Re: [tied] Danaans [was Poseidon]

From: Mark Odegard
Message: 3371
Date: 2000-08-23

As I keep saying, all I can do is quote the article in question.
 
--start quotes--
The root of this name can be found in a great number of personal names as well as river names (names of divinities included) of both populations (e.g., Dnae, Danu, Danuva and Eridanos, Don (Tanais), Danapris, etc). [p. 68]
 
... The Egyptian links must be regarded as secondary. It was easy, Sakellariou maintains, to attach Danaos to the Nile and so also to Egypt, because the Semitic god Ba'al (in Greek Belos) had passed for the personification of the river and because formerly, Aigyptos served as a name for the Nile.  [p 81]
--end quotes--
 
Basically, it is argued the mythology was reinterpreted, relocated as the original sources were forgotten. They knew about Egypt from Mycenaean times, but the written sources for the Danaan mythological cycle is rather late, and has been sent through the mythological Cuisinart, like everything else.
 
Mark.
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: João Simões Lopes Filho
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Danaans [was Poseidon]

Can These Danaan component explain the similarities between Proitos/Akreisios/Danae/Perseus and Osiris/Seth/Isis/Horus?
 
Joao SL
Rio
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2000 2:37 PM
Subject: [tied] Danaans [was Poseidon]

 
----- Original Message -----
 
The variation Potei-/Poti:-/Posei-/Posi:- would have resulted from chaotic attempts to level out the irregularity of posis vs. potei
 
Piotr

From another article in the current JIES, this by A.L. Katona, "Proto-Greeks and the Kurgan Theory". This is a review of the work of the Greek archaeologist Michael B. Sakellariou.
 
If the second part of this compound name could be connected to the IE root *da-/dan (c.f. Mycenaean po-se-da-o-ni do-so-mo without the digamma) one might ask if the Danaans, or any other ethnic component later to become Greeks, brought this deity with them as especially theirs. [p. 70]
 
Just as a thought, Poseidon might perhaps be better analyzed as 'Lord of the Danaans', 'Lord of the Flowing-Water-People' rather than 'Lord of the Water'.
 
As for the Danaans, the da-/dan- root is certainly the river-word. They were the people of flowing water. The article I mentioned suggests this is probably the oldest ethnonym for Greeks that we have, one they applied to themselves. It is probably too much to say the Danaans were the proto-Greeks, much as it is too much to say just the Angles were the proto-English.
 
The Danaans certainly contributed a distinct component to Greek mythology, one that does not completely agree with the usual Olympian version. The river-god stories are mostly *their* stories. The Egyptian motifs in this cycle of myths is suggested to be something late, a re-association and relocation of certain elements after the 800-1000 year old North Pontic origin had been utterly forgotten; but it's *still* the marriage of the river god and his children. The article leans to North Pontic origin origin for the Danaans.