Ancient Greece and wine importance. Records inscribed on tablets in Linear B include details of wine, vineyards and wine merchants, as well as an early allusion to Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. Greeks embedded the arrival of winemaking culture in the mythologies of Dionysus and the cultural hero Aristaeus. Early remnants of amphoras show that the Mycenaeans actively traded wine throughout the ancient world in places such as Cyprus, Egypt, Palestine, Sicily and southern Italy. As the Greek city-states established colonies throughout the Mediterranean, the settlers brought grapevines with them and were active in cultivating the wild vines they encountered. Sicily and southern
Names of the Greeks "Yona", "Yonaka" to the Indo-Greeks. The term "Yunan" is used in current Persian, Arabic (), Azeri, Turkish, Hindi (यूनान), Indonesian and Malay. The related Hebrew name, "Yavan" or "Javan" (), was used to refer to the Greek nation in the Eastern Mediterranean in early Biblical times. There was an eponymous character Javan mentioned in "Genesis" 10:2. In later times it was used for all Hellenistic kingdoms (for example, the Maccabeans applied it to their Seleucid foes). "Yavan" is still the name used for modern Greece in contemporary Israel. Although the contemporary Chinese term for Greece (希臘 "Xīlà") is based on