Massalia was an ancient Greek colony (apoikia) on the Mediterranean coast, east of the Rhône. Settled by the Ionians from Phocaea in 600 BC, this apoikia grew up rapidly, and its population set up many outposts for trading in modern-day Spain, Corsica and Liguria. Massalia persisted as an independent colony until the Roman campaign in Gaul in the 1st Century BC. The ruins of Massalia still exist in the contemporary city of Marseille, which is considered the oldest city of France and one of Europe's oldest continuously inhabited settlements.

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, Italy, southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.