The Formation Of Ancient Greeks

The paper intends to study the formation of ancient Greeks from the following three perspectives:main ethnic groups, ethnic culture, and ethnic identity, to demonstrate the picture of the formation of ancient Greeks, and to explore the process and the regular pattern of ancient Greeks. This paper consists of four parts.The first part has two main aspects:firstly, based on an theoretical analysis and evaluation of existing ethnic definition, formed the interpretation of the two concepts: ethnic group and ethnic formation; secondly, through the overview of the history and current research on formation of Ancient Greeks, clear the main content and significance of this paper. According to the domestic as well as the foreign researches on the definition of ethnicity, the representatives of the overall researches are the following three ones:characteristics theory, identity theory, boundary theory. As far as I concern, we should focus not only the formation of the objective characteristics such as the main ethnic groups and ethnic culture, but the formation and development of the subjective ethnic identity.The second chapter mainly explores the origin of ancient Greeks, demonstrating the composition of the ancient Greeks and the process of its formation. Before dwellers moved in Greek, there was inhabited by many indigenous people, especially the Pelasgians living on the mainland and the Cretes living on the islands. In the ancient Indo-European wave of emigration, some tribes moved into Greece successively. The first move was the creator of the Mycenaean Culture-the Achaeans. With the arrival of the last batch of Dorians, the history of on-and-off mass emigration into ancient Greece came to a halt. Several hundred years of "Dark Period" was also period of full integration and development of different tribes. Awake from the "Dark Period", four major branches were thus formed, namely, the Achaeans, the Ionians, the Aeolians and the Dorians. The third part mainly discusses the formation of ancient culture. Ethnic culture is the result of natural evolution and interaction in the process of ancient Greeks' long-term living together. After the immigration of the Dorians, each tribal culture of the ancient Greece mutually absorb, learn and integrate in a relatively stable and peaceful life and contacts, which gradually leads to the accumulation and precipitation of their general characters. During the Archaic period, the perfectly mixed language began spreading in the Greek world. The Homer and the theogony of Hesiod was sung on the Greek soil, a variety of Panhellenic-natured religious festivals and competition fairs prevailed in the Greek world, Hellen Genealogy and relevant legends were found in numerous records and literature works, etc., hence the birth of a homogeneous culture. The formation of the ancient Greek culture represented by language, religion and competition fair provides the agreed standards and objective content, which serves as an important link to unite the ancient Greeks.The fourth part deals with an in-depth analysis of the origin, formation and evolution process of the identity of ancient Greeks. During Homeric period, the ancient Greeks have had a preliminary identity with such a nation-natured appellation as the "Achaeans", yet without an obvious concept of alien ethnicity. During the Archaic period, on the basis of cultural consistency and under the new general appellation "Hellenes", while the Greeks began to prosper again, they still held relatively objective, impartial and positive conceptions and attitudes towards alien. In late Archaic period, with the rise of the Eastern "barbarians" represented by Persia, the ancient Greeks'concept of others began to change:on the one hand, they despised the "barbarian", and on the other hand they were afraid them. Such a mentality began to develop. Up to the 5th century BC, with the outbreak of the war between Greece and Persia as well as the development of the post-war slavery and the development needs of the situation in mainland Greece, the Greeks had not only had a clear self-definition from the inside, but also began to shift to the outside so as to define themselves with the differences between "others", which leads to the formation of such an opposing ideology as "Greeks-barbarians". At the end of the Classical period, having lost their superiority in political and economic status, the ancient Greeks had to change their identity. On the one hand, the traditional ancestral cultural identity continued to persist and play its role in the society; on the other hand, it began to pay more attention to cultural factors. In the Hellenistic period, due to the introduction of Greek culture and many other factors, the ancient Greeks's identity became more complicated.There is a continuous process of change in the formation of ancient Greeks. In this process, different times showed different features and contents.The process before the "Dark Period" was mainly the successive moving of the main body of ancient Greek nation to Greece. The Archaic period was mainly the formation process of culture. By and large, these two periods have laid the objective material foundation for the formation of the Ancient Greek nation, and they also saw the accumulation of the ancient Greek's inner emotions; therefore, their identity is mainly manifested by the understanding of the self-consistency from the outside. During the Classical period, with the invasion of foreign enemies, the ancient Greeks began to focus more and more on the self-definition from the outside and based on the differences between others, which can be well illustrated by the formation of the classic "Greeks-barbarians" concept. Until Hellenistic period, the traditional "Greeks-Barbarians" changed again.From the formation of ancient Greeks, it can be seen that culture and blood play an important role in the formation of a nation. The Greeks finally achieved the image and concept of their cultural nation with the constant accumulation of the consistency of the internal culture and the external interactions with "others".