed of stone or brick) have higher resistivity than typical soils, while others (such as organic deposits or unfired clay) tend to have lower resistivity. Although some archaeologists consider

13872-443: The now-destroyed archaeology and is used in describing and interpreting the site. Once artifacts and structures have been excavated, or collected from surface surveys, it is necessary to properly study them. This process is known as post-excavation analysis , and is usually the most time-consuming part of an archaeological investigation. It is not uncommon for final excavation reports for major sites to take years to be published. At

14008-529: The original research objectives of the archaeologists. It is then considered good practice for the information to be published so that it is available to other archaeologists and historians, although this is sometimes neglected. Before actually starting to dig in a location, remote sensing can be used to look where sites are located within a large area or provide more information about sites or regions. There are two types of remote sensing instruments—passive and active. Passive instruments detect natural energy that

14144-510: The past, their natural choice was Greece. The Philhellenic movement led to new archaeological discoveries as well as contributed to the Greek War of Independence from the Ottoman empire . Most Philhellenes were Romantics and Protestants. The original response to Bernal by Near Eastern scholars, historians, classicists, biological anthropologists, linguists, egyptologists and archaeologists

14280-413: The past. Since its early development, various specific sub-disciplines of archaeology have developed, including maritime archaeology , feminist archaeology , and archaeoastronomy , and numerous different scientific techniques have been developed to aid archaeological investigation. Nonetheless, today, archaeologists face many problems, such as dealing with pseudoarchaeology , the looting of artifacts,

14416-698: The people who produced them, monetary value to collectors, or strong aesthetic appeal. Many people identify archaeology with the recovery of such aesthetic, religious, political, or economic treasures rather than with the reconstruction of past societies. This view is often espoused in works of popular fiction, such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Mummy, and King Solomon's Mines. When unrealistic subjects are treated more seriously, accusations of pseudoscience are invariably levelled at their proponents (see Pseudoarchaeology ) . However, these endeavours, real and fictional, are not representative of modern archaeology. There

14552-550: The precise locations of objects and features, known as their provenance or provenience, be recorded. This always involves determining their horizontal locations, and sometimes vertical position as well (also see Primary Laws of Archaeology ). Likewise, their association , or relationship with nearby objects and features , needs to be recorded for later analysis. This allows the archaeologist to deduce which artifacts and features were likely used together and which may be from different phases of activity. For example, excavation of

14688-586: The radical tier of the academic world. Ronald H. Fritze expands on Berlinerbau's statement, writing that: Actually, what seems even more significant, if one continues to believe in the existence of scholarly expertise and authority, is that most of Bernal's positive reviews were written by people who are not scholars of the classics, Egyptology, ancient Near Eastern history studies, archaeology or European intellectual history. As radicals they found Bernal's arguments to be politically congenial and they were not equipped or particularly interested in critically evaluating

14824-643: 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

14960-406: The sake of its own development." Bernal proposes instead that Greek evolved from the contact between an Indo-European language and culturally influential Egyptian and West Asian Semitic languages . He believes that many Greek words have Egyptian or Semitic roots. Bernal places the introduction of the Greek alphabet (unattested before 750 BC) between 1800 and 1400 BC, and the poet Hesiod in

15096-437: 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

15232-475: The sub-discipline of historical archaeology . For many literate cultures, such as Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia , their surviving records are often incomplete and biased to some extent. In many societies, literacy was restricted to the elite classes, such as the clergy , or the bureaucracy of court or temple. The literacy of aristocrats has sometimes been restricted to deeds and contracts. The interests and world-view of elites are often quite different from

15368-519: The temples of Šamaš the sun god, the warrior goddess Anunitu (both located in Sippar ), and the sanctuary that Naram-Sin built to the moon god, located in Harran , but he also had them restored to their former glory. He was also the first to date an archaeological artifact in his attempt to date Naram-Sin's temple during his search for it. Even though his estimate was inaccurate by about 1,500 years, it

15504-585: The tenth century. The first volume of Black Athena describes in detail Bernal's views on how the Ancient model acknowledging Egyptian and Phoenician influences on Greece came under attack during the 18th and 19th centuries. Bernal concentrates on four interrelated forces: the Christian reaction, the idea of progress , racism and Romantic Hellenism. The Christian reaction . Already Martin Luther had fought

15640-476: The term archaeology means "the study of ancient history". The discipline involves surveying , excavation , and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Archaeology developed out of antiquarianism in Europe during the 19th century, and has since become a discipline practiced around the world. Archaeology has been used by nation-states to create particular visions of

15776-555: The theory that Greek civilization was founded by Indo-European settlers from Central Europe. This theory, which Bernal calls the Aryan model , came to be generally accepted during the 19th century. Bernal defends instead what he calls the Ancient model ; the name refers to the fact that Egyptian and Phoenician (as well as Mesopotamian and Anatolian ) influences on the Greek world were widely accepted in antiquity. Bernal discusses Aeschylus 's play, The Suppliants , which describes

15912-503: The third millennium and second millennium BC. Furthermore, there is no evidence for Egyptian colonies of any sort in the Aegean world. Weinstein accuses Bernal of relying primarily on his interpretations of Greek myths as well as distorted interpretations of the archaeological and historical data. Bernal has also been accused of pursuing political motives and enlisting Bronze Age Greece in an academic war against Western civilisation. Bernal in fact made no secret of his political motives and at

16048-559: The tradition of Chinese epigraphy by investigating, preserving, and analyzing ancient Chinese bronze inscriptions from the Shang and Zhou periods. In his book published in 1088, Shen Kuo criticized contemporary Chinese scholars for attributing ancient bronze vessels as creations of famous sages rather than artisan commoners, and for attempting to revive them for ritual use without discerning their original functionality and purpose of manufacture. Such antiquarian pursuits waned after

16184-576: The use of metal detectors to be tantamount to treasure hunting, others deem them an effective tool in archaeological surveying. Examples of formal archaeological use of metal detectors include musketball distribution analysis on English Civil War battlefields, metal distribution analysis prior to excavation of a 19th-century ship wreck, and service cable location during evaluation. Metal detectorists have also contributed to archaeology where they have made detailed records of their results and refrained from raising artifacts from their archaeological context. In

16320-472: The usual term for one major branch of antiquarian activity. "Archaeology", from 1607 onward, initially meant what we would call "ancient history" generally, with the narrower modern sense first seen in 1837. However, it was Jacob Spon who, in 1685, offered one of the earliest definitions of "archaeologia" to describe the study of antiquities in which he was engaged, in the preface of a collection of transcriptions of Roman inscriptions which he had gleaned over

16456-412: The years of his travels, entitled Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis. Twelfth-century Indian scholar Kalhana 's writings involved recording of local traditions, examining manuscripts, inscriptions, coins and architectures, which is described as one of the earliest traces of archaeology. One of his notable work is called Rajatarangini which was completed in c.  1150 and is described as one of

16592-574: 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

16728-525: Was a restlessly itinerant Italian humanist and antiquarian who came from a prominent family of merchants in Ancona , a maritime republic on the Adriatic . He was called by his contemporaries pater antiquitatis ('father of antiquity') and today "father of classical archaeology": "Cyriac of Ancona was the most enterprising and prolific recorder of Greek and Roman antiquities, particularly inscriptions, in

16864-421: Was also responsible for mentoring and training a whole generation of Egyptologists, including Howard Carter who went on to achieve fame with the discovery of the tomb of 14th-century BC pharaoh Tutankhamun . The first stratigraphic excavation to reach wide popularity with public was that of Hissarlik , on the site of ancient Troy , carried out by Heinrich Schliemann , Frank Calvert and Wilhelm Dörpfeld in

17000-557: 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

17136-423: Was borrowed from the new geological and paleontological work of scholars like William Smith , James Hutton and Charles Lyell . The systematic application of stratigraphy to archaeology first took place with the excavations of prehistorical and Bronze Age sites. In the third and fourth decades of the 19th century, archaeologists like Jacques Boucher de Perthes and Christian Jürgensen Thomsen began to put

17272-556: 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

17408-523: Was demonstrated in 1614 that the Hermetic corpus was not very ancient at all and originated in late antiquity, though more recent scholarship has established that parts of it do probably have a Pharaonic origin. Casaubon's textual analysis partly discredited the Hermetic corpus, but Bernal maintained that respect for Ancient Egypt survived and contributed to the Enlightenment in the 18th century. The Freemasons are particularly relevant. Bernal traces thus

17544-421: Was developed as a result of increasing commercial development. The purpose of archaeology is to learn more about past societies and the development of the human race . Over 99% of the development of humanity has occurred within prehistoric cultures, who did not make use of writing , thereby no written records exist for study purposes. Without such written sources, the only way to understand prehistoric societies

17680-404: Was once thought of as a historical recollection of Homo sapiens taking over from Neanderthal man . She asserts that this historical approach to myth firmly belongs in the 19th century. Others have challenged the lack of archaeological evidence for Bernal's thesis. Egyptologist James Weinstein points out that there is very little evidence that the ancient Egyptians were a colonizing people in

17816-424: Was overwhelmingly negative and critical. A 2013 article noted that Bernal's trilogy "has been an object of much ridicule and a little curiosity". As of 1999, over 100 negative reviews had been published about Black Athena, as well as several books refuting its assertions. According to Jacques Berlinerblau : By my rough estimate, negative scholarly reviews of Black Athena have outweighed positive or moderate ones by

17952-430: 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

18088-464: Was still a very good one considering the lack of accurate dating technology at the time. The science of archaeology (from Greek ἀρχαιολογία , archaiologia from ἀρχαῖος , arkhaios , "ancient" and -λογία , -logia , " -logy ") grew out of the older multi-disciplinary study known as antiquarianism . Antiquarians studied history with particular attention to ancient artifacts and manuscripts, as well as historical sites. Antiquarianism focused on

18224-580: 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

18360-637: 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

18496-673: 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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