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There is precedent for a brilliant ethnicity collapsing into irrelevance - the ancient Greeks. One can see hints of their eventual greatness in the Minoan civilization, but after the collapse of that civilization at around 1400 BCE the Greeks returned to obscurity until about 600 BCE, at which point they steadily began to punch above their weight and contribute a disproportionate amount of the world's intellectual and artistic triumphs. Like modern Jews, the ancient Greeks too had a widespread diaspora, with far-flung colonies and a cultural impact hugely out of proportion to the population size of the actual ethnic group. They left their Hellenic stamp on much of the Near East and, even after having been conquered by the Romans, still were punching above their weight in literature and science. But then, at some point around 300 AD or so, their disproportionate influence steadily began to decrease. They returned to being just an ethnic group among others, not particularly distinguished in any way. Byzantium, as far as I know, was not rich in important intellectual or artistic innovations. There is little sign these days of what the Greeks, for a few memorable centuries, once were.
1400 BCE is about when actual Greek starts being used as the administrative language, instead of the Minoan language. The actual collapse is 300 years later. Though, the new hybrid culture is a rougher, more militaristic one, exemplified in the Iliad.
The Hagia Sophia puts every pagan temple before it to shame. The Latin west wouldn't make cathedrals or art nearly as beautiful until around the time of Constantinople's fall.
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This ignores the fact that there is little genetic or ethnic continuity between the 'Greeks' of 1600 BC (Minoans), the 'Greeks' of 300 BC ('Achaeans') and the modern 'Greeks'.
Minoans were pre-Indo-Europeans, who survived the invasions of the 3rd millennium BC, of mostly Neolithic Farmer/Anatolian extract.
The Achaeans were descendants of the Myceneans, who were themselves heavily diluted genetically, but still largely culturally, Indo-European. They were relatively genetically similar to the pre-IE population (i.e. Minoan-like) of Greece, with a minority admixture of Indo-European.
The modern Greeks (with the caveat that there is high variance between e.g. remote island populations and areas like Macedonia/Salonika) are descendants of those Achaean Greeks PLUS huge population exchanges in the Roman period (from Syria, from Africa, from Germania) AND large Slavic admixture in the Byzantine-Ottoman period.
In the classical period, similarly to India, Indo-European admixture decreased as you went south down the peninsula. If we think of Classical Greek ethnicity as essentially Indo-European culture sitting on top of a 1/3 Proto-Greek/IE, 2/3 Minoan-like genetic base, ironically modern Greeks are closest to the northern Mycenaeans- this is due to thousands of years of Slavic admixture (especially during the Middle Ages) increasing the IE/EHG/Steppe Herder genetics.
Picture looks something like:
Age 1, Minoan and Minoan-like 'Greeks': culturally Non-Indo-European, genetically mostly Neolithic farmer, non-Indo-European
Age 2, Mycenae->Classical Greece: culturally Indo-European, genetically 25% IE, 75% 'Minoan'
Modern Greeks: culturally Christian Orthodox/Southern European, genetically similar 33% IE/66% Non-IE
I don't think there is a ton of meaningful sense in which this is one ethnicity. The Greece of Aristotle has been wholly subsumed as a small part of the mixture of Slavs and Levantines and Anatolians, and the culture is gone. It was only really revived as a LARP by Philhellenes of the early 19th Century.
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