Introduction

The ancient Greeks were speakers of the Greek language, who first emerged as a distinct civilization in the region of the Greek peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age (before 1000 b. c.e.). They eventually came to occupy Europe and Asia from France in the west to Egypt in the south to India in the east.

The Greek language is an Indo-European language, meaning it is related to languages such as Irish, German, Latin, French, Russian, ancient Hittite, and the dialects of Iran and India. All these languages derive from one postulated original language called *Proto-Indo-European (the * means that the language has never been encountered but is a theoretical reconstruction). The relationships among these languages were discovered by the Grimm brothers, the same men who collected German fairy tales. They noted that several languages used very similar words to express the same concept, leading them to conclude that these languages evolved from a common ancestor. For example, the word for father in Latin is pater, in Greek pater, in Vedic (India) pitar, in Irish athair (the p has dropped off), in German Vater, and in English, of course, father. The Greeks were descendants of this large linguistic family, and the Greeks themselves are therefore related to many other inhabitants of ancient and modern Europe, Persia, and India.

The first evidence we have of Greek as a language is its presence in the Linear B tablets from the Greek mainland and the island of Crete (see chapter 3). So we know that the Greeks existed as a Greek-speaking (or, at least, Greek-writing) population from at least 1450 b. c.e. on the Greek mainland, although they almost certainly arrived in the area several hundreds of years before this (see chapter 4).

One very important civilization these early Greeks encountered in their settlement of Greece were the Minoans, a non-Greek, probably non-Indo-European-speaking population that lived on the island of Crete. Even though these Minoans were not Greeks, they greatly influenced the development of early Greek culture, and they must be considered in any early history of Greece.