Religion in the Middle East compose almost 600,000. Syrian Orthodox number about 1 million in Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon, with the great majority being in Syria. The ethnic Greeks, who had once inhabited large parts of the western Middle East and Asia Minor, have declined since the Arab conquests and recently severely reduced in Turkey, as a result of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, which followed World War I. Today the biggest Middle Eastern Greek community resides in Cyprus numbering around 793,000 (2008). Cypriot Greeks constitute the only Christian majority state in the Middle East, although Lebanon was founded with a Christian majority in the
Ancient Greek verbs three tenses are used, and they distinguish aspect only, not time: The optative mood likewise uses these three tenses, but there is also a future optative, used mainly to report indirectly what would be a future indicative in direct speech. Ancient Greek has no perfect progressive or past perfect progressive. Thus, the meaning "he has been doing" is typically expressed with the present tense, and "he had been doing (earlier)" is expressed with the imperfect tense: For further information on the endings, see Ancient Greek grammar (tables). Dictionaries of Ancient Greek usually give six principal parts for any verb. For