The ancient Greek tribes were groups of Greek-speaking populations living in Greece, Cyprus, and the various Greek colonies. They were primarily divided by geographic, dialectal, political, and cultural criteria, as well as distinct traditions in mythology and religion. Some groups were of mixed origin, forming a syncretic culture through absorption and assimilation of previous and neighboring populations into the Greek language and customs. Greek word for tribe was Phylē (sing.) and Phylai (pl.), the tribe was further subdivided in Demes (sing. Demos, pl. Demoi) roughly matching to a clan. The name Pelasgians was used exclusively by the ancient Greek writers, who referred to the populations they considered the ancestors of the Greeks or "pre-Hellenic". Some, mainly later ones, use it to describe purely Greek populations. With the dominion of land passing on from one tribe to the other, cultural exchange through art and trade, and frequent alliances toward common goals, the ethnic character of the different tribes had become primarily political by the dawn of the Hellenistic period. The Roman conquest of Greece, the subsequent division of the Roman Empire into Greek East and Latin West, as well as the advent of Christianity, molded the common ethnic and political Greek identity once and for all to the subjects of the Greek world by the 3rd century AD.

Ancestors

Greek tribes

Late Bronze Age: Homeric Age of the Iliad (circa 1200 BC)

Hellenes

Iron Age: Archaic and Classical Greece (from circa 800 BC)

Archaic and Classical Greece after Late Bronze Age collapse and Dorian Invasion

Hellenes

Pre-Greek and non-Greek tribes (later Hellenized)

Pre-Greek and non-Greek tribes who became hellenized and whom some of the later Greek tribes claimed descent from