The Greeks are thought to have come up with the innovation of vowel characters, and lacking a pharyngeal consonant, employed this letter as the Greek O to represent the vowel, a sound it maintained in Etruscan and Latin.

Although he threatened the British with unilateral withdrawal, his government maintained the Greek Army's positions, not being able to shoulder the political cost of abandoning Asia Minor and the many Greeks living there to Turkish reprisals.

The Greeks formed the Ptolemaic dynasty during their three-hundred-year rule over Egypt ( 305 to 30 BC ) and maintained the ancient religious customs and traditions, while often associating the Egyptian deities with their own.

Under kings alternately named Gordias and Midas, the independent Phrygian kingdom of the 8th and 7th centuries BC maintained close trade contacts with her neighbours in the east and the Greeks in the west.

French historian François Guizot states that the road was first developed by Phoenicians and later maintained by Greeks and Romans.

According to the Bibliotheca, no one had realised that Ajax had raped Cassandra until Calchas, the Greek seer, warned the Greeks that Athena was furious at the treatment of her priestess and she would destroy the Greek ships if they didn't kill him immediately.

The name comes from Greek Bosporos ( Βόσπορος ), which the ancient Greeks analysed as bous ' ox ' + poros ' means of passing a river, ford, ferry ', thus meaning ' ox-ford ', which is a reference to Io ( mythology ) from Greek mythology who was transformed into a cow and condemned to wander the earth until she crossed the Bosphorus where she met Prometheus.

Indeed, based on their previous experience of the Greeks, the Persians might be excused for this ; Herodotus tells us that the Athenians at Marathon were " first to endure looking at Median dress and men wearing it, for up until then just hearing the name of the Medes caused the Hellenes to panic ".

Subsequently, the Galatians continued to be subsumed into the Greek world until their culture was barely indistinguishable from the Greeks before disappearing under the Turkish and Islamic Jihad and Genocide of Byzantine Anatolia.

On March 25, 1821 ( also the same day as the Greek Orthodox day of the Annunciation of the Theotokos ), the Greeks rebelled and declared their independence, led by Theodore Kolokotronis, but did not achieve it until 1829.

The Greeks held out in the Peloponnese until 1460, and the Venetians and Genoese clung to some of the islands, but by 1500 most of the plains and islands of Greece were in Ottoman hands.

Nerves are large enough to have been recognized by the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, but their internal structure was not understood until it became possible to examine them using a microscope.

The pike phalanx, supported by peltasts and cavalry, became the dominant mode of warfare among the Greeks from the late 4th century onward until Greek military systems were supplanted by the Roman legions.

This century saw the beginning of a period of philosophical brilliance among Western civilizations, particularly the Greeks which would continue all the way through the 4th century until the time of Alexander the Great.

The Greeks and the Arabs were not familiar with cotton until the Wars of Alexander the Great, as his contemporary Megasthenes told Seleucus I Nicator of " there being trees on which wool grows " in " Indica ".

In the 8th century BC, the Ancient Greeks expanded until reaching the area of Taranto and Salento in Magna Graecia.

The area was colonised by Ancient Greeks and was within Magna Græcia, until the Roman Republic began to dominate.

Production of Tyrian Purple for use as a fabric dye began as early as 1200 BCE by the Phoenicians, and was continued by the Greeks and Romans until 1453 CE, with the fall of Constantinople.

Disputes between the Orthodox and Catholic Greeks of the community were frequent and persisted until 1797 when the city was occupied by France who closed all the religious confraternities and confiscated the archive of the Greek community.

In the course of its history, it has been ruled by the Canaanites, the Philistines, the Israelites, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Greeks, the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Persians, the Egyptians and the Crusaders, until it was destroyed by the Mamluks in 1270.

Other pre-Roman civilizations include Magna Graecia ( or Greater Greece ), when Greeks began settling in Southern Italy in the 8th century BC and lasted until the 3rd century BC and also the Etruscan civilization, which flourished between 900 and 150 BC in the central section of the peninsula.

The Greeks gradually came to use the name for a wider region, but it was not until the time of the Roman conquests that the term was expanded to cover the entire peninsula.

The practice was also well established in Europe among the Greeks and Romans, although a role as court functionaries does not arise until Byzantine times.

When the Greeks landed on Delos while on their way to Troy, Anius prophesized that the Trojan War would not be won until the tenth year, and insisted that they stay with him for nine years, promising that his daughters would supply them with aliments during that period.

In another legend, Philoctetes was left on Lemnos by the Greeks on their way to Troy ; and there he suffered ten years ' agony from his wounded foot, until Odysseus and Neoptolemus induced him to accompany them to Troy.

However, the ancient Greeks believed that the motions of the planets were circular and not elliptical, a view that was not challenged in Western culture until the 17th century through the synthesis of theories by Copernicus and Kepler.

This accounts for the fact that the Greeks were not acquainted with the city until Alexander the Great took and plundered it.

There were no advances in military technology until, from the mechanical arm action of a slinger, the Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Persians, Chinese, etc.

) Unlike the cults of most of the other Egyptian deities, the worship of the Apis bull was continued by the Greeks and after them by the Romans, and lasted until almost 400 A. D.

The anecdotes are literary, and late ; however, in the founding tales of the Greek colony of Gela, founded in the 680s on the southwest coast of Sicily, a tradition was preserved that the Greeks had seized cult images wrought by Daedalus from their local predecessors, the Sicani.

Though Etruscans preferred to show the goddess as a nurturer ( Kourotrophos ) rather than an abductor of young men, the late Archaic sculptural acroterion from Etruscan Cære, now in Berlin, showing the goddess in archaic running pose adapted from the Greeks, and bearing a boy in her arms, has commonly been identified as Eos and Cephalus.

Greeks in the late fifth and early 4th centuries BC considered their oldest poets to be Orpheus, Musaeus, Hesiod and Homer — in that order.

The ancient Greeks celebrated the festival of the Heracleia, which commemorated the death of Heracles, on the second day of the month of Metageitnion ( which would fall in late July or early August ).

On the other hand, the relatively more enlightened Greeks and Romans exposed some of their babies (" late " infanticidal childrearing ).</ td >

By the late Egyptian historical period, after the occupations by the Greeks and the Romans, Isis became the most important and most powerful deity of the Egyptian pantheon because of her magical skills.

Until the early 20th century, Greeks were uniformly distributed between the Greek peninsula, the western coast of Asia Minor, Pontus, Egypt, 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 the ancient Greek colonization.

During the late Roman Empire, several Roman provinces covered the territory that comprises present-day Bulgaria: Scythia ( Scythia Minor ), Moesia ( Upper and Lower ), Thrace, Macedonia ( First and Second ), Dacia ( Coastal and Inner, both south of Danube ), Dardania, Rhodope ( Roman province ) and Haemismontus, and had a mixed population of Byzantine Greeks, Thracians and Dacians, most of whom spoke either Greek or variants of Vulgar Latin.

However, it is clear that by the late pharaonic period, demotic scribes regularly employed a more phonetic orthography, a testament to the increasing cultural contact between Egyptians and Greeks even before Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt.

Mycenaean Greeks were undoubtedly inhabiting Cyprus from the late stage of the Bronze Age, while the island's Greek name is already attested from the 15th century B. C.

The news reached the Greeks at Thermopylae either late that day or before the dawn of the next day, who held a council to decide their next step.

Though Jerome and Eusebius ( both citing Castor of Rhodes ), and as even late as 1812 John Lemprière euhemeristically asserted that he was the first king of Argos, and Robert Graves that he was a descendant of Iapetus, most modern mythologists understand Inachus as one of the river gods, all sons of Oceanus and Tethys and thus to the Greeks part of the pre-Olympian or " Pelasgian " mythic landscape ; in Greek iconography, Walter Burkert notes, the rivers are represented in the form of a bull with a human head or face.

The indictment describes several army clashes between the Greeks and the Hittites which took place around the late 15th or early 14th centuries BCE.

The Midas of the late 8th century BC had a Greek wife and strong ties to the Greeks, which suggests it was he who made the offering ; but Herodotus also says Gyges of Lydia, a contemporary of that Midas, was " the first foreigner since Midas " to make an offering at Delphi, which suggests Herodotus believed the throne was donated by the more ancient Midas.

While both the ancient Greeks and Romans knew of algae, and the ancient Chinese even cultivated certain varieties as food, the scientific study of algae began in the late 18th century with the description and naming of Fucus maximus ( now Ecklonia maxima ) in 1757 by Pehr Osbeck.

Starting from the late 8th century BC, the Greeks established a settlement first at Siris, founded by fugitives from Colophon.

This area was populated by Syriac Christians and had a significant presence of Pontic Greeks, Assyrians, Baghdadi Jews and Armenians ; these peoples lived in the region from 500 BC to the late 19th century.

In the early 20th century it was composed of two parts — the old walled town at the bridge over the Euripus, where a number of Turkish families continued to live until the late 19th century, and a sizeable Jewish community lived until World War II, and the more modern suburb that lies outside it, chiefly occupied by Greeks.

In his last communication to them, Napoleon warned them not to imitate the Greeks of the late Byzantine Empire, who engaged in subtle discussions when the ram was battering at their gates.

During late Antiquity and Middle Ages, the major influences came from the Slavic peoples who migrated and settled south of the Danube ; from medieval Greeks, and the Byzantine Empire ; from a long domination by the Ottoman Empire ; from the Hungarians ; and from the Germans living in Transylvania.

Offers in the late 19th century by the British archeologist Cecil Harcourt Smith to fund the restoration of Lion of Chaeronea was initially refused by the Greeks.

The crane for lifting heavy loads was invented by the Ancient Greeks in the late 6th century BC.

The pre-Etruscan history of the area in the late Bronze and Iron Ages parallels that of the early Greeks.