Ionia

The Ionians were one of the four main ancient Greek phyla or tribes, linked by their use of the Ionic dialect of the Greek language. The other three groups were the Achaeans, the Dorians and the Aeolians. They were known collectively as Hellenes. The Athenians, in the peninsula of Attica, were the only Ionians on the Greek mainland. The history of the Greek people is closely associated with the history of Greece, Constantinople, and Asia Minor.

The Achaeans

The Achaeans is one of the collective names used for the Greeks in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. The other names are the Danaans and Argives. In the historical period, the Achaeans were the inhabitants of the region of Achaea, a region in the north central part of the Peloponnese. Two groups of islands lie off the Peloponnesan coast: the Argo-Saronic Islands to the east, and the Ionian Islands to the west. Greece's first major civilizations, the Aegean or Mycenaean civilization, dominated the Peloponnese in the Bronze Age from the stronghold at Mycenae in the north-east of the peninsula.

Mycenae was the site of the cities of Sparta, Corinth, Argos and Megalopolis, and was the homeland of the Peloponnesian League. Sparta acquired two powerful allies, Corinth and Elis, by ridding Corinth of tyranny, and helping Elis secure control of the Olympic Games. Sparta continued strategies like this to gain other allies in their league. Sparta defeated Tegea in a frontier war and offered them a permanent defensive alliance; this was the turning point for Spartan foreign policy. After the Persian Wars the League was expanded into the Hellenic League, including Athens and other states. The Hellenic League was led by Pausanias.
Sparta withdrew and the Peloponnesian League was refounded with Sparta's original allies, while the Hellenic League turned into the Athenian-led Delian League. The two Leagues eventually came into conflict with each other in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC). During classical antiquity, the Peloponnese was at the heart of the affairs of ancient Greece. It fell to the expanding Roman Republic in 146 BC and became the province of Achaea.

The city states of this region formed a confederation known as the Achaean League which was influential during the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. The Homeric Achaeans would have been a part of the Mycenaean civilization that dominated Greece from ca. 1600 BC, with a history as a tribe that may have gone back to the prehistoric Hellenic immigration in the late 3rd millennium BC. Linear B is a script that was used for writing Mycenaean, an early form of Greek. Some Hittite texts mention a nation lying to the west called Ahhiyawa- identified with the Achaeans of the Trojan War and the city of Wilusa with the legendary city of Troy. Achaeans, Argives, and Danaans are names used interchangeably by Homer, to signify the Greek allied forces.

The Aeolians
The Aeolians were one of the ancient Greek tribes. Originating in Thessaly, they moved their location when the Dorians were attacking the Achaeans and then abandoned most of the Mycenaean territories. Thessaly was home to an extensive Neolithic culture around 2500 BC. Later, in ancient Greek times, the lowlands of Thessaly became the home of baronial families, such as the Aleuads of Larissa or the Scopads of Crannon. These baronial families organized a federation across the Thessaly region, later went on to control the Amphictyonic League in northern Greece. The Thessalians were renowned for their cavalry. Coins were invented in Lydia around 660 BC.
The Persians enter Greek history after they conquered the Lydians and the Greek city-states of Ionia that were previously controlled by the Lydians who as warriors were also famous archers. Lydia arose as a Neo-Hittite kingdom following the collapse of the Hittite Empire in the twelfth century BC and remained a satrapy after Persia's conquest by the Macedonian king Alexander the Great. Alexander I of Macedon, son of Amyntas, is believed to have declared independence from Persia and participated in the Olympic games. The Persians had the sympathy of a number of Greek city-states, including Argos-a major stronghold of Mycenaean times, which had pledged to defect when the Persians reached their borders.
Tegea (in Arcadia) struggled against Spartan hegemony in Arcadia and was finally conquered ca 560 BCE. In the fourth century Tegea- the religious center of ancient Greece joined the Arcadian League and struggled to free itself from Sparta. Due to its remote, mountainous character, Arcadia has always been a classical refuge. So during the Dorian invasion, when Mycenaean Greek was replaced with Doric Greek along the coast of the Peloponnes, it survived in Arcadia, developing into the Arcadocypriot dialect of Classical Antiquity.

During the Greco-Persian Wars (499 BC-448 BC) the Aleuads joined the Persians. In the end, the only ally the Athenians had in the Battle of Marathon were the Plataeans, with whom Athens had formed an alliance since the late sixth century BC. The name Aeolian comes from the fact that they were considered to be the legendary decedents of Aeolus son of Hellen, the mythological patriarch of the Hellenes.
The Aeolians took over some of the abandoned territory and built the cities of Delphi and a few cities on islands near Asia Minor as well as helping the Ionians build Athens. They began building these cities well after the Mycenaeans were defeated, and gave rise to the Aeolian dialect of the Greek language. Tyre appears on monuments as early as 1300 BC. Strabo refers to the city of Acre as once a rendezvous for the Persians in their expeditions against Egypt. The city of Acre was also assaulted and captured by Alexander Jannaeus, by Cleopatra VII of Egypt and by Tigranes II of Armenia.

In 148 BC the Romans formally incorporated Thessaly into the province of Macedonia, but in AD 300 Thessaly was made a separate province with its capital at Larissa. The city retained civic life under the Roman Empire; Thessaly was sacked in 395 by the Goths.

The Dorians

The Dorians were one of the principal ancient Greek tribes, the other three being the Achaeans, the Ionians and the Aeolians. Traditional accounts place their origins in the north, north-eastern regions of Greece, ancient Macedonia and Epirus, whence obscure circumstances drove them south into the Peloponnese, to certain Aegean islands, and to parts of the coast of Asia Minor.
The Dorians are mentioned in passing by many authors and inscriptions but the two chief classical authors to relate their origins are Herodotus and Pausanias. The customs of the Spartan state and its illustrious individuals are detailed at great length in such authors as Plutarch. Herodotus mentions that the "people now called the Dorians" were neighbors of the Pelasgians of Thessaly. Pausanias relates that the Achaeans of the Peloponnesus were driven from their lands by Dorians coming from Oeta, a mountainous region bordering on Thessaly. They were led by Hyllus, a son of Hercules, but were defeated by the Achaeans. Under other leadership they managed to defeat the Achaeans and remain in the Peloponnesus, an event called "the return of the Heracleidae." They had built ships at Naupactus in which to cross the Gulf of Corinth. Pausanias goes on to describe the conquest and resettlement of Laconia, Messenia, Argos and elsewhere, and the emigration from there to Crete and the coast of Asia Minor. The Doric dialect was spoken along the coast of the Peloponnese, in Crete and southwest Asia Minor.

In later periods other dialects predominated, most notably the Attic, upon which the Koine or common Greek language of the Hellenistic period was based. In addition to their Doric dialect of Greek, these colonies retained their characteristic Doric calendar (Hellenic Calendar) revolving round a cycle of festivals of which the Hyacinthia and the Carneia were especially important. For there was no uniform calendar imposed upon all of Classical Greece—began soon after the June solstice, or connected the orientation of Minoan palaces with the summer rising of Sirius. In Egypt, however, the calendar year, marked with the summer rising of the Nile, begins with the rising of Sirius ("Sothis") in the Egyptian calendar. Leading religious and political sites on the Hellenic mainland began their calendar with the rising of Sirius: Olympia, Delphi, Athens (Attic calendar), Epidauros, and other Greek city-states with Mycenaean origins.
From the Dorian invasion to 1200 BC, Hittite power in Anatolia collapsed with the destruction of their capital Hattusa and that the late 19th and the 20th dynasties of Egypt also suffered invasions of the Sea Peoples at this time, a time of great upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean. Though most of the Doric invaders settled in the Peloponnese, they also settled on Rhodes and in Asia Minor. The Dorians also invaded Crete. In later times the Dorian Hexapolis (the six Dorian cities) would arise: Halikarnassos (Halicarnassus) and Knidos (Cnidus) in Asia Minor, Kos, and Lindos, Kameiros, and Ialyssos on the island of Rhodes. These six cities would later become rivals with the Ionian cities of Asia Minor.

The Ionians
The Ionians were one of the four main ancient Greek phyla or tribes. The northern shores of the Aegean Sea, in Thrace, were also home to Greek colonists of Ionian descent and the French city of Marseille was founded by Ionians from Phocaea in Ionia. The middle section of the Greek-speaking western coast of Asia Minor was actually called "Ionian" and its inhabitants so outshone the other Asian Greeks, the southern Dorians and northern Aeolians, that Asians used the term "Ionian" (Assyrian "Yamanni") to refer to all Greeks.
Mycenaean is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, spoken on the Greek mainland and on Crete in the 16th to 11th centuries BC, before the Dorian invasion. The reconstructed Mycenaean Greek name of the place is Mukanai (long a), which has the form of a plural, like Athanai. The change of a to e is a development of later Attic-Ionic. View from the acropolis, or "high city".The settlement pattern at Mycenae during the Bronze Age was a fortified hill surrounded by hamlets and estates. Missing is the dense urbanity present on the coast (such as at Argos). It is believed that Mycenae was settled by by Indo-Europeans who practiced farming and herding, close to 2000 BC. Scattered sherds have been found from this period, 2100 BC to 1700 BC. At the same time, Minoan Crete developed a very complex civilization which interacted with Mycenae.
In the Temple at the citadel, a scarab of Queen Tiye matriarch of the Amarna family of Egypt - married to Amenhotep III - was placed in the "Room of the Idols", alongside at least one statue. Amenhotep III's relations with m-w-k-i-n-u,Mukana. Tiye herself had one known brother: Anen who served as the second prophet of Amun during her husband's reign. Mycenae's political, military and economic influence likely extended as far as Crete, Pylos in the western Peloponnese, and to Athens and Thebes. Hellenic settlements were already being placed on the coast of Anatolia. A collision with the Hittite empire over their sometime dependency at a then strategic location, Troy, was to be expected. There was in fact a total eclipse of the sun in the Aegean on March 5, 1223 BC. A late date is implied for the Trojan War, which would, in that case, have been against Troy VIIa after all. The Perseids would have been in power ca. 1380, the date of a statue base from Kom el-Heitan in Egypt recording the itinerary of an Egyptian embassy to the Aegean in the time of Amenophis III.