Ancient Greek From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article is about the language. For Ancient Greek culture in general, see Ancient Greece. For Ancient Greek population groups, see List of ancient Greek tribes. "Classical Greek" redirects here. For the culture, see Classical Greece. Ancient Greek Hellnik Inscription about the construction of the statue of Athena Parthenos in the Parthenon, 440/439 BC Region eastern Mediterranean Era developed into Koin Greek by the 4th century BC Language family Indo-EuropeanHellenicoAncient Greek Writing system Greek alphabetLanguage codes ISO 639-2 grc ISO 639-3 grc (includes all pre-Modern stages) Glottolog anci1242[1] Map of Ancient (Homeric) Greece This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. Beginning of Homer's Odyssey Ancient Greek is the form of Greek used in ancient Greece and the ancient world around the ninth to sixth centuries BC (the Archaic period), around the fifth to fourth centuries BC (Classical period), and around the third century BC to sixth century AD (Hellenistic period). It is antedated in the second millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek. The language of the Hellenistic phase is known as Koine (common), while the language from the late period onward features no considerable differences from Medieval Greek. Koine is regarded as a separate historical stage of its own, although in its earlier form, it closely resembled the Classical. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects. Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of classical Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a standard subject of study in educational institutions of the West since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical phases of the language.