Editing Greeks (section)

===Continuity===
[[File:Byzantine Greek Alexander Manuscript Bracca (cropped).JPG|thumb|Alexander the Great in [[Byzantine Emperor]]'s clothes, by a manuscript depicting scenes from his life (between 1204 and 1453)]]

The most obvious link between modern and ancient Greeks is their language, which has a documented tradition from at least the 14th century BC to the present day, albeit with a break during the [[Greek Dark Ages]] from which written records are absent (11th–8th cent. BC, though the [[Cypriot syllabary]] was in use during this period).<ref name=Adrados>{{harvnb|Adrados|2005|pp=xii, 3–5}}.</ref> Scholars compare its continuity of tradition to [[Chinese language|Chinese]] alone.<ref name=Adrados/><ref name="Browning">{{harvnb|Browning|1983|p=vii: "The Homeric poems were first written down in more or less their present form in the seventh century B.C. Since then Greek has enjoyed a continuous tradition down to the present day. Change there has certainly been. But there has been no break like that between Latin and Romance languages. Ancient Greek is not a foreign language to the Greek of today as Anglo-Saxon is to the modern Englishman. The only other language which enjoys comparable continuity of tradition is Chinese."}}</ref> Since its inception, Hellenism was primarily a matter of common culture and the national continuity of the Greek world is a lot more certain than its demographic.<ref name=Roberts1/><ref name=ADS>{{harvnb|Smith|1991|pp=29–32}}.</ref> Yet, Hellenism also embodied an ancestral dimension through aspects of Athenian literature that developed and influenced ideas of descent based on autochthony.<ref>{{harvnb|Isaac|2004|p=504: "Autochthony, being an Athenian idea and represented in many Athenian texts, is likely to have influenced a broad public of readers, wherever Greek literature was read."}}</ref> During the later years of the Eastern Roman Empire, areas such as [[Ionia]] and [[Constantinople]] experienced a Hellenic revival in language, philosophy, and literature and on classical models of thought and scholarship.<ref name=ADS/> This revival provided a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage.<ref name=ADS/> Throughout their history, the Greeks have retained their language and [[Greek alphabet|alphabet]], certain values and cultural traditions, customs, a sense of religious and cultural difference and exclusion (the word ''[[barbarian]]'' was used by 12th-century historian [[Anna Komnene]] to describe non-Greek speakers),<ref>Anna Comnena. ''[[Alexiad]]'', Books 1–15.</ref> a sense of Greek identity and common sense of ethnicity despite the undeniable socio-political changes of the past two millennia.<ref name=ADS/> In recent anthropological studies, both ancient and modern Greek osteological samples were analyzed demonstrating a bio-genetic affinity and continuity shared between both groups.<ref>{{harvnb|Papagrigorakis|Kousoulis|Synodinos|2014|p=237: "Interpreted with caution, the craniofacial morphology in modern and ancient Greeks indicates elements of ethnic group continuation within the unavoidable multicultural mixtures."}}</ref><ref>{{harvnb|Argyropoulos|Sassouni|Xeniotou|1989|p=200: "An overall view of the finding obtained from these cephalometric analyses indicates that the Greek ethnic group has remained genetically stable in its cephalic and facial morphology for the last 4,000 years."}}</ref> There is also a direct genetic link between ancient Greeks and modern Greeks.<ref name="Gibbons2017">{{cite journal |last1=Gibbons |first1=Ann |title=The Greeks really do have near-mythical origins, ancient DNA reveals |journal=Science |date=2 August 2017 |doi=10.1126/science.aan7200 }}</ref><ref name="Lazaridis2017">{{harvnb|Lazaridis|Mittnik|Patterson|Mallick|2017}}</ref>