Balkans
Antiquity

The Balkan region was the first area in Europe to experience the arrival of farming cultures in the Neolithic era. The Balkans have been inhabited since the Paleolithic and are the route by which farming from the Middle East spread to Europe during the Neolithic (7th millennium BC). The practices of growing grain and raising livestock arrived in the Balkans from the Fertile Crescent by way of Anatolia and spread west and north into Central Europe, particularly through Pannonia. Two early culture-complexes have developed in the region, Starčevo culture and Vinča culture. The Balkans are also the location of the first advanced civilizations. Vinča culture developed a form of proto-writing before the Sumerians and Minoans, known as the Old European script, while the bulk of the symbols had been created in the period between 4500 and 4000 BC, with the ones on the Tărtăria clay tablets even dating back to around 5300 BC.

The identity of the Balkans is dominated by its geographical position; historically the area was known as a crossroads of cultures. It has been a juncture between the Latin and Greek bodies of the Roman Empire, the destination of a massive influx of pagan Bulgars and Slavs, an area where Orthodox and Catholic Christianity met, as well as the meeting point between Islam and Christianity.

Albanic, Hellenic, and other Palaeo-Balkan languages, had their formative core in the Balkans after the Indo-European migrations in the region. In pre-classical and classical antiquity, this region was home to Greeks, Illyrians, Paeonians, Thracians, Dacians, and other ancient groups. The Achaemenid Persian Empire incorporated parts of the Balkans comprising Macedonia, Thrace (parts of present-day eastern Bulgaria), and the Black Sea coastal region of Romania beginning in 512 BC. Following the Persian defeat in the Greco-Persian Wars in 479 BC, they abandoned all of their European territories, which regained their independence. During the reign of Philip II of Macedon (359-336 BC), Macedonia rose to become the most powerful state in the Balkans. In the second century BC, the Roman Empire conquered the region and spread Roman culture and the Latin language, but significant parts still remained under classical Greek influence. The only Paleo-Balkan languages that survived are Albanian and Greek. The Romans considered the Rhodope Mountains to be the northern limit of the Peninsula of Haemus and the same limit applied approximately to the border between Greek and Latin use in the region (later called the Jireček Line). However large spaces south of Jireček Line were and are inhabited by Vlachs (Aromanians), the Romance-speaking heirs of Roman Empire.

The Bulgars and Slavs arrived in the sixth-century and began assimilating and displacing already-assimilated (through Romanization and Hellenization) older inhabitants of the northern and central Balkans. This migration brought about the formation of distinct ethnic groups amongst the South Slavs, which included the Bulgarians, Croats and Serbs and Slovenes. Prior to the Slavic landing, parts of the western peninsula have been home to the Proto-Albanians. Including cities like Nish, Shtip. This can be proven through the development of the names, for example Naissos > Nish and Astibos > Shtip follow Albanian phonetic sound rules and have entered Slavic, indicating that Proto-Albanian was spoken prior to the Slavic invasion of the Balkans.
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