Mark wrote
> 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.
Thanks for the quotes Mark, they are raher useful. I like the idea
of a self imposed Ethnonym "People of the Rivers" sounds a good name
for the Western IE peoples, destinguishing them from the Easterners.
The linkage with Egypt I place in the late Bronze Age. There were
D-n-n people amongst the Hittite alies at Kadesh and amongst the
Peoples of the Sea. Like the P-l-s-t (Philistines) the Denen seem to
have settled first along the coast, and pushed inland later by the
Philistine expansion, coming to dwell in the Golan heights as the
Hebrew tribe of Dan. The Bible gives an early assovciation between
Dan and shipping (I can dig it out if anyone wants it). Aegean
memories of this connection with Egypt shows up in classical
mythology. This is one reason for a tieup in calssical mythology
between the Aegean and Levant. Rather than Aegypto-Semitic influence
in the Aegean at late Mycenaean times, it is a case of Aegean
influence in the Levant (amply demonstrated by pottery finds of Late
Helladic IIIC associated with Peoples of the Sea, in Cilicia and the
coast of Lebanon and Palestine.
Eypto-Semitic influence can be best traced to the period after 1,000
BCE with the orientalising influences of the Archaic. This is the
period that the Phoenicians were active, introducing their alphabet,
and bringing the Greeks back into the wider world of the Eastern
Mediterranean.
Regards
John