Ethnicities around the world (beta)

People with Greek and South Italian ethnicity have ancient roots in the Greek peninsula, centered around the Aegean and Ionian Seas. In modernity, people with Greek and South Italian ethnicity may also be found in Cyprus, the Caucasus, southern Russia, and the Mezzogiorno region of southern Italy. South Italy was perhaps the first region to be settled by the ancient Greeks outside of the Greek peninsula, going back to the 8th century BCE. Greek culture and identity have dominated Western civilization for centuries, in part because of Alexander the Great’s conquest of much of the ancient world, and his introduction of Greek culture everywhere he conquered. The great philosophers Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle hail from ancient Greece, as do the giants of ancient literature, Homer and Sophocles, and the famed mathematicians and scientists Pythagoras, Euclid and Archimedes. The ancient Greeks also made significant contributions to the arts, exploration, politics, architecture, music, science, sports - the list goes on and on. Cultural diffusion between Greece and southern Italy yielded significant cultural development: the ancient Greek alphabet was imported to southern Italy and adopted by the Etruscans and eventually evolved into the Latin alphabet, the most widely used alphabet in the world.