希腊人

Greeks or Hellenes (; Greek: Έλληνες, Éllines [ˈelines]) are an ethnic group indigenous to what is now Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, parts of Egypt and Syria, southern Italy, southern Albania, and to a lesser extent, other countries surrounding the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea. They form a nation within Greece and Cyprus and a significant diaspora (omogenia) around the world.

Greek communities have been historically established on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea, but the Greek people themselves have always been concentrated on the Aegean Sea and the Ionian Sea, where the Greek language has been spoken since the Bronze Age. Until the early 20th century, Greeks were distributed between the Greek peninsula, the western coast of Anatolia as well as Cappadocia, the Black Sea coast, Egypt, the Balkans, Cyprus, and Constantinople. Many of these regions coincided to a large extent with the borders of the Byzantine Empire of the late 11th century and the Eastern Mediterranean areas of ancient Greek colonization. The cultural centres of the Greeks have included Athens, Thessalonica, Alexandria, Smyrna, and Constantinople at various periods.

In more recent history, most ethnic Greeks have lived within the borders of the modern Greek state or in Cyprus, as the Greek genocide and subsequent Greek–Turkish population exchange nearly ended the three-millennia-old Greek presence across Asia Minor. Other longstanding Greek populations can be found from southern Italy to the Caucasus, southern Russia and Ukraine, and in the Greek diaspora communities in a number of other countries, especially in the Western world. Today, most religious Greeks are Christians officially registered with the Greek Orthodox Church. The Westernness of Greeks, often affirmed in Western culture, has long been debated among Greeks themselves.

The Greek people have greatly influenced and contributed to culture, visual arts, exploration, theatre, literature, philosophy, ethics, politics, architecture, music, mathematics, medicine, science, technology, commerce, cuisine, and sports. The Greek language, which constitutes an independent branch within the Indo-European language family, is the oldest recorded living language, and its vocabulary has been the basis of many languages (including English) and the international scientific nomenclature. As early as the 4th century BC, the Greek language spread to become the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world for over a millennium, earning effective co-official status in the Roman Empire and also being the language in which the New Testament of the Christian Bible was originally written.

History

The Greeks speak the Greek language, which forms its own unique branch within the Indo-European family of languages, the Hellenic. They are part of a group of classical ethnicities. Anthony D. Smith described them as an "archetypal diaspora people".

Origins

The Proto-Greeks probably arrived in the area now called Greece, in the southern tip of the Balkan Peninsula, sometime during the European Bronze Age (c. 3rd millennium BC). The sequence of migrations into the Greek mainland has to be reconstructed on the basis of the ancient Greek dialects, as they presented themselves centuries later and are therefore subject to some uncertainties. There were at least two migrations, the first being the Ionians and Achaeans, which resulted in Mycenaean Greece by the 16th century BC, and the second, the Dorian invasion, around the 11th century BC, displacing the Arcadocypriot dialects, which descended from the Mycenaean period.

Mycenaean Greece

In c. 1600 BC, the Mycenaean Greeks borrowed from the Minoan civilization its syllabic writing system (Linear A) and developed their own syllabic script known as Linear B, providing the first and oldest written evidence of Greek. The Mycenaeans quickly penetrated the Aegean Sea and, by the 15th century BC, had reached Rhodes, Crete, Cyprus and the shores of Asia Minor.

Around 1200 BC, the Dorians, another Greek-speaking people, followed from Epirus. Older historical research often proposed Dorian invasion caused the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization, but this narrative has been abandoned in all contemporary research.……

节选，摘自英文维基百科「Greeks」，按 CC BY-SA 4.0 使用。