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Origins of The Ancient Greek Tribes

Socrates Exarchopoulos

The ancient Greek tribes were groups of Greek-speaking populations living in Greece, Cyprus, and the various Greek colonies. They were primarily divided by geographic, dialectal, political, and culturalcriteria, as well as distinct traditions in mythology and religion. Some groups were of mixed origin, forming a syncretic culture through absorption and assimilation of previous and neighboring populations into the Greek language and customs. Greek word for tribe was Phylē (sing.) and Phylai(pl.), the tribe was further subdivided in Demes (sing. Demos, pl. Demoi) roughly matching to a clan.

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With the dominion of land passing on from one tribe to the other, cultural exchange through art and trade, and frequent alliances toward common goals, the ethnic character of the different tribes had become primarily political by the dawn of the Hellenistic period. The Roman conquest of Greece, the subsequent division of the Roman Empire into Greek East and Latin West, as well as the advent of Christianity, molded the common ethnic and political Greek identity once and for all to the subjects of the Greek world by the 3rd century AD.

Read The Lists of ancient Greek Tribes With Wikipedia Sources

Map of ancient Epirus & Environs, Thracian, Illyrian, Paeonian, & Greek contact zones with illustration and extent of Hellenization up to the creation of Epirus Nova or Illyria Graeca. CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Greek tribes Late Bronze Age: Homeric Age of the Iliad (circa 1200 BC)

Map of Homeric Greece with English labels. CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE

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Greek Language Prehistory (2000-1000 BC), showing the complex pattern of peoples migrations and their languages and dialects

Iron Age: Archaic and Classical Greece maps (from circa 800 BC)

Map of "The archaic period in Greece (750 BC – 480 BC)"

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Map of the regions of Ancient Epirus and Macedonia - and adjacent barbarian lands ILLYRIA and Paionia.

Ancient Macedonia map

Ancient Crete map

Iron Age: Archaic and Classical Greece tribes (from circa 800 BC)

Hellenes (Archaic and Classical Greece after Late Bronze Age collapse and Dorian Invasion)

References

  1. Roger D. Woodard (2008), "Greek dialects", in: The Ancient Languages of Europe, ed. R. D. Woodard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 51.

  2. Wilkes, John. The Illyrians (The Peoples of Europe). Wiley-Blackwell, 1995, p. 97.

  3. The Illyrian Atintani, the Epirotic Atintanes and the Roman Protectorate N. G. L. Hammond, The Journal of Roman Studies Vol. 79 (1989), pp. 11-25 "There were Illyrian Amantini in Pannonia and Greek Amantes in North Epirus"

  4. Mogens Herman Hansen and Thomas Heine Nielsen. An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 345.

  5. Mogens Herman Hansen and Thomas Heine Nielsen. An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 338.

  6. John Boardman and Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond. The Cambridge Ancient History Volume 3, Part 3: The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries B.C. Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 284.

  7. Woodhouse, William John. Aetolia: Its Geography, Topography, and Antiquities. Clarendon Press, 1897, p. 70. "Ptolemy, however, makes them neighbours of the Epirot tribe of the Kassopaioi, who lived on the coast of the Ionian sea."