The Origins of the Ancient Greek Hounds According to the prevalent opinion, the hound dog breed in general is the first dog breed worldwide. The primitive man was a hunter and his dog was a  hound. And it has to be like that, because the speedy hounds chased their prey in such a manner that the prey was forced to pass in front of the hunter, who was lurking in the bushes holding a club in his hand, or the prey would be so exhausted by the hard chase that it would fall down, facilitating its killing by the  hunter. The Greek Hound originated from the ancient Egyptian Greyhound, the primogenitor of the Mediterranean hound breeds, which came from the Abyssian  vicious dog Canis simensis or from the Assyrian Greyhound, both of them distant descendants of the Canis familiaris intermedius, son of Tomarctus, the first  dog on earth, small-sized, that looked like a hyena (we are talking millions of years ago!) In the 2nd millenium bC, or perhaps even earlier, about 4.000 years ago, the Cretans and later the Phoenicians, brought and traded from Egypt, especially  from the Nile lowland and the Near East, hounds in Greece. This primeval hound adapted to the climate and the land of Greece and cultivated with the  breeding of the Greeks. Those early breeds are depicted on the murals of the Palace of Tiryns, entitled “Departure for the Hunt” and “Wild Boar Hunt”, dated 3.500 years ago! From these hounds came the chasing or hare-hunting dogs of Xenophon’s age. For their evolution more than one thousand years have past. From these  hunting dogs originated the Hellenicos Ichnilatis.  Xenophon (who lived from 430 to 354 bC) apart from a historian, a philosopher and an army general, was a hunter and the first canine breeder in the world.  In his famous book “On Hunting”, Xenophon gives many advice to hunters and breeders of his age, most of them applicable even today.