Middle Bronze Age migrations (Ancient Near East) Ancient North Eurasian ancestry from eastern Europe and the Eurasian steppe associated with a migration of Indo-European speakers, likely proto-Greek. Thus, while this is evidence of Mycenaeans being related to the Minoans, it also provides support of a pre-Greek migration into mainland Greece which was in part ancestral to the Mycenaeans. For reasons unknown, the Hittites moved into central Asia Minor, conquering the Hattians and later adopting their culture and name. This invasion by the Hittites displaced other peoples living in Anatolia, who in turn displaced the Middle Helladic Greek-speaking peoples to the west. This enforced an exodus from Northwestern
Ancient Greek phonology and this cluster underwent metathesis early in the Ancient Greek period. Metathesis is likely in this case; clusters of a voiced stop and , like , do not occur in Ancient Greek, since they change to by assimilation (see below), while clusters with the opposite order, like , pronounced , do occur. Ancient grammarians, such as Aristotle in his "Poetics" and Dionysius Thrax in his Art of Grammar, categorized letters () according to what speech sounds ( 'elements') they represented. They called the letters for vowels ('pronounceable', singular ); the letters for the nasals, liquids, and , and the letters