Re: Deep Dates.

From: Ivanovas/Milatos
Message: 439
Date: 1999-12-06

��<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN"> <HTML><HEAD> <META content="text/html; charset=unicode" http-equiv=Content-Type> <META content="MSHTML 5.00.2014.210" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE></STYLE> </HEAD> <BODY bgColor=#ffffff> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Hello,</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Mark asked:  Did the Trojans speak Luwian? </FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">There is an interesting article on this subject by Edwin Brown (who has also tried - not always convincingly to me - to show a number of Luwian words to have supplied the words for the acronyms of Linear A: The Linear-A Signary: Tokens of Luvian Dialect in Bronze Age Crete. In: Minos 27/28, 1992/93) in: Qui miscuit utile dulci, Festschrift for Paul Lachlan MacKendric, ed. G. Schmeling, Wauconda 1998: Linear A on Trojan Spindlewhorls, Luvian-Based FANAX at Cnossus. In this article he identifies the inscription on two clay spindlewhorls found by Schliemann in Troy as Luwian (e.g. Pu-ria as *puriyas with the help of the Hittite cognate reduplicated 'purpura-' (is that the basic root for the color word we have been looking for?) meaning 'clod' or 'lump', in Hittite, connected with the bread ideogram to mean 'dumpling' (p. 53, as for the color connections we might use this: "*puro- in its suffixed form *pur-en- is thought to have yielded Greek, 'stone' of a pitted fruit"p. 54 either hinting at a fruit originally giving red color or the molluscs having this 'knubby' form they have...), from which he concludes that the word here designates the whorl itself. He also mentions newer Trojan finds "which now include a bit of undoubted Luvian writing, on a Troy VII biconvex seal inscribed with Luvian hieroglyphs", p. 53.</FONT></DIV> <DIV> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">As for the Neolithic/Bronze Age connections between cultures around the Mediterranean from an archaeological point of view you might want to have a look at <A href="http://www.duke.edu/web/jyounger/experiments/articles">http://www.duke.edu/web/jyounger/experiments/articles</A> , where John Younger, a specialist on BA Aegean glyptics, published a paper called: A Balkan-Aegean-Anatolian Glyptic Koine in the Neolithic and EBA Periods (from a lecture he held in an 1987 conference that hasn't been published until now), containing, e.g. this:</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">"foot amulets seem to originate in the Early Neolithic period from Romania, through northern Greece, to Byblos; by EM II they are common enough in the Mesarra tholoi "(that's in Crete).</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">This means: in the middle of the third millenium BC there were obviously already busy connections between the mentioned places!</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode"></FONT> </DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Greetings from the middle of the great green (today it's rather blue)</FONT></DIV> <DIV><FONT face="Lucida Sans Unicode">Sabine<BR></DIV></FONT></BODY></HTML>