The indigenous people who inhabited Greece and parts of Italy were known as the "Pelasgians." They were of Hebrew-descent. One of the ancestors of the Israelites was a guy named "Peleg."
Between 2000 and 1900 BC, other tribes started migrating into the Greece penninsula. The Minoans were a mediterranean type. The Ionians, who make up the majority of the country, were descendants of the Hittite ruling class, and much of the Greek language derived from them. About 1200 BC, the Dorians were descendants of the Nordic Goths. They made up most of the ruling class.
After the Dorians took over, a dark age followed. At the end of this time, classical Greece began to emerge (750 B.C.) as a loose composite of city-states with a heavy involvement in maritime trade and a devotion to art, literature, politics, and philosophy. Greece reached the peak of its glory in the 5th century B.C., but the Peloponnesian War between 431�404 BC weakened the nation, and it was conquered by Philip II and his son Alexander the Great of Macedonia, who considered themselves Greek. By the middle of the 2nd century BC, Greece had declined to the status of a Roman province. It remained within the eastern Roman Empire until Constantinople fell to the Crusaders in 1204. In 1453, the Turks took Constantinople and by 1460, Greece was a province in the Ottoman empire. The Greek war of independence began in 1821, and by 1827 Greece won independence with sovereignty guaranteed by Britain, France, and Russia.