Why did the ancient Greeks only have one name.?
368652
the people of ancient times led an isolated and provincial existence...most never traveled beyond a village or a regions borders for any reason...or inddeed suposed that such areas even existed...there was not much education beyond the mrudiment of what one needed in one's trade of fishing ,farming,building and tool-making....there would be a specific vocabulary to each of these trades and generally one would be beyond one's depth when discussions went toward any other subject....trade names were and are frequently used even today....miller,a grinder of grains;smith,a worker of metals....goldsmith....archer,a soldier equipped with bow and arrow....fletcher,an arrowmaker....sharp,a tool sharpener or crafty ,agile warrior...(sharp and fletcher are the 17th and 18th most frequently used english family surnames)...so in ancient times one would be known as the town's miller(millerton)for all of their brief life...as in jos the miller. people didn't live to advanced ages so their was no need for further identification:a lifespan longer than 40 years was rare!!!!!!PEOPLE OF ANCIENT GREECE were known as sons of such and such a personage....as in modern names like peterson,ericsson,ralphson,gooddottir(BJORK),.....ICARUS SON OF DAEDALUS,TELAMACUS SON OF ODDYSEUS,...THERE IS THE FACTOR;EVEN TODAY WHERE NO FURTHER NAME IS NECESSARY...e.i.:madonna....prince...jackie 0...AS IN ANCIENT TIMES...PLATO,ARISTOTLE,PHIDIAS,ALEXANDER,CLEOPATRA...AS IN ROME....DIOGENES,CICERO,.....SOME ANCIENT NAMES WERE DRAWN FROM GREAT DEEDS...e.i.SCIPIO AEGYPTUS,DRUSUS GERMANICUS,..ETC.as lineages of important families shaped regions thru rulership or kingship; association with predecessors became more and more important to those governed!!!!early education in all countries involves lists of kings and rulers as elements of erudition...the rolls of inca rulers are still recited in peru,as are american presidents and their deeds!!!
48771
From the Greeks.  Named after Mount Olympus where the gods were and hence the first Greek Olympian games were invented. Covering wrestling, running marathons, disk throwing and many other sports.
369131
Irrelevant..I found your answer about the last names of your royalties very clever! I am Greek.
295958
Short answer:  the BASIC order of our letters goes back through Latin, through Greek to Phoenician and the earliest alphabets invented by speakers of "Northwest Semitic" languages (the group that includes Hebrew).   This order (with modifications necessitated by differences in the languages adapting the letters to their own languages) goes back to at least the mid 2nd millennium BC,  but we really don't know why they did it this way.\n\nIn fact, the very NAME "alphabet" betrays these roots!\n\n-----------------\nFuller answer (hang on!):\n\nThe LATIN letters were derived from a form of the GREEK alphabet, and the term "alphabet"  is based on the first two letters of the Greek alphabet --"alpha" and "beta" (so the idea of the word is the same as "a-b-c's").  But these Greek names are rather odd --meaningless, in fact. Why?  That's because the Greeks borrowed a number of the NAMES for their letters from the source of the letters themselves, the seafaring traders of Phoenicia.   The Phoenicians did not invent this system themselves, but were part of a cluster of related "Semitic" languages spoken centered in the regions later called Syria & Palestine.  The letter-names are derived from actual words which BEGAN with the sound that letter is used to represent (e.g., "aleph", meaning "ox").\n\nWe can actually still see much of the original Semitic order of the letters in the Latin alphabet, and even more in the Greek.   The original letters were at times used to represent a different sound from the original letter, esp when the original letter represented a sound unlike any in the language doing the borrowing.   (This is how the Greeks came up with the first set of VOWELS, which were not part of the original Semitic alphabet.)     The major changes/differences in ORDER were caused when the borrowing language dropped a letter it could not use...  and more often by adding letters needed in the borrower's language.  These new letters were most often added at the end, after "T", the final letter in the Semitic alphabets.  Later, after the early Latin alphabet was well-established, some letters"split" into variants, which were listed next to their "parent" letter.   Thus "I" and "J" come from one letter, "U" "V" and "W" were from one letter.\n\nSo when was did the SEMITIC order of the alphabet come about, and why?     Our earliest proven examples of the letters in the basic order used to this day are clay tablets the list the letters in order (perhaps for training scribes?) from the ancient Syrian city of Ugarit (the language, re-discovered in the 1920s is called "Ugaritic").  These show us that this order existed by at least 1300 BC. (with some additional letters for sounds that  were no longer found in later languages like Phoenician, Biblical Hebrew and Aramaic).\n\n(A few centuries later we find reflections of this order in the Bible.   The clearest examples are "acrostic" poetic passages in which  succeeding verses or sets of verses begins with the next letter of the alphabet. Psalm 119 is the most well-known example of this practice, and many English Bibles even mark the successive stanzas as "Aleph" "Beth", etc. ) \n\nBut we still do not know why they adopted THIS order!    Perhaps there is some ancient lost memory device or set of devices (story?  set of sentences?) in which this particular order was found useful for remembering the various letters.   Perhaps certain sounds were thought easy to group together (think of how "l m n" flows for us).      Many believe the inventors of the alphabet were speakers of a Semitic language living in or near Egypt.    So it is possible that the IDEA for an alphabets owed something to a part of the system of Egyptians hieroglyphics.  In that case, perhaps the gr
1007840
Interesting question. Since they were the ONLY two people in the world, where did everyone else come from?\nMythology is stupid isn't it? Now watch the christians make up stories and excuses for this lame book of bronze age jewish mythology...
794035
And in Greece it is a name only female, also elia is an olive!!!
647388
It's because it was common in the Ottoman empire,where Greece belonged for about 400 years.Foreign people visited Greece more often than other parts of the empire,because of the ancient greek civilisation.That's why it's considered to be "the greek way".In Greece,it is called Ottoman style.
668965
Ancient Greek society was very experimental.  Therefore, it is rumored that many "gave the other team" a try.  From there I'll allow you to use your own imagination.
183002
Eros is another name for Cupid (those crazy greeks and romans could never agree on what to call things, so they made up different names for the same stuff).
934734
There is only one God.\nAnd that God is Kind, Generous, Loving, Forgiving, etc.\nPeople may call Him by whatever name but they shouldn't bring in some other partner with Him.
1021598
I think it was from Greek mythology.  Asia was one of the Oceanids.  There was also an Anatolian (Turkish) king of that name.
158708
It was the form of rule in Sparta, where there were two hereditary kings. In Athens, it was mainly because of the extremely bad management by the Pisistratid tyrants. They ran things so poorly, and people mainly attributed this to their sole rule, so they decided to never let it happen again.
490448
The word Asia entered English, via Latin, from Ancient Greek Ασία (Asia; see also List of traditional Greek place names). This name is first attested in Herodotus (about 440 BC), where it refers to Asia Minor; or, for the purposes of describing the Persian Wars, to the Persian Empire, in contrast to Greece and Egypt. Herodotus comments that he is puzzled as to why three different women's names are used to describe a single land mass (Europa, Asia and Libya, referring to Africa), stating that most Greeks assumed that Asia was named after the wife of Prometheus but that the Lydians say it was named after Asias, son of Cotys who passed the name on to a tribe in Sardis.\n\nEven before Herodotus, Homer knew of a Trojan ally named Asios, son of Hyrtacus, a ruler over several towns, and elsewhere he describes a marsh as ασιος (Iliad 2, 461). The Greek term may be derived from Assuwa, a 14th century BC confederation of states in Western Anatolia. Hittite assu- "good" is probably an element in that name.\n\nAlternatively, the ultimate etymology of the term may be from the Akkadian word (w)aṣû(m), cognate of Hebrew יצא, which means "to go out" or "to ascend", referring to the direction of the sun at sunrise in the Middle East, and also likely connected with the Phoenician word asa meaning east. This may be contrasted to a similar etymology proposed for Europe, as being from Semitic erēbu "to enter" or "set" (of the sun). However, this etymology is considered doubtful, because it does not explain the fact that the term "Asia" first came to be associated with Anatolia, which actually lies west of the Semitic speaking areas.
412033
because their history would change...lol\n\nWe should not forget that Alexander the Great was from Macedonia not Greece.
634476
The name George has its origin in ancient Greek Geōrgios (Γεώργιος), a derivation of the noun geōrgos (γεωργός) "husbandman, farmer", a compound of gē (γῆ) "earth" and ergon (ἔργον) "work".\n\nThe name was rare in Antiquity, but became extremely popular in Christianity thanks to Saint George. It remains a popular name and has many variants in the different languages.
50336
Since 600 BC, Greeks used the name Persis for Persia / Iran. Persis was taken from Old Persian Pars or Parsa - the name of Cyrus's main clan that gave its name also to the region where the Persians lived (modern day province called Fars). Persian people likewise used the name of Younaan (instead of Hellas) for Greece. "Younan" in fact is taken from the name of Ionia, in the south-east of Greece.\n\nIn Latin, the name for the land was Persia. The name "Persia" until 1935 was the "official" name of Iran in the world, but Persian people inside their country since the Sassanian period have called it "Iran" meaning "the land of Aryans", the older version of which had been "Aryanam" as seen in ancient Iranian texts. They also used "Parsa" in the Achaemenids period.
635422
because the names we use today come from the names used by the ancient greeks and romans and they tended to name the constellations with characters from their mythology.