Ancient Near East continents (Europe, Asia, and Africa), including apart from its core in modern-day Iran, the territories of modern Iraq, the Caucasus (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Abkhazia), Asia Minor (Turkey), Thrace, Bulgaria, Greece, many of the Black Sea coastal regions, northern Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, Central Asia, parts of Pakistan, and all significant population centers of ancient Egypt as far west as Libya. It is noted in western history as the foe of the Greek city states in the Greco-Persian Wars, for freeing the Israelites from their Babylonian captivity, and for instituting Aramaic as the empire's official language. Ancient
Ancient Greek phonology velars . Which one they became depended on dialect and phonological environment. Because of this, certain words that originally had labialized velars have different stops depending on dialect, and certain words from the same root have different stops even in the same Ancient Greek dialect. Near or , the labialized velars had already lost their labialization in the Mycenaean period. Through "psilosis" ('stripping'), from the term for lack of (see below), the was lost even at the beginnings of words. This sound change did not occur in Attic until the Koine period, but occurred in East Ionic and Lesbian Aeolic,