Greeks and Pre-Greeks
Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition
Margalit Finkelberg
Tel-Aviv University
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
© Margalit Finkelberg 2005
SBN-13 978-0-521-85216-6 hardback
ISBN-10 0-521-85216-1 hardback
http://assets.cambridge.org/052185/2161/excerpt/0521852161_excerpt.pdf
"The even spread of the suffixes -ss- and -nth- over western Asia,
Greece and Crete strongly suggests that the so-called pre-Hellenic
populations of Greece were of Anatolian stock. If true, this would
lead us not only to Anatolia but also farther east, for the simple
reason that the Anatolians of Asia, Indo-Europeans though they were,
cannot be taken separately from the great civilisations of the Near
East. As the archaeological discoveries of recent years show, the
Bronze Age Aegean was in close contact with these civilisations. The
degree to which this new assessment of the linguistic and
archaeological evidence at our disposal may affect the terms of the
current discussion of the cultural identity of Aegean civilisation
will be examined in Chapter 3."