Tauride.

From: Rex H. McTyeire

 

My best guess is that Steve Woodson is referring to the Taurians, whose behavior toward traveling Greeks contributed to the designation of the Black Sea as 'The Inhospitable Sea" by early Greeks.  Herodotus offers some reports on the sacrifices and methods in the Temple of Iphigenea (Artemis). They were a settled people controlling at least the Crimean Coast, in contrast to the nomadic Scythians. Some scholars lump them with Scythians, and certainly it appears they managed to cohabit with them for at least a period.  For my money, they clearly predate the Scythic incursion to that western point.  I would then have to charge them linguistically to Thracian or closely related IE rather than Iranian.

 

La Revedere;
Rex H. McTyeire
Bucharest, Romania
<rexbo@...>

The Crimea, the 'Taurian Chersonese', is one of the more curious chunks of human linguistic real estate. It's a sort of mini-India. Once a language got there, it tended to persist, mostly because it's practically an island, and quite defensible from the land. This is the place where you have Tartars returning from their Siberian exile, where ethnic Greeks persisted until almost the present, etc. This is the last place Gothic was recorded. I would not be suprised to learn if Slavic was a minority language there until the time of Peter the Great, if even then.

 

I've posted on the tale of Iphi at Tauride, and what it might signify. Mostly, there may have been a very ancient religious connection; such connections really do persist, and parts of Greece may have required a properly-born, properly-trained, geographically-proper priestess for certain cults of Artemis. Certainly, the Artemis-Upright of Sparta was blood-thirsty lady. Religion is very often very fussy about the *exact words* for certain rituals; an example of this is the mention of Etruscan priests being led to the battlefront before Attila (!!!) to utter prayers -- in Etruscan!!!. I suspect some **very** archaic Greek was spoken in the Greek temples, of the sort even Clytemnestra would have found old-fashioned.

 

Greek myth is a jumble. You have historic elements juxtaposed with literary license, together with genuine myth conflated with different recensions to the point where you have Castor and Polydeuces doing battle with their recensional mirror images. Old stuff is moved forward, while recent stuff gets projected backwards. The cycles involving Jason and Hercules are more recent, but both are projected back before the Trojan War. And in the meantime, the Greeks forgot about the Great Goddess, and how everything was matrilineal and gyne-local when they first moved-in.

 

There were several Trojan Wars, but the one described by Homer is probably just a farrago of old stories. The thing about Troy is that this geographic point controls the entrance to the Hellespont/Dardenelles from the Aegean, and consequently, controls the Med-Black Sea trade. The Greeks called the Gallipoli Peninsula (the European side of the Hellespont/Dardenelles) the Thracian Chersonese. Homer suggests it was Thracian-speaking; modern scholarship suggests the Asian side was Anatolic-speaking.

 

I'm rambling. The point, I think, is that we need to think in terms of a continuum of language and culture. The idea that ultra-archaic Greek was spoken someplace along the Black sea even in late Archaic times needs to be considered.

 

Mark.