Ancient Greek in the context of "Aloadae"

Polis (pl.: poleis) means 'city' in Ancient Greek. The ancient word polis had socio-political connotations not possessed by modern usage. For example, Modern Greek πόλη (póli), "city", is located within a χώρα (chóra), "country", which is a πατρίδα (patrída) or "native land" for its citizens. In ancient Greece, the polis was the native land; there was no other. It had a constitution and demanded the supreme loyalty of its citizens. Χώρα was only the countryside, not a country. Ancient Greece was not a sovereign country, but was territory occupied by Hellenes, people who claimed as their native language some dialect of Ancient Greek.

Poleis did not only exist within the area of the modern Republic of Greece. A collaborative study carried by the Copenhagen Polis Centre from 1993 to 2003 classified about 1,500 settlements of the Archaic and Classical ancient-Greek-speaking population as poleis. These ranged from the Caucasus to Southern Spain, and from Southern Russia to Northern Egypt, spread over the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. They have been termed a network of micro-states. Many of the settlements still exist; e.g., Marseille, Syracuse, Alexandria, but they are no longer Greek or micro-states, belonging to other countries.

Western philosophy refers to the philosophical thought, traditions, and works of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word philosophy itself originated from the Ancient Greek φιλοσοφία (philosophía), literally, 'the love of wisdom', from Ancient Greek: φιλεῖν (phileîn), 'to love', and σοφία (sophía), 'wisdom'.

Western philosophy stands in contrast to other cultural and regional traditions like Eastern philosophy.

Ancient Greek mathematics refers to the history of mathematical ideas and texts in Ancient Greece during classical and late antiquity, mostly from the 5th century BC to the 6th century AD. Greek mathematicians lived in cities spread around the shores of the ancient Mediterranean, from Anatolia to Italy and North Africa, but were united by Greek culture and the Greek language. The development of mathematics as a theoretical discipline and the use of deductive reasoning in proofs is an important difference between Greek mathematics and those of preceding civilizations.

The early history of Greek mathematics is obscure, and traditional narratives of mathematical theorems found before the fifth century BC are regarded as later inventions. It is now generally accepted that treatises of deductive mathematics written in Greek began circulating around the mid-fifth century BC, but the earliest complete work on the subject is Euclid's Elements, written during the Hellenistic period. The works of renown mathematicians Archimedes and Apollonius, as well as of the astronomer Hipparchus, also belong to this period. In the Imperial Roman era, Ptolemy used trigonometry to determine the positions of stars in the sky, while Nicomachus and other ancient philosophers revived ancient number theory and harmonics. During late antiquity, Pappus of Alexandria wrote his Collection, summarizing the work of his predecessors, while Diophantus' Arithmetica dealt with the solution of arithmetic problems by way of pre-modern algebra. Later authors such as Theon of Alexandria, his daughter Hypatia, and Eutocius of Ascalon wrote commentaries on the authors making up the ancient Greek mathematical corpus.

In classical antiquity, the Hellenistic period covers the time in Greek, Eastern Mediterranean, and West Asian (or Middle Eastern) history following Classical Greece, between the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC and the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BC, in which these regions were under the influence of Greek leadership, culture, and language. The Hellenistic period was followed by the ascendancy of the Roman Empire, the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, and the Roman conquest of Ptolemaic Egypt the following year, which eliminated the last major Hellenistic kingdom. Its name stems from the Ancient Greek word Hellas (Ἑλλάς, Hellás), which was gradually recognized as the name for Greece, from which the modern historiographical term Hellenistic was derived. The term "Hellenistic" is to be distinguished from "Hellenic" in that the latter refers to Greece itself, while the former encompasses all the ancient territories of the period that had come under significant Greek influence, particularly the Hellenized Ancient Near East, after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

After the Macedonian conquest of the Achaemenid Empire in 330 BC and its disintegration shortly thereafter in the Partition of Babylon and subsequent Wars of the Diadochi, Hellenistic kingdoms were established throughout West Asia (Seleucid Empire, Kingdom of Pergamon), Northeast Africa (Ptolemaic Kingdom) and South Asia (Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, Indo-Greek Kingdom). This resulted in an influx of Greek colonists and the export of Greek culture and language to these new realms, a breadth spanning as far as modern-day India. These new Greek kingdoms were also influenced by regional indigenous cultures, adopting local practices which were deemed beneficial, necessary, or convenient. Hellenistic culture thus represents a fusion of the ancient Greek world with that of the Western Asian, Northeastern African, and Southwestern Asian worlds. The consequence of this mixture gave rise to a common Attic-based Greek dialect, known as Koine Greek, which became the lingua franca throughout the ancient world.

Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 BC to 1450 BC. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civilization. It evolved into Linear B, which was used by the Mycenaeans to write an early form of Greek. It was discovered by the archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans in 1900. No texts in Linear A have yet been deciphered. Evans named the script "Linear" because its characters consisted simply of lines inscribed in clay, in contrast to the more pictographic characters in Cretan hieroglyphs – likewise undeciphered – that were used during the same period.

Linear A belongs to a group of scripts that evolved independently of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian systems. During the second millennium BC, there were four major branches: Linear A, Linear B, Cypro-Minoan, and Cretan hieroglyphic. In the 1950s, Linear B was deciphered and found to have an underlying language of Mycenaean Greek. Linear A shares many glyphs and alloglyphs with Linear B, and the syllabic glyphs are thought to notate similar syllabic values, but none of the proposed readings lead to a language that scholars can understand.

The Theogony (Ancient Greek: Θεογονία, romanized: Theogonía, lit. 'the genealogy or birth of the gods') is a poem by Hesiod (8th–7th century BC) describing the origins and genealogies of the Greek gods, composed c. 730–700 BC. It is written in the epic dialect of Ancient Greek and contains 1,022 lines. It is one of the most important sources for the understanding of early Greek cosmology.

The Epic Cycle (Ancient Greek: Ἐπικὸς Κύκλος, romanized: Epikòs Kýklos) was a collection of Ancient Greek epic poems, composed in dactylic hexameter and related to the story of the Trojan War, including the Cypria, the Aethiopis, the so-called Little Iliad, the Iliupersis, the Nostoi, and the Telegony. Scholars sometimes include the two Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, among the poems of the Epic Cycle, but the term is more often used to specify the non-Homeric poems as distinct from the Homeric ones.

Unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, the cyclic epics survive only in fragments and summaries from Late Antiquity and the Byzantine period.

Philosophy (from Ancient Greek philosophía lit. 'love of wisdom') is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, knowledge, mind, reason, language, and value. It is a rational and critical inquiry that reflects on its methods and assumptions.

Historically, many of the individual sciences, such as physics and psychology, formed part of philosophy. However, they are considered separate academic disciplines in the modern sense of the term. Influential traditions in the history of philosophy include Western, Arabic–Persian, Indian, and Chinese philosophy. Western philosophy originated in Ancient Greece and covers a wide area of philosophical subfields. A central topic in Arabic–Persian philosophy is the relation between reason and revelation. Indian philosophy combines the spiritual problem of how to reach enlightenment with the exploration of the nature of reality and the ways of arriving at knowledge. Chinese philosophy focuses principally on practical issues about right social conduct, government, and self-cultivation.