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( Ancient Greek)
The Ancient Greek language is the historical stage of the Greek language[1] as it existed during the Archaic (9th–6th centuries BC) and Classical (5th–4th centuries BC) periods in ancient Greece. The Hellenistic (post-Classic) period of Ancient Greece formally constitutes its own stage in the Greek language known as Koine Greek. Ancient Greek is subdivided into various dialects, including the Homeric Greek of the Homeric poems, and the Attic Greek of great works of literature and philosophy of the Athenian Golden Age. For information on the Hellenic language family prior to the creation of the Greek alphabet, see articles Mycenaean Greek and Proto-Greek. The origins, early forms, and early development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood, owing to the lack of contemporaneous evidence. There are several theories about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Indo-European language (not later than 2000 BC), and about 1200 BC. They have the same general outline but differ in some of the detail. The only attested dialect from this period[2] is Mycenaean, but its relationship to the historical dialects and the historical circumstances of the times imply that the overall groups already existed in some form.
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