The earliest records of written Greek are inscribed on baked mud tablets found at the beginning of the present century in the ruins of the palace of Knossos on Crete and, later, at sites on the Greek mainland. Written in a syllabic script known as Linear B in which each symbol represents a consonant plus vowel combination, they can be dated to the period immediately before the demise of the Minoan civilization of Knossos which occurred in about 1450 B.C. Unfortunately their decipherment has not revealed any great works of early literature; most of the tablets are inventories of property or deal with agricultural production and produce. However they represent the earliest records of any European language.
Linear B was essentially a syllabic script with each symbol representing a consonant-vowel combination
The dating of the Knossos tablets does not of course tell us anything of when Greek was first spoken in the Balkan Peninsula and in the lands around the Aegean Sea. Archaeological evidence and the development of dialects would indicate this predated the Knossos tablets by at least five hundred years.
The earliest inscriptions in the forerunner of todays Greek alphabet date from about 750 B.C., long after the Mycenaeans, mainland successors to the Minoans and heroes of the Trojan wars, had declined in influence and at about the time the poet Homer is said to have lived.
Homer, together with Hesiod the earliest of the famous writers of ancient Greece, is the subject of a vast scholarly literature. Some deny the existence of an individual poet and see the man as a personification of a long tradition of oral poetry while others have gone as far as to identify him with the "inventor" of the Greek alphabet, using his innovation to record the oral poetry of a long bygone age. Whatever the truth may be, it is generally held that parts of the Iliad use language that long predates the eighth century B.C. and that some of the descriptions of weapons and fighting techniques are consistent with the archaeological evidence from Mycenaean sites contemporary with the fall of Troy in about 1250 B.C. (according to archaeological evidence; 1184 B.C. according to the scholar Eratosthenes).
A very early Greek (around 650 BC) inscription with the text running from left to right then doubling back to run from right to left. This form of writing, resembling the path of the ox-drawn plough across a field, is known as boustrophedon. Unlike the example of linear B above, this is an early forerunner of the Greek script still in use today.
When considering ancient Greece it is important to be aware of the cultural and political background which was very different to that of a modern nation state. For much of this period Greece was fragmented into city states with their satellite colonies, each with its own political system and cultural values; these may, at various times, have traded with each other, fought each other or formed military alliances. In many cases they did all three. This separateness was reinforced by the Greek language which had evolved as a number of regional dialects through successive southern movements of Greek speaking peoples. The distribution of these dialects reflected patterns of migration and colonization and it did not follow that geographical closeness led to similarities in dialect. For example the Greek of Arcadia, the harsh mountainous interior of the Peloponnese, was closer to the Cypriot dialect than the Doric dialect used in the neighbouring southern Peloponnese. This is usually explained in terms of colonization of Cyprus by Mycenaean Greeks from the Peloponnese in the late bronze age while the Doric Greeks who moved into the Peloponnese after the Mycenaeans, never penetrated the inhospitable heartland of Arcadia. A further twist to dialect in ancient Greece is the practice of using a particular dialect for a particular literary form irrespective of the native speech of the author. Thus choral poetry is usually written in Doric even if written by a Boeotian such as Pindar or when used in Athenian (Attic) tragedy.
Bearing in mind that while Homer flourished in the 8th century B.C. (and some of his language was archaic even for that period) and Aristotle did not die until 322 B.C., not only do the texts popularly associated with ancient Greek writing span a considerable period of time (at least equal to the period between the present day and Shakespeare) but are composed in a number of distinct dialects. There is thus, at least in one sense, no such thing as standard ancient Greek common to all speakers - although maybe one such candidate did emerge. During the classical period Athens acquired such political and cultural dominance among the Greek city states that the Attic dialect of the 4th century B.C. began to be accepted as the universal standard, at least for Greek prose.
However politics were soon to bring about further and more radical change to the Greek language, perhaps the most dramatic in its tortuous history. Philip II of Macedon (382 - 336 B.C.) followed by his yet more ambitious son, Alexander the Great (356 - 323 B.C.), a man whose ambition stopped at nothing short of becoming master of "all the known world", swept away the traditional city states, uniting Greece and the near and middle east into a massive empire extending south to Egypt and east into India. Although the Macedonian court was thought of by other Greeks of the time as provincial and only half civilized, Philip seems to have been a man of culture and used his wealth to bring to his court only the best money could buy (among his imports was the philosopher Aristotle as tutor for the young Alexander!) and adopted the Attic dialect as the language of his empire. The far reaching effect of this was, for the first time, to replace the dialects with a standard national language. However the extent of the empire also meant many people whose native tongue was not Greek attempted to express themselves through the medium of the classical Attic dialect resulting in an erosion and simplification of the language and changes in pronunciation that remain until this day. This form of Greek is known as the common language or koine. It is the language in which the Christian Gospels were originally composed and which is still used, largely unchanged, in the Greek Orthodox liturgy.
It may be supposed that when the Romans arrived in Greece (Greece became a Roman protectorate in 146 B.C.) and the near east, Greek would have been superseded by Latin. However if anything the reverse was true, the study of Greek being mandatory for the educated Roman, and the use of Greek was widespread throughout the eastern part of the Empire. The Empire itself was to divide in 395 A.D. with the eastern half being ruled from Constantinople (modern day Istanbul), the capital founded by the Emperor Constantine the Great in 330 A.D. In the 6th Century A.D. Greek became the official language of the Eastern or Byzantine Empire. Long after the Western Empire and Rome itself fell prey to invaders, the Byzantine Empire persisted under increasing pressure from Islam in the east and crusaders and avaricious Frankish and Italian princes in the west until the final fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. By this time most of present day Greece had been occupied and colonized by Franks and Venetians, themselves later to fall to the expanding Ottoman Empire. Thus just as western European was beginning to emerge with the start of the renaissance, a dark age finally descended on the Greek-speaking world.
-Source: Translexis® Limited
You are the one who started this thread with the questions. I merely contributed my thoughts on the subject.
