this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2024
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TIL I have greek ancestors.
It'd be far more shocking if you didn't
Is it?
Surely through the massive quantities of generations through all of human history, at least a single individual happened to live in Greece
The greeks had colonies everywhere. Odessa and Marseille started as greek colonies. They copied the phoenician model of "where there is sea, we can colonize, reinforce, conquer and trade with".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_colonisation
And then Alexander the OK conquered the "entire" world. After his death, his empire was split into multiple hellenic(ie greek) kingdoms. Greek became the lingua franca, since the ruling class was greek, and greek culture was spread everywhere. Thats why the New Testament was written in greek.
Hanukkah is actually the celebration of the uprising of the jews against their greek rulers. If you are somewhat familiar with the history of the era, you might have heard about the Seleucids or the Ptolemies. Those were greek kingdoms. Cleopatra was a Ptolemy and she was the first in her dynasty who bothered to learn egyptian. All previous Ptolemy rulers only spoke greek, their court was greeks and some hellenized(greekified) jews and egyptians. The Ptolemies were extremely incestuous.
Then the romans came and conquered most of that. Some other greek kingdoms were taken back by their local population. Funnily enough, the last independent "greek" kingdom that survived was the most remote one, the Indo-Greek Kingdom.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greek_Kingdom
An indogreek kingdom that fought chinese raiders. Thats an interesting crossover.
They had colonies all over the mediterranean and middle east. Not so much north of the alps.
I mean germanic people/vikings raided/ruled southern Europe. The Mediterranean Sea was hugely important for trade and civilization, throughout the ages. Athens was a french duchy for a couple centuries, ruled by francs. Alps is not as isolating as, the Sahara desert. You have navigable rivers like Danube and southern France with access to the Mediterranean sea.
Does your average norwegian have some greek dna? Maybe not. But ultimately everyone fucked everyone and people fucked people near them. And the Mediterranean Sea facilitated a lot of fucking, trading and conquering between the countries that had access to it.
It's like saying "the mongols never conquered Greece, therefore greeks dont have mongol dna". The mongols fucked with turkic people and turkic(turks) people fucked with greek people. So i am sure greeks have some mongol dna.
There is this funny video of turkish youtubers who did dna tests
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TStTmMCtgBk
And many of them have majority greek dna or a big part of greek dna.
Not if they are Asian, Aboriginal Australian, or Pacific Islander