There had been a continuous Greek presence in Cappadocia since antiquity , [6] and the native Indo-European populations of Cappadocia, some of whose languages cf. Phrygian may have been closely related to Greek, were entirely Greek in their language and culture by at least the 5th century. Today their descendants can be found throughout Greece and the Greek diaspora worldwide across the globe.
The area known as Cappadocia today was known to the Ancient Persians as Katpatuka , a name which the Greeks altered into Kappadokia Cappadocia. Mycenaean Greeks set up trading posts along the west coast around B. In the Hellenistic era , following the conquest of Anatolia by Alexander the Great , Greek settlers began arriving in the mountainous regions of Cappadocia at this time.
As a result, Greek became the lingua franca of the region's natives. It would become the sole spoken language of the region's inhabitants within three centuries and would remain so for the next one thousand years. After the death of Alexander the Great, Eumenes of Cardia , one of the Diadochi of Alexander the Great, was appointed satrap of Cappadocia, where he set up Greek settlements and distributed cities to his associates.
In the following centuries the Seleucid Greek Kings founded many Greek settlements in the interior of Asia Minor, [10] and this region would become popular for the recruitment of soldiers. Unlike other regions of Asia Minor where Greeks would settle in cities, most of the Greek settlements in Cappadocia and other interior Anatolian regions were villages. In the centuries following Alexander the Great's death, Ariarathes, the son of a Persian satrap who formerly controlled Cappadocia, gained control of Cappadocia and left it to a line of his successors, who mostly bore the name of the founder of the dynasty.
These kings began to intermarry with neighboring Greek Hellenistic kingdoms, such as the Seleucids. During their reign Greek towns were beginning to appear in the southern regions of Cappadocia. Archelaus who was a Roman client prince was the last to rule as a king of Cappadocia. He was a Cappadocian Greek nobleman , [19] [20] possibly of Macedonian descent and was the first king of Cappadocia of wholly non-Persian blood. By late antiquity the Cappadocian Greeks had largely converted to Christianity.
