Dennis wrote
> So John has come to my point of view. Of course I agree with
Pelasgians = Sons of the Soil, natives in general. I'm not sure that I
agree however with your placing them and the Tyrrhenians in the
neolithic. This begs the question - who were the Trojans of Troy I/II?
These, for me, are the Tyrrhenians, speaking the ancestor of Etruscan.
My reasons are twofold :
> 1. the congruence of the names all deriving from a root T(u)R(u/o)S;
> 2. the forms Tyrrhenos/Tyrsenos.
> This last suggests to me that the Greeks must have been familiar at
an early date with the name Tyrsenos for it to have undergone the Greek
development /s > h/. This development predates Linear B, since the
/s>h/ development is complete in Linear B texts. So we're talking
pre-15th century. This means that Tyrrhenos cannot be a classical Greek
resurrection of a pre-EBA name, since by classical times the /s>h/
sound change was no longer operating, so the name that would have been
resurrected would have been Tyrsenos.
> So this all suggests to me that the Greeks were very early in contact
with Tyrsenoi, and sufficiently impressed with them to use their name
often enough for it to undergo the normal phonetic development of
Greek. In other words, it is not a resurrected or recherche/literary
form. Conclusion : the Tyrsenoi/Tyrrhenoi were the people of the
sophisticated technically advanced culture of Troy I/II which was
destroyed c.2250BCE.
Dennis I think your arguments here are thoroughly convincing. Just a
couple of pointers.
Archaeologically there seems to have been a seemless cultural
development between the first NW Anatolian neolithic and Troy II. So
if the Etruscans as you suggest are the pre-Troy III people, then there
is no reason to suppose they were not in the area from neolithic times.
Secondly, the cultural hiatus between Troy II and III, with the burn
horizon dated 2,250 BCE is associated with burned sites from the
Balkans to Central Anatolia. At the same time Troy II burned, so did
Yortan and Beycultestan in Western Anatolia (the only sites large
enough to be faviourably compared to Troy II. Boian sites in Bulgaria
also suffered burning, and we find Usatova derived cultural artifacts
from the southern Ukrainian steppes in succeeding horizons. It would
seem that we have here an archaeologically verified date for a cultural
movement starting in Ukraine and terminating in Central Anatolia. This
would appear to be the coming of the Anatolian IE languages to the area.
> I don't think one can associate Tyre with the Tyrrhenians. The first
letter of Tyre is in fact the same as the first letter of Sidon, the
Semitic tsade, mod.Ararabic sad (the emphastic 's'), which as an
affricate 'ts' seems to have led the Greeks to use 't' for Tyre and 's'
for Sidon.
Yes, you are right. I was flying kites. Tyre was known in Mesopotamia
as Surru.
> As for the Pelasgians, they may have been neolithic, but that is
surely pure speculation.
Not necessarily. The pre-pottery culture at Nea Nicomedia in
Macedonia, and the early ceramic neolithic Sesklo culture, that
introduced farming throughout the Greek side of the Aegean was a
culture that continued without a break or hiatus through to the arrival
of Anatolian refugees from the above mentioned wave of burnings which
appeared in Troizen (again the Trs name Dennis), Lerna and the Argolid
circa 2,250.
Thus we have a single development of cultures, with no eveidence of a
break, or of arrival of new elements from outside the region (apart
from a limited number of trade goods) from 7,000 BCE to at least 2,250
BCE.
Dennis again
> To answer Rex about the problem of where the Greek language came
from, I meant that it is only a problem if we assume the Pelasgians to
be pre- or non-Greek. You then have to conjecture under what
circumstances they came to be Greek speaking, as they must have been by
the time the invaders/colonisers subsumed under Danaos and Kadmos
arrived. To posit Greeks as an elite group dominating originally
neolithic Pelasgians means we have to imagine the subject people
adopting the elite's language while the elite adopts the subject
people's ethnic name. Surely the most usual course of affairs is that
the elite end up speaking the language of the numerically superior
subject people, while the elite's prestigious ethnic name is
perpetuated. So can we envisage Pelasgians dominating numerically
superior Greeks?
Dennis, I suspect you are getting tied up in knotes here.
Archaeologically, it has been assumed that Greeks arrived in the Aegean
with the appearance of Grey Winyan ware, a pottery style found widely
in Macedonia, Thrace, and NW Anatolia from about 2,000 - 1,900 BCE.
Certainly the building of the fortress at Dimini in Thessaly, circa
1,900 BCE, by users of Grey Minyan Ware on the base of cultures that
were continuous with the painted pottery cultures of Sesklo (mentioned
above), seems to indicate the arrival of a new cultural if not
linguistic element in the population.
You ask
>You then have to conjecture under what circumstances they came to be
Greek >speaking, as they must have been by the time the
invaders/colonisers subsumed >under Danaos and Kadmos arrived.
I don't suppose them to have been Greek speaking at the time that the
Greeks arrived. In fact I see them as having spoken the substrate
language (eg. supplying the "thalatta/thalassa", and the *-ss-*, *-nd-*
already discussed at length on this list). Analysis of non IE elements
found in Greek show that they are concentrated in specific areas like
crafts, ships and shipping etc. Close contact between the pre-Greek
(non-IE) and (Greek) IE elements seem to have occurred so that Greek
can in fact be considered an amalgam language of both elements.
I wrote
> To me, this is only possible if we make the Pelasgians equal
Tyrrhenians.
Dennis replied
> This is a possibility, given that the Greeks seem to have been
impressed > enough by the Tyrsenoi (above). The statements that
Tyrrhenians and
> Pelasgians in Herodotos' day spoke different languages is not a
problem, > since they could have been speaking dialects of the same
language, but which > had grown far apart during the 1500+ years since
the fall of Troy II. There > is also the image of "god equalling"
Pelasgos teaching the natives not to eat > poisonous plants and to wear
sheepskins in the cold. It seems unlikely that > people resident there
since neolithic times would need this kind of advice, > but newcomers
might.
Did the "god equalling Pelasgos" teach the Pelasgians or the later
Greeks? Certainly the classical Greeks were fully aware of the
cultural elements they owed to the Pelasgians. Surely the Pelasgians
would have taught the Greeks (coming from foreign parts) how best to
avoid poisonous plants or to prepare for local winter conditions. Such
a teaching could later easily have been put as a responsibility of a
single individual, named Pelasgos.
On another matter I suspect that your explanation of a difference
between later Pelasgian and Tyrrhenoi is possibly sound. But I wonder
how far the two languages had developed. Two pieces of evidence
suggest that it was not that far.
1. The flight of refugees across the Aegean at various periods (eg. the
2,250 period already mentioned and the later flight of the sons of
Pelops (the Atreid's) from Arzawa to the Peloponnesse at the post
Perseid period and the expansion of the late Hittite Empire.
2. The explusion of the Pelasgians from Athens and their welcome in
Tyrrhenian Lemnos (mentioned by Thucidides).
This seems to suggest that the two groups recognised a relationship,
even though dialectical differences may have been growing.
> Of course, all this has to be set against the background of the very
low >cultural level of Middle Helladic. After all, Pelasgos' teaching
does not seem >to equal that of other gods like Thoth or Bacchus.
> So what does this make the Pelasgians? Either early neolithic
incomers (per >John), Tyrrhenians (per earlier John and myself) or (per
myself) the local >Greeks encountered and possibly named so by Danaos
and Kadmos. Whichever one >choses, they are not Rex's Pelasgians.
Dennis, I see (above) no destinction between the earlier and later
views of myself (the two John views held here). I also suspect that
your second case (of local Greeks named by Danaos and Kadmos), I would
label as "Grecianised Pelasgians" named by Danaos and Kadmos. Living
so close to a language (archaic Greek), which had borrowed so many
elements from their substrate language (Pelasgian), would have
increased the likelihood of linguistic interference in any case, with a
fairly easy transition from a previous Pelasgian/Tyrrhenoi language
towards successive increases in Greek vocabulary and grammar.
Thus, whatever the circumstances such a series of hypotheses are fully
compatible with Rex's Pelasgians!
Dennis again
> Italy. Just a couple of points.
> 1. The Paeligni were an Oscan-speaking people. The Oscans, as
linguistic entity, were an iron age people who arrived in Italy,
probably via the Adriatic sometime in the 1st millennium. They were not
native or neolithic Italian people.
I would counsel (as Glen is always counselling me) beware of too close
an association between cultures and languages here.
> 2. Pre-Tyrrhenian Etruscans. No such thing, Tyrrhenians and Etruscans
are the same. Prior to the unification of Italy under Roman dominance,
Italy was normally referred to by the Greeks as Tyrrhenia. As I said
above re the origin of Tyrrhenos, the Tyrrhenian Sea could only have
been named so by Greeks. Their first appearance there, apart from as
interlopers who were chased off by the Tyrrhenians/Etruscans, was
mid-8th century. It is quite possible that the Tyrrhenians/Etruscans
had been in Italy from c.1100BCE, 800 only marks their emergence as a
recongnisably distinct culture, thanks to the enormous influence,
amounting to almost saturation, of the Phoenicians. I have long thought
that Virgil's Aeneas represented the arrival of the Etruscans, but it
was politically unacceptable to say so in his day. Also, the linguistic
problem of the derivation of Roma (long 'o') from Remus (short 'e') can
be resolved through Etruscan, making it likely that Remus was Etruscan
and therefore that Rome was founded by the Etruscans. Which also means
that the Etruscans had reached Latium before the first Greek colonies
were established.
This all makes sense, except that Herodotus had said the Tyrrhenoi left
Lydia circa 800 BCE. I would suggest we have here another example of
what we have already seen at least twice before.... departure of
Etruscans to the west to escape the military expansionism of a near
neighbour. Thus I agree that Aeneas was probably Etruscan. Etruscan
was not acceptable to Virgil, but to call him a Trojan was. But if you
(amd I) are right and Etruscan = Trojan, then to calll him a Trojan is
the same thing!
> Miscellaneous Points
> 1. Labyrinth from Minoan storehouse
> You're kidding surely. Do you think that Herodotos would have used a
word meaning a storehouse to describe what he actually saw for himself.
Read his description ref. 2.148.1 to 7 again. The word must surely be
Egyptian. There are a couple of good candidates for the source of the
word there, certainly better than the double-headed axe Labrys, but
even this, by its religious connotation argues against your idea. As
does also Lin.B da-pu-ri-to, which I personally think is doubtful (why
da- for r/la-, and the pu is actually pu2 or phu, so why the
aspiration?), and is impossible to confirm from the context. Anyway,
the labyrinth, like mazes and spirals, are intimately connected with
death and re-birth (vegetation, spiritual and thence initiation into
the mysteries) and in Crete is specifically linked to the Minotaur and
the bull cult with its associated double-headed axes, horns or
consecration and the like, all of which date back to the earliest
Palatial period and point to Egypt as the source or inspiration.
No it doesn't point to Egypt at all... Horns of consecration, the
double axe and all that it implies is not Egyptian, but rather
Anatolian... They have been found by Melaart at Catal Huyuk in the
earliest Anatolian neolithic. To try to derive them from Egyptian
exemplars implies Egyptians coming by sea to the Aegean... And as
Sabine will tell you, there is no evidence of this at such an early
phase. Occasional finds of pharaohnic "faience" and other mass
produced trade goods (no doubt carried by Aegean rather than Egyptian
intermediary traders) is all that we find. It would seem, as the
neolithic came to the Aegean from Anatolia, so they brought their
religious iconography with them.
> 2. Pelasgian Dodona and Pelasgian Zeus.
> a) Zeus is one the few Greek divine names that shows a clear
derivation from IE to Greek. In other words, Zeus is Greek.
> b) Dodona, according to Herodotos and other Greek writers (no refs
I'm afraid), was established from the oracle at Siwa in the Libyan
desert. While the oracle was that of Ammon, the tutelary deity was a
certain Ddwn = Dodona?
I think this link is back to front. Siwa was fortified by Merenptah
and Rameses III by Dardani from the Peoples of the Sea, to guard
against Libyan incursions. Hence the ddwn of the Egyptians. It
doesn't refer to Dodona (unless there is an earlier etymological link
between Dodona and the Dardanoi (and the modern Dardanelles). Once
again we are back into the same area as our Pelasgian=Etruscan areas.
So rather than Dodona coming from Siwa, I would suggest a Late Bronze
Age connection going the other way - from Dodona to Siwa at the time of
the Peoples of the Sea.
> 3. Io and Europa
> a) Io has a, to me at least, a clear Egyptian etymology in 'Ht, "wild
cow", and by extension (I assume by association with the horns) "moon".
Io was said to be a dialect word at Argos for "moon", as it is in
Bohairic Coptic (ioh).
> b) Europa derives from the Semitic root /3rb/ (3=ayin) "west, place
of sunset", same root as Arab. She was clearly the daughter or sister
of Kadmos (who names means "east" or "old" Sem.root /qdm/).
Hmmm.. Semites are not Egyptians Dennis. There are clear connections
between Io, Europa, Kadmos, Aegenor and Phoenix - which imply
Phoenician connections not necessarily Egyptian ones. Phoenicians
appeared in the Aegean in the cultural vacuum there by about 1,000
operating out of a base in Rhodes. These myths in this case would have
been post-Mycenaean in origin, not pre-Mycenaean as you suggest.
> To close, I do agree with you Rex, that there is an underlying unity
in the > culture and myths of the Aegean area as a whole, which extends
to Italy. > However, I see the foundation of that unity in Egypt, and
its early > transmission mainly through the Phoenicians, the great
sailors and traders of > the Bronze Age Mediterranean.
Dennis, Phoenicians were not the great Bronze Age traders and sailors
that you suggest. Sabatini suggests that the earliest Phoenician
sailors were operating out of Sidon and Tyre circa 1,000 BCE. Ahiram
of Surru was the same as Hiram of Tyre who assisted Solomon with the
building of his temple and the voyage from Eilat to Ophir. This was
the time of the Ships of Tarshish of the Bible. The great sailors and
traders of the Bronze Age were not Phoenician but Minoan and later
Mycenaean.
Thus the unity of culture in the Aegean was not of Phoenician
provenance but came from Anatolia. In fact Western Anatolia and the
Greek region were linked as a single cultural sphere since neolithic
times. That did not shift with the coming of the early pre-Mycenaean
Greeks. Egyptian influences were distant, intermittent and not
formative.
Regards
John