Huh, unsure. Also clearly wrong - by Herodotus, if not earlier, the Greeks clearly understand themselves as a defineable cultural grouping, even if they often find smaller divisions (Athenians, Thebans, etc) more important.
Replies
It probably went all the way back to after the Trojan War, where the Greeks actually got the name they use to describe themselves.
jul 26, 2025, 8:41 pm • 6 0 • view
Also tricky and mostly wrong. So the word Classical Greeks use to describe themselves is Hellenes, of course, which appears only twice in Homer. But Homer uses Achaioi (Achaeans) to mean the same thing and that word appears to date from the bronze age, showing up in Hittite as Ahhiyawa.
jul 27, 2025, 2:12 am • 34 0 • view
To be clear, not as a term the Hittites gave the Greeks, but as a Hittite effort to transliterate what the Greeks - or at least some Greeks - were already calling themselves. Likewise, Homer uses Danaoi which is probably reflected in Bronze Age Egyptian 'Denyen.'
jul 27, 2025, 2:13 am • 25 0 • view
I've seen postulations that Achaean might also pop up in the Egyptian writings about the Sea People as Ekwesh.
jul 27, 2025, 1:22 pm • 0 0 • view
The nature of the Linear B (=Bronze Age Greek) corpus is such that you don't get 'slam dunk' evidence either way but broadly I'd suggest it is plausible and perhaps likely that Greek-speakers recognized themselves as an ethnic group fairly early. It just wasn't the most important identity.
jul 27, 2025, 2:16 am • 28 0 • view
Among other indicators, while we're here, is that the bronze age Greek palace cultures have similar material culture - indeed, it is common to point to the emergence of more distinctive regional material culture after LBAC as a sign of the breakdown of interconnectedness.
jul 27, 2025, 2:17 am • 27 0 • view
On balance, this strikes me as most likely someone over- and perhaps misreading someone they heard attempting to stress that the Greeks tended to consider themselves Athenian/Theban/etc first and 'Greek,' like, fifth and that panhellenic thinking intensifies notably post-480 and taking it too far.
jul 27, 2025, 2:19 am • 36 0 • view
But the very oldest piece of surviving Greek literature is the Iliad and it already demonstrates a sense that the Greeks (Achaioi, Danaoi, Argeioi) are a distinct, identifiable group who can be distinguished clearly from other (Trojans, Ethiopians, Thracians, Amazons) ethnic groups.
jul 27, 2025, 2:21 am • 43 0 • view
When did the Greeks first develop the idea of "barbarians" for those who spoke something else?
jul 28, 2025, 5:01 pm • 0 0 • view
Is it comparable to how, say, “nationalism” didn’t quite exist on medieval Europe, but at the same time, observers still noted clear distinctions between broad groups of people (like Germans vs. Italians) even when each individual group was not fully unified either politically nor linguistically?
jul 27, 2025, 2:42 am • 8 0 • view
Came here to ask that.
jul 27, 2025, 7:21 am • 0 0 • view
I was actually under the impression that the Greeks got their name from Helen of Troy (as the Trojan War was the first time the Greeks were semi-unified under the Amphictyonic League), but apparently I was way off on that.
jul 27, 2025, 2:55 am • 1 0 • view
The Greeks didn’t refer to themselves as the Sea Peoples?
jul 27, 2025, 2:27 am • 0 0 • view
'Sea Peoples' is, like, 66% a modern, invented term. The Egyptian documents present a multi-ethnic coalition of peoples, some of which - but not all - are described as 'of/from the sea' and so scholars coined 'sea peoples' to refer to the entire collection of different ethnic groups listed.
jul 27, 2025, 2:30 am • 10 1 • view
It’s rather unclear where those historical “sea peoples” came from. They were described folks they attacked. But they were multi-ethnic. That is clear. So, while they could have included some Greeks, it couldn’t have been just Greeks.
jul 27, 2025, 11:14 am • 0 0 • view
Personally, I’ve always been partial to the idea that the Sea Peoples started out as pirates from Sardinia.
jul 27, 2025, 2:51 pm • 0 0 • view
I think the Fall of Civilizations podcast talks about them in episode 18, on the ancient Egyptians.
jul 27, 2025, 11:14 am • 0 0 • view