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 dialects centuries AD. After the division of the Roman Empire into the east and the west the earliest Modern Greek prevailed. The dialect distribution was then as follows: According to some scholars, Tsakonian is the only modern Greek dialect that descends from Doric, albeit with some influence from the Koine. Others include the Southern Italian dialects in this group, though perhaps they should rather be regarded as descended from the local Doric-influenced variant of the Koine. Ancient Greek dialects Ancient Greek in classical antiquity, before the development of the κοινή (koiné) "common" language of Hellenism, was divided into several dialects. Most