72-539: Heracleopolis Magna ( ‹See Tfd› Greek : Μεγάλη Ἡρακλέους πόλις , Megálē Herakléous pólis ), Heracleopolis ( Ἡρακλεόπολις , Herakleópolis ) or Herakleoupolis ( Ἡρακλεούπολις ) is the Roman name of the capital of the 20th nome of ancient Upper Egypt , known in Ancient Egyptian as nn nswt . The site is located approximately 15 km (9.3 mi) west of the modern city of Beni Suef , in
144-577: 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
216-577: 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,
288-678: A common Indo-European archetype ( Dyeus as the supreme sky god), and thus exhibit shared functions by nature. Others required more expansive theological and poetic efforts: though both Ares and Mars are war gods, Ares was a relatively minor figure in Greek religious practice and deprecated by the poets, while Mars was a father of the Roman people and a central figure of archaic Roman religion. Some deities dating to Rome's oldest religious stratum, such as Janus and Terminus , had no Greek equivalent. Other Greek divine figures, most notably Apollo , were adopted directly into Roman culture, but underwent
360-464: A common Indo-European origin. Lugus was identified with Mercury , Nodens with Mars as healer and protector, and Sulis with Minerva . In some cases, however, a Gallic deity is given an interpretatio romana by means of more than one god, varying among literary texts or inscriptions. Since the religions of the Greco-Roman world were not dogmatic, and polytheism lent itself to multiplicity,
432-469: A deity is his or her specific character as it unfolded in myths, hymns, rites, and so on. This character makes a deity comparable to other deities with similar traits. The similarity of gods makes their names mutually translatable. ... The practice of translating the names of the gods created a concept of similarity and produced the idea or conviction that the gods are international. Pliny the Elder expressed
504-509: A distinctive Gallo-Roman religion . Both the Romans and the Gauls reinterpreted Gallic religious traditions in relation to Roman models, particularly Imperial cult . Jan Assmann considers the polytheistic approach to internationalizing gods as a form of "intercultural translation": The great achievement of polytheism is the articulation of a common semantic universe. ... The meaning of
576-489: A distinctly Roman development, as when Augustus made Apollo one of his patron deities . In the early period, Etruscan culture played an intermediary role in transmitting Greek myth and religion to the Romans, as evidenced in the linguistic transformation of Greek Heracles to Etruscan Her[e]cle to Roman Hercules . The phrase interpretatio romana was first used by the Imperial-era historian Tacitus in
648-508: 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
720-606: A god who is truly most powerful and most good and governs this world of sense, and, as I well know, is worshipped by us also under other names". However, Julian specifies no "other names" under which the Jewish god was worshiped. In late-antiquity mysticism, the sun god Helios is sometimes equated to the Judeo-Christian God. The following table is a list of Greek , Roman , Etruscan , Egyptian , Sumerian , Phoenician , Zoroastrian , and Celtic equivalencies via
792-590: 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
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#1732766008736864-400: 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
936-459: 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 ,
1008-789: A pair of decorated eyes, presumably from a statue, all attributed to a temple dated to the Third Intermediate Period. A Spanish team also conducted excavations as recently as 2008, under the direction of María del Carmen Pérez-Die of the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid, Spain. Their efforts revealed a previously unknown tomb with several false doors dating to the First Intermediate Period, as well as funeral offerings, all of which had not been vandalized. Other finds include
1080-460: 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
1152-949: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern Interpretatio graeca Interpretatio graeca ( Latin for 'Greek translation'), or "interpretation by means of Greek [models]", refers to
1224-763: 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,
1296-632: Is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near the Greek-Albanian border. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in
1368-567: The Germania . Tacitus reports that in a sacred grove of the Nahanarvali , "a priest adorned as a woman presides, but they commemorate gods who in Roman terms (interpretatione romana) are Castor and Pollux " when identifying the divine Alcis . Elsewhere, he identifies the principal god of the Germans as Mercury , perhaps referring to Wotan . Some information about the deities of
1440-558: The Beni Suef Governorate of Egypt. In Ancient Egypt , Heracleopolis Magna was called nn nswt , meaning Child of the King (appearing as hnn nswt or hwt nn nswt ; also transcribed Henen-Nesut or Hut-Nen-Nesut ). This later developed into Coptic : Ϩⲛⲏⲥ or ϩⲛⲉⲥ ( /ǝhnes/ ), which was borrowed into early Egyptian Arabic : اهناس Ahnās . The site is now known as Ihnasiyyah Umm al-Kimam "Ihnasiyyah, Mother of
1512-562: 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
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#17327660087361584-606: 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
1656-559: The First Intermediate Period , between 2181 and 2055 BC. Eventually after the collapse of the Old Kingdom , Egypt was divided into Upper and Lower Egypt . Herakleopolis became the principal city of Lower Egypt and was able to exercise its control over much of the region. Herakleopolis exerted such great control over Lower Egypt during this time that Egyptologists and Egyptian archaeologists sometimes refer to
1728-674: The Hellenistic era , including Amon / Zeus , Osiris / Dionysus , and Ptah / Hephaestus . In his observations regarding the Scythians , he equates their queen of the gods, Tabiti , to Hestia , Papaios and Api to Zeus and Gaia respectively, and Argimpasa to Aphrodite Urania , while also claiming that the Scythians worshipped equivalents to Herakles and Ares , but which he does not name. Some pairs of Greek and Roman gods, such as Zeus and Jupiter , are thought to derive from
1800-516: 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
1872-548: The Ptolemaic Kingdom (332–30 BC), Herakleopolis was still an important religious and cultural center in Egypt. The Greek rulers of this period, in an attempt to find connections and comparisons between their own gods and the gods of the land that they were now ruling, associated Haryshef with Heracles in the interpretatio graeca , thus the name often used by modern scholars for Herakleopolis. The site of Herakleopolis
1944-780: 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
2016-468: 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
2088-497: The interpretationes . These are not necessarily gods who share similar traits (as viewed by modern scholarship or readers, at least), and rarely do they share a common origin (for that, see comparative Indo-European pantheons ); they are simply gods of various cultures whom the Greeks or Romans identified (either explicitly in surviving works, or as supported by the analyses of modern scholars) with their own gods and heroes. This system
2160-417: 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,
2232-475: The "translatability" of deities as "different names to different peoples" (nomina alia aliis gentibus). This capacity made possible the religious syncretism of the Hellenistic era and the pre-Christian Roman Empire . Herodotus was one of the earliest authors to engage in this form of interpretation. In his observations regarding the Egyptians, he establishes Greco-Egyptian equivalents that endured into
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2304-566: 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
2376-571: The Great . Other than archaeological features, the artefacts found by Petrie during his excavation are numerous, and span the entire chronological range of settlement. Relating specifically to artefacts found from the end of the First Intermediate Period and the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, Petrie uncovered numerous pot sherds he associated with the 11th Dynasty. From the later Roman periods, Petrie found numerous objects associated with many of
2448-544: 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
2520-549: 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
2592-593: 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
2664-554: The Jews worshiped Dionysus , and that the day of Sabbath was a festival of Sabazius. Lacunae prevent modern scholars from knowing the other speakers' thoughts. Tacitus , on the topic of the Sabbath , claims that "others say that it is an observance in honour of Saturn , either from the primitive elements of their faith having been transmitted from the Idæi , who are said to have shared
2736-497: The Shards" and as Ihnasiyyah al-Madinah "The City of Ihnasiyyah". The Greek name meant "City of Heracles ", with the epithet "great" being added to distinguish it from other towns with that name . The Greek form became more common during the Ptolemaic Kingdom , which came to power after the death of Alexander the Great . The Roman Empire used a Latinised form of the Greek name. Some Egyptologists and Biblical scholars connect
2808-404: 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),
2880-430: The ancient Gauls (the continental Celts ), who left no written literature other than inscriptions, is preserved by Greco-Roman sources under the names of Greek and Latin equivalents. A large number of Gaulish theonyms or cult titles are preserved, for instance, in association with Mars . As with some Greek and Roman divine counterparts, the perceived similarities between a Gallic and a Roman or Greek deity may reflect
2952-479: 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
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3024-612: The biblical city of Hanes ( Hebrew : חָנֵס Ḥānês ) mentioned in Isaiah 30:4 with Heracleopolis Magna. The date of the earliest settlements on the site of Herakleopolis is not known, but an entry on the Palermo Stone reporting king Den 's visit to the sacred lake of Heryshef at Nenj-neswt , the ancient name of the city, suggests that it was already in existence by the mid First Dynasty , c. 2970 BC. Herakleopolis first came to prominence and reached its apogee of power during
3096-570: The concept of "deity" was often expansive, permitting multiple and even contradictory functions within a single divinity, and overlapping powers and functions among the diverse figures of each pantheon. These tendencies extended to cross-cultural identifications. In the Eastern empire, the Anatolian storm god with his double-headed axe became Jupiter Dolichenus , a favorite cult figure among soldiers. Roman scholars such as Varro interpreted
3168-440: The conclusion that he had found all that Herakleopolis had to offer. His friend Sir Flinders Petrie , on the other hand, “...in 1879 suspected that the region already cleared was only a part of the temple,” and thus Herakleopolis (or Ehnasya as he called it, a name harking back to the site's period of Roman occupation) had much left to be unearthed. Petrie discovered a great deal that Naville had not believed existed. He completed
3240-796: 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 ,
3312-441: 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
3384-528: 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
3456-464: The excavation of the temple of Heryshef, and attempted to find other remains in an area around the temple. In so doing, he succeeded in discovering such previously unknown features. such as a house's remains from the Roman period of occupation. He also identified another temple that he attributed to the 19th Dynasty, as well as the aforementioned additions to the Temple of Heryshef associated with Ramesses
3528-412: 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
3600-589: The factors contributing to the frequent friction between the Jews and the Roman Empire; for example, the Emperor Hadrian 's decision to rebuild Jerusalem under the name of Aelia Capitolina , a city dedicated to Jupiter, precipitated the bloodbath of the Bar Kokhba revolt . Emperor Julian , the 4th century pagan emperor, remarked that "these Jews are in part god-fearing, seeing that they revere
3672-462: The flight of that God, and to have founded the race", implying Saturn was the god of the Jews. From the Roman point of view, it was natural to apply the above principle to the Jewish God. However, the Jews, unlike other peoples living under Roman rule, rejected any such attempt out of hand, regarding such an identification as the worst of sacrilege . This complete divergence of views was one of
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#17327660087363744-432: The funeral chapel of senior official Neferjau and his wife Sat-Bahetep, and the remains of tomb H.1 belonging to a late-11th Dynasty officier named Khety. 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
3816-449: 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
3888-467: 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
3960-452: 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
4032-424: The monotheistic god of the Jews into Roman terms as Caelus or Jupiter Optimus Maximus . Some Greco-Roman authors seem to have understood the Jewish invocation of Yahweh Sabaoth as Sabazius . In a similar vein, Plutarch gave an example of a symposium question "Who is the god of the Jews?", by which he meant: "What is his Greek name?" as we can deduce from the first speaker at the symposium, who maintained that
4104-465: 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
4176-411: The mortuary sites that he unearthed, including iron tools, pottery, and icons. While other excavations are not numerous and are naturally overshadowed by that of Flinders Petrie and his famous expedition, there have been several more recent excavations that have also increased knowledge of the site. During the 1980s, a Spanish team conducted excavations and uncovered such artefacts as a libation altar and
4248-403: The names of equivalent Greek deities. Interpretatio graeca may also describe non-Greeks' interpretation of their own belief systems by comparison or assimilation with Greek models, as when Romans adapt Greek myths and iconography under the names of their own gods. Interpretatio romana is comparative discourse in reference to ancient Roman religion and myth , as in the formation of
4320-476: The period between the 9th and 10th Dynasties (2160–2025 BC) as the Herakleopolitan Period. During this period, Herakleopolis often found itself in conflict with the de facto capital of Upper Egypt, ancient Thebes . Between the latter part of the First Intermediate Period and the early Middle Kingdom , the city became the religious center of the cult of Heryshaf , and the Temple of Heryshaf
4392-643: 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
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#17327660087364464-437: 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
4536-622: The tendency of the ancient Greeks to identify foreign deities with their own gods. It is a discourse used to interpret or attempt to understand the mythology and religion of other cultures; a comparative methodology using ancient Greek religious concepts and practices , deities , and myths , equivalencies, and shared characteristics . The phrase may describe Greek efforts to explain others' beliefs and myths, as when Herodotus describes Egyptian religion in terms of perceived Greek analogues, or when Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Plutarch document Roman cults , temples , and practices under
4608-574: 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
4680-557: 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
4752-556: 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
4824-513: Was constructed. Heracleopolis Magna and its dynasty was defeated by Mentuhotep II in c. 2055–2004 BC, which ushered in the Middle Kingdom period. By the time of the Third Intermediate Period (1069–664 BC), Herakleopolis again rose in importance. There were many renovations and new constructions of the temple and mortuary centers that existed in the city, and it again became an important religious and political center. By
4896-552: Was occupied even into Roman times . Near the Necropolis of Sedmet el-Gebel , houses dating to this period were found, which in and of itself implies a continued occupation of the area. The first person to undertake an extensive excavation at Herakleopolis was the Swiss Egyptologist Edouard Naville . After excavating what he believed to be the entirety of the Temple of Heryshef, Naville came to
4968-485: 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
5040-580: 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
5112-637: 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
5184-673: 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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