Byzantine literature in the context of "Byzantine studies"

Hellenic, Greek, or ancient Greek historiography involves efforts made by the Ancient Greeks to track and record historical events. By the 5th century BC, it became an integral part of ancient Greek literature and held a prestigious place in later Roman historiography and Byzantine literature.

Belarusian culture is the product of a millennium of development under the impact of a number of diverse factors. These include the physical environment; the ethnographic background of Belarusians (the merger of Slavic newcomers with Baltic natives); the paganism of the early settlers and their hosts; Eastern Orthodox Christianity as a link to the Byzantine literary and cultural traditions; the country's lack of natural borders; the flow of rivers toward both the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea; and the variety of religions in the region (Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, and Islam).

Digenes Akritas (Latinised as Acritas; Greek: Διγενῆς Ἀκρίτας) is a medieval Greek romantic epic that emerged in the 12th-century Byzantine Empire. It is the lengthiest and most famous of the acritic songs, Byzantine folk poems celebrating the lives and exploits of the Akritai, the inhabitants and frontier guards of the empire's eastern Anatolian provinces. The acritic songs represented the remnants of an ancient epic cycle in Byzantium and, due to their long oral transmission throughout the empire, the identification of precise references to historical events may be only conjectural. Set during the Arab-Byzantine wars, the poem reflects the interactions, along with the military and cultural conflicts of the two polities. The epic consists of between 3,000 and 4,000 lines and it has been pieced together following the discovery of several manuscripts. An extensive narrative text, it is often thought of as the only surviving Byzantine work truly qualifying as epic poetry. Written in a form of vernacular Greek, it is regarded as one of its earliest examples, as well as the starting point of Modern Greek literature.

The epic details the life of the eponymous hero, Basil, whose epithet Digenes Akritas ("two-blood border lord") alludes to his mixed Greek and Arab descent. The text is divided into two halves: the first half, epic in tone, details the lives and encounter of Basil's parents; his mother, a Byzantine noblewoman from the Doukas family named Eirene, and his father, an Arab emir named Mousour who, after abducting Eirene in a raid, converted to Christianity and married her. The second half, in a more romantic atmosphere, discusses Basil's early childhood and later, often from a first-person point of view, his struggles and acts of heroism on the Byzantine borders. Allusions to Greek mythological elements, including the Hercules-like childhood of Basil, and his affair with the Amazon warrior Maximo, also appear throughout the text. Though a legendary figure, it has been suggested that inspiration for the hero may have derived from the 11th-century Cappadocian general and emperor Romanos Diogenes.

Late Greek refers to writings in the Greek language in Late Antiquity and the Early Byzantine period; and in other words, from about the late 2nd century AD until about the late 7th century AD. The intellectual center of Late Greek was Alexandria in Egypt. Alexandria came under Arab rule starting in the 640s AD, which is sometimes taken as the ending-point of the Late Greek period. In terms purely of linguistics and language style, writings in Late Greek were conservative, whereas style began to change during the 8th century to some extent, and hence the ending-point of Late Greek is sometimes put at the beginning of the 8th century.

Notable examples of Late Greek writers include Clement of Alexandria (died c. 215), Galen (died c. 216), Origen (died c. 254), Diophantus (died c. 290), Porphyry (died c. 305), Zosimos of Panopolis (died c. 325), and many others. See the article Byzantine literature for more.

Hungarian prehistory (Hungarian: magyar őstörténet) spans the period of history of the Hungarian people, or Magyars, which started with the separation of the Hungarian language from other Ugric languages around 800 BC, and ended with the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin around 895 AD. Based on the earliest records of the Magyars in Byzantine, Western European, and Hungarian chronicles, scholars considered them for centuries to have been the descendants of the ancient Scythians and Huns. This historiographical tradition disappeared from mainstream history after the realization of similarities between the Hungarian and Uralic languages in the late 18th century. After the 2000s, archaeological research aimed at exploring the early history of the Hungarians resumed, with a primary focus on the Ural Mountains and Siberia. Today, these efforts are regularly supplemented with archaeogenetic studies. In addition to linguistics, archaeology, and archaeogenetics, the re-evaluation of well-known written sources has also begun. Together, these fields of study may provide new information regarding the origins of the Hungarian people.

Study of pollen in fossils based on cognate words for certain trees – including larch and elm – in the daughter languages suggests the speakers of the Proto-Uralic language lived in the wider region of the Ural Mountains, which were inhabited by scattered groups of Neolithic hunter-gatherers in the 4th millennium BC. Linguistic studies and archaeological research evidence that those who spoke this language lived in pit-houses and used decorated clay vessels. The expansion of marshlands after around 2600 BC caused new migrations. No scholarly consensus on the Urheimat, or original homeland, of the Ugric peoples exists: they lived either in the region of the Tobol River or along the Kama River and the upper courses of the Volga River around 2000 BC. They lived in settled communities, cultivated millet, wheat, and other crops, and bred animals – especially horses, cattle, and pigs. Loan words connected to animal husbandry from Proto-Iranian show that they had close contacts with their neighbors. The southernmost Ugric groups adopted a nomadic way of life by around 1000 BC, because of the northward expansion of the steppes.