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Aegean civilization is a general term for the Bronze Age civilizations of Greece around the Aegean Sea. There are three distinct but communicating and interacting geographic regions covered by this term: Crete, the Cyclades and the Greek mainland. Crete is associated with the Minoan civilization from the Early Bronze Age. The Cycladic civilization converges with the mainland during the Early Helladic ("Minyan") period and with Crete in the Middle Minoan period. From c. 1450 BC, the Greek Mycenaean civilization spreads to Crete, probably by military conquest. The earlier Aegean farming populations of Neolithic Greece brought agriculture westward into Europe before 5000 BC.
Greek is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy, 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 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.
Mycenaean Greek is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, on the Greek mainland and Crete in Mycenaean Greece, before the hypothesised Dorian invasion, often cited as the terminus ad quem for the introduction of the Greek language to Greece. The language is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script first attested on Crete before the 14th century BC. Most inscriptions are on clay tablets found in Knossos, in central Crete, as well as in Pylos, in the southwest of the Peloponnese. Other tablets have been found at Mycenae itself, Tiryns and Thebes and at Chania, in Western Crete. The language is named after Mycenae, one of the major centres of Mycenaean Greece.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the 4th century BC, the Ionic-based Euclidean alphabet, with 24 letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard throughout the Greek-speaking world and is the version that is still used for Greek writing today.
The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. It has been suggested that the script remained in use as late as the 1st century BC. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is thought to be descended from the Cypro-Minoan syllabary, itself a variant or derivative of Linear A. Most texts using the script are in the Arcadocypriot dialect of Greek, but also one bilingual inscription was found in Amathus.
Greek is an Indo-European language, the sole surviving descendant of the Hellenic sub-family. Although it split off from other Indo-European languages around the 3rd millennium BCE, it is first attested in the Bronze Age as Mycenaean Greek. During the Archaic and Classical eras, Greek speakers wrote numerous texts in a variety of dialects known collectively as Ancient Greek. In the Hellenistic era, these dialects underwent dialect levelling to form Koine Greek which was used as a lingua franca throughout the eastern Roman Empire, and later grew into Medieval Greek. For much of the period of Modern Greek, the language existed in a situation of diglossia, where speakers would switch between informal varieties known as Dimotiki and a formal one known as Katharevousa. Present-day Modern Standard Greek is largely an outgrowth of Dimotiki, with some features retained from Katharevousa.
Eteocypriot is an extinct non-Indo-European language that was spoken in Cyprus by a non-Hellenic population during the Iron Age. The name means "true" or "original Cypriot" parallel to Eteocretan, both of which names are used by modern scholars to mean the non-Greek languages of those places. Eteocypriot was written in the Cypriot syllabary, a syllabic script derived from Linear A. The language was under pressure from Arcadocypriot Greek from about the 10th century BC and finally became extinct in about the 4th century BC.
The Cypro-Minoan syllabary (CM), more commonly called the Cypro-Minoan Script, is an undeciphered syllabary used on the island of Cyprus and at its trading partners during the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age. The term "Cypro-Minoan" was coined by Arthur Evans in 1909 based on its visual similarity to Linear A on Minoan Crete, from which CM is thought to be derived. Approximately 250 objects—such as clay balls, cylinders, and tablets which bear Cypro-Minoan inscriptions, have been found. Discoveries have been made at various sites around Cyprus, as well as in the ancient city of Ugarit on the Syrian coast. It is thought to be somehow related to the later Cypriot syllabary.
The official languages of the Republic of Cyprus are Greek and Turkish. The everyday spoken language (vernacular) of Greek Cypriots is Cypriot Greek, and that of Turkish Cypriots is Cypriot Turkish. For official purposes, the standard languages are used.
A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a script, as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing was invented during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each writing system invented without prior knowledge of writing gradually evolved from a system of proto-writing that included a small number of ideographs, which were not fully capable of encoding spoken language, and lacked the ability to express a broad range of ideas.
Rosalind Thomas FBA is a Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Balliol College, Oxford University and professor of Ancient Greek history. She focuses on ancient literacy, oral tradition and performance culture as well as Greek law and society, Greek historiography, Greek relations with the Persians, and the Greek polis. She was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2020.
Emily Joanna Gowers, is a British classical scholar. She is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge. She is an expert on Horace, Augustan literature, and the history of food in the Roman world.
Susan Sherratt is Reader in Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the archaeology of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages of the Aegean, Cyprus and the eastern Mediterranean, especially trade and interaction within and beyond these regions.
Sofia Voutsaki is Professor of Greek Archaeology at the University of Groningen and a specialist in the archaeology of the Bronze Age Aegean and classical Greece. She has directed excavations and surveys in the Argolid and at the Mycenaean site of Ayios Vasileios near Sparta, and has also published works on social change, mortuary archaeology, archaeological science, and the history of 19th- and 20th-century Greek archaeology.
Geoffrey Horrocks is a British philologist and Emeritus Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Cambridge.
Christine E. Morris is an Irish classical scholar, who is the Andrew A. David Professor in Greek Archaeology and History at Trinity College Dublin. An expert on religion in the Aegean Bronze Age, her work uses archaeological evidence to examine the practice and experience of belief. She is a member of the Standing Committee for Archaeology for the Royal Irish Academy.
Rebecca Laemmle is a Swiss Classical scholar. She is an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge where she is a Fellow of Pembroke College, specializing in Homer and his ancient reception, ancient comedy and tragedy, and comico-satirical writing.
Myrto Hatzimichali is a senior lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge. In 2012, she joined Homerton College where she is now the director of studies in Classics and a fellow. Before teaching at Cambridge, Hatzimichali was the Leventis Lecturer on the impact of Greek culture in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter.
Lea Niccolai is an Italian Late-Antique historian specializing in religious philosophy and socio-political thought. In particular, she examines the various processes of the Christianization of the Roman Empire. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Classics at Cambridge and Director of Studies in Classics at Trinity College.
Shushma Malik is an ancient historian. She is Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Cambridge and the first Onassis Classics Fellow at Newnham College, Cambridge.
References
- ↑ "Steele". Magdalene College. Retrieved 2025-02-01.
- ↑ "Cambridge University Reporter Special". www.admin.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2025-02-01.
- ↑ Steele, Philippa M., ed. (2013), "Acknowledgements", A Linguistic History of Ancient Cyprus: The Non-Greek Languages, and their Relations with Greek, c.1600–300 BC, Cambridge Classical Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xiii–xiv, ISBN 978-1-107-04286-5 , retrieved 2025-02-01
- ↑ "The Mystery of Ancient Cypriot Clay Balls" (PDF). British Academy Review (24). The British Academy. Summer 2014.
- ↑ "Steele". Magdalene College. Retrieved 2025-02-01.
- ↑ Administrator (2016-04-04). "Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS)". www.classics.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2025-02-01.
- ↑ "Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems". crewsproject.wordpress.com. 2023-10-24. Retrieved 2025-02-01.
- ↑ "Unravelling the relationships between early writing systems". CORDIS | European Commission. Retrieved 2025-02-01.
- ↑ "XHE0080 - Evidence on The impact of exiting the European Union on higher education". committees.parliament.uk. Retrieved 2025-02-01.
- ↑ "List of Former Visiting Fellows". 2019-01-27. Retrieved 2025-02-01.
- ↑ Steele, Dr Philippa (2013-08-28). "Dr Philippa Steele". www.classics.cam.ac.uk. Retrieved 2025-02-01.
- ↑ "REF 2021" . Retrieved 2025-02-01.
- ↑ "The meaning of success: Insights from women at Cambridge by University of Cambridge - Issuu". issuu.com. 2014-02-28. Retrieved 2025-02-01.
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