Re: Greater Pelasgia

From: John Croft
Message: 1554
Date: 2000-02-18

The sylvan Sabine wrote in reply to my post

> >there is no trace of Anatolian refugees in Crete and yet we find that
> Kn-ss-
> (Knossos) was already a major site 22-2500 BCE and that they too
seemed
> to speak a -ss-, -nd- language.<
>
> Wrong (except you really mean the word 'refugee'... ;-))!
> Knossos started as one of the earliest Neolithic sites in Greece
(from the
> late 7th. mill.) Its first -later- real settlement, "attested in the
> earliest level of EN 1, is attributed to the arrivals of immigrants
of a
> higher cultural level"(permanent
> architecture, fully developed pottery) Davaras in: Neolithic Culture
in
> Greece, Athens 1966. So no refugees, but settlers.

Thanks for this information. This is exactly what I was meaning... No
secondary Anatolian presence in Crete (after neolithic settlement, but
plenty of -ss-, -nd- places. Unless Glen's hypothetical semitoid
substratum produces such words (and I doubt it given Afro-Asiatics
C_C_C structures with inflected vowels to change related meanings), I
suspect the Macro-Pelasgian were the post neolithic aborigines of the
Aegean.

> As -nd- words already existed in Mycenaean (although in invisible
form...)
> and may well go back to Minoan Linear A (undeciphered, early 2nd.
millenium)
> and placenames of this kind show at least Bronze Age remains on the
surface
> (might be Neolithic underneath ...) the PIE theory for these suffixes
might
> well apply if a scenario like Faucounau's turns out to be correct.
Minoan
> civilization doesn't show any remarkable traces of immigration apart
from
> the Neolithic one, so it really is possible from an archaeological
point of
> view.

Sabine, your attempt to link Renfrew's Anatolian origin and a secondary
Kuban PIE origin for me does not work because of the connections
between PIE and Proto-Uralic, already discussed on this list.

> As for Atlantis: a new idea by the geoarchaeologist Eduard Zangger
says that
> the ingenious water/harbour systems he seems to have detected around
Troy
> (which is also connected to early Etruscan images of the labyrinth)
> identifies the Troy region with Atlantis - would fit perfectly into
the
> picture, because here was also were the later sea-peoples came from
...

Do you have a bibliographic reference for this? I can remember reading
a connection between the Weshwesh (mentioned in Egyptian records) with
Willwios (an early form of Illios = Troy). Certainly the
Denden=Danan=Dardenelles=Danaos identification seems strong, which
would suggest confirmation of Zangger's views.

> And Kretschmer's meaningful article on the -nd- suffix (in German)
was in
> Glotta 1925 (much older than 1970, John, just as the Article by
Blege/Haley
> on 'the Coming of the Greeks' in AJA where they offered a map of all
> those -nd- and -ss- sites around the Aegean - I believe that's the one
> Palmer uses, too)!

From Crete to Australia - what a marvellous tool we have here in the
web.

Warm regards

John