Re: Deep Dates.

Sabine writes:

Hello,

Mark asked:  Did the Trojans speak Luwian?

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.

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 http://www.duke.edu/web/jyounger/exper iments/articles , 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:

"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).

This means: in the middle of the third millenium BC there were obviously already busy connections between the mentioned places!
 
Greetings from the middle of the great green (today it's rather blue)

Sabine

---

When re-reading the Iliad, I noted two uses of purple. In one, it was used as an adjective, but this seems to have been an artifact of translation. The other made it a noun, as I remember ('weaving purple').  Color words are intrinsically adjectives, and only with some difficulty can you push them into being nouns. 'Weaving purple' is not the same as 'weaving purple cloth', but like 'weaving [indigo] denim'. There is cochineal, "a red dye consisting of the dried bodies of female cochineal insects" (online Merriam Webster), but 'cochineal' is not a color word per se in the sense of Berlin and Kay. There is a Mediterranean fruit that also gives a red dye, but I forget this one.

The Iliad also used what was given as cyanus, representing Greek kuânos, which is "dark-blue enamel" (Liddell-Scott at Perseus site). Apparently, this is not a color word in Berlin and Kay sense either.

The Iliad  does not speak to what languages were being spoken, and never mentions the need for an interpretator. It occurs to me that Aeneas, if we are to accept him as representing some sort of kernal of historic reality, might have spoken Tyrrhenian, specifically, proto-Etruscan ;-) He might also have spoken Punic (after all, he does get involved with Dido (the "widow Dido", as Shakespeare lewdly states it).

The current issue of the National Geographic has a spread on ancient Greece. The accompanying map is mostly concerned with the Peloponesian War, but the article deals with Mycenae and Troy. It addresses the current dig underway. Contrary to the older literature, Troy VI (this would be the Troy of Herakles and Hesione) seems to have had very large lower city with extensive fortifications, housing perhaps 6,000 people.

This issue has the best map I've ever seen of Troy. Seen from a bird's eye view from the south looking towards the Thracian Chersonese, the geographical reality is plain to see. The fleet would seem to have been anchored in Besik Bay, which is on the Aegean, across the Scamander and over the hills from Hellespont-facing Troy. Troy guarded the entry from the Aegean to the Hellespont.

The article notes a recently discovered shard in the museum of Lamia: it depicts Mycenaean ships! "The slender oars suggest a fast warship rather than the deep, heavy ships that would have been used by merchants. ... The ship's high prow and stern give it the apperance of a half-moon. Surely it is no coincidence that the Iliad's most common adjective for ships is koronis -- curved." (p. 67).

The great question about Greek, of course, is why there is no obvious Anatolian substratum in Greek (borrowings yes, but no apparent toponyms, etc). This view may be changing, but so far, my reading gives no hint of the Anatolians being allowed to live in Greece before entering Anatolia. The suggestion is the Anatolians never entered Greece at all, but entered Anatolia, probably via the Black Sea, more than 1000 years before the Greeks ever came along. The region occupied by present day Bulgaria has known quite a few complete language replacements in its history.

In late Mycenaean times, we know there was also Thracian interposed between the Greeks and the Anatolians, as well as additional questions of exactly what language the Makedones spoke (Greek? Illyrian? Something else?).

As for Luwian being spoken in Troy, this indeed seems to be exactly the case. About the only question is if the royal dynasty represented by Priam was native or Greek.

Mark.