Re: Greater Pelasgia

Sorry, I can't buy into this Greater Pelasgia idea.

If you're going to use ancient authority, there are other references that could be cited:

Herodotos, in addition to Mark's post, in (II 50-55) describes the Pelasgians as natives who were "transformed" into Greeks after the invasion of Danaos, and describes the Egyptian Danaos as having taught the Pelasgians (not the Hellenes) the worship of the gods.

Diodoros Sikeliotes refers to Kadmos as having taught the Pelasgians the use of Phoenician letters.

Euripides, in a lost fragment quoted in Strabo, wrote :

Danaos, the father of fifty daughters, on coming to Argos took up his abode in the city of Inachos and throughout Hellas he laid down the law that all people hitherto named Pelasgians were to be named Danaans.

Aischylos, in his play 'the Suppliants' clearly identifies Pelasgians with later Hellenes.

Note that "suppliants" in Greek is "hiketides", adjective "hikesios", a pun on "hyksos".

Other writers saw Pelasgians all over Greece, sometimes as "proto"-Hellenic, sometimes as non-Hellenic.

So based on these references, and hopefully supported by archaeological interpretations and linguistic evidence, I offer the following scenario :

In the early 18^th century BCE, a violent movement took place in the Middle East, perhaps originating in the far north of the area, which mixed Hurrian and Indo-European elements with a predominantly Semitic population, and introduced a new military technology of horses, light war chariots, composite bow and improved bronze swords. Sweeping down into Egypt, which was in some political disarray, they established a powerful kingdom at least in Lower Egypt. Manetho called these conquerors "Hyksos". Then, taking to the sea, just as later land-based conquerors such as the Arabs and Mongols would do, they harried the prosperous and civilised Aegean and Crete (the three palaces of Mallia, Phaistos and Knossos were all destroyed about this time (MMII/MMIII) but soon rebuilt). Bands of these conquerors landed in Greece and established a base (Semitic Makhanah > Greek Mykenai). Here they found the "acorn-eating" Pelasgians, living in what Emily Vermeule has characterised (for MHII) as "extreme poverty and marginality" and "almost neolithic" conditions. These were the builders of the Shaft Graves whose "furious splendour", again citing Emily Vermeule, had no predecessor in the low-level MHII conditions.

When Knossos was rebuilt, although continuing native Cretan style, there were however subtle innovations, such as the extensive portrayal of gryphons (Gk. "gryps" < Semitic "k@..." (@=shwa)), winged sphinxes, horses in the "flying gallop" position, new styles of knives which while locally made echoed contemporary Syrian styles. All of this suggests a Hyksos presence, which was then extended to southern Greece with the building of the Greek palaces with their heavy Cretan influence.

With the expulsion of the Hyksos (around 1570), in which there seems to have been some sort of alliance between Egypt and the Aegean (Ahmose's mother Ahhotpe is described as Mistress of the Haw Nebut (normally seen as the Aegean islands), the strong native traditions of Egypt and Crete soon re-asserted themselves. However, in backward mainland Greece, the Hyksos-founded dynasties continued. Of course, the control of the Hyksos dynasts was essentially limited to the areas surrounding their cities. In the backwoods and mountains, there remained the unassimilated Greeks, who were not a part of this new civilisation. So you would have had the Danaan Greeks speaking a Greek heavily influenced by the Egyptian and Semitic speech of their masters (rather like the Norman influence on English), and the native "Pelasgian" Greeks speaking a more primitive form of the same language.

Under the peace established by the powerful Egyptian 18^th Dynasty, the Hyksos dynasties flourished, along with the rest of the eastern Mediterranean. Eventually, around 1450BCE, under circumstances which are hard to recover due to their almost identical cultures, the Mycenean Greeks took over Crete, as is recorded in the tomb painting of Rekhmire, a court official of Tuthmosis III.

Early in the following century, the waning of Hittite power, had allowed the establishment of "robber baronies" along the west coast of Anatolia. One of these, the Ahhiyawa, took to raiding the northern Aegean and Greek mainland. Establishing themselves at Elis, under the legendary leadership of Pelops, they conquered all of the region named after him, Peloponnesos. These Achaeans (for it is they) established themselves in Mycenai (the Atreides dynasty) and conquered Crete. The Myceneans who either refused to succumb, or otherwise escaped Achaean domination, came to be the Cretan Pelasgians, who, as Diodoros Sikeliotes wrote, arrived in Crete after the Eteocretans, but before the Dorians. The last act in the Achaean conquest was the capture of Kadmid Thebes, the last of the Hyksos dynasties, a generation before the Trojan War.

So we come to the Sea Peoples, who included Etruscans (Trs), Danaans (Tanayu), Achaeans (Iqws) and Pelasgians (Prst). Not only were the Cretan Pelasgians involved in the establishment of Philistia (Pleti and Kreti), but also colonised Cyprus, whose dialect has many similarities with Arkadian, which is presumably the dialect of the Myceneans). I agree that the Philistines are named for the Pelasgians. There is a gloss somewhere (I forget where) of PELASTIKON for PELASGIKON. My own opinion is that PELASTIKOS is the original, and that PELASGIKON came about as an orthographic confusion between gamma and tau.

Then came the Dorian invasions, or to give them their traditional appellation, the Return of the Heraklidai, whose mission was to wrest back for Hyksos rule the cities usurped by the Achaeans. And, the rest, as they say, is history.

So, in conclusion, I see the term "Pelasgian" as a generalised name for all unassimilated, tribal, conservative, marginal groups, who are not, for whatever reason, considered part of the "Hellenic" scene, even though the Hellenes saw them as their ancestors. It follows therefore, that I do not believe in "Greater Pelasgia". As to the "Pelasgian" language, those Pelasgians who "became" Danaans, according to Herodotos, Diodoros, Euripides, Aischylos, they at least must have been "proto"-Greek speakers.

The advantage of this scenario is that the arrival of the Greeks is no longer a problem. Their being seen as chariot-riding all-conquering but not very numerous invaders poses enormous problems concerning the timing of their entry, the more so considering the lack of any evidence for such an invasion. It also does away with the problem of the elusive, yet advanced civilisation of the "Pre-Hellenes", who apparently contributed so much to Greek vocabulary. It also allows you to postulate any number of Proto-IE, IE strictu sensu, Tyrrhenian, Anatolian or whatever strata of pre-Greeks, since they all become the undifferentiated clay out of which the wondrous Classical Greek civilisation was constructed.

There is also one test, which would prove or disprove the central tenet of this scenario. That is if someone would undertake a rigorous and scrupulous comparison of the acknowledged non-Indo-European element of the Ancient Greek lexicon with Ancient Egyptian and Semitic. This would be an arduous task for which I am certainly not equipped. Unfortunately it seems that within professional Academia there is an insurmountable wall between Classics and Egyptology, and those few who have tried to scale it (e.g. Michael Astour with his comparison of Greek and Semitic mythology "Helleno-Semitica") have been pushed to the "fringe" or otherwise ostracised. All I can offer are the two standard Homeric words for the sword, a weapon which must have been as central to the Heroic Greek Age as the Colt 45 to the mythology of the Wild West. These are "xiphos" and "phasganon", neither of which has an IE etymology, from the Egyptian "sft" (knife) and the Semitic root "psg" (cleave).

Lots of luck with your speculations, though, which I find, like the one on the Normans, very thought-provoking.

Cheers

Dennis