In the Iliad, Homer assumes that the Trojans worship the same gods as the Greeks. (Not only worship them, but sometimes talk to them face-to-face and make bargains with them, as when Paris accepted Helen as a bribe from Aphrodite.) Well, Homer might not even have been aware that there were people who worshipped non-Greek gods. But the Trojans were not a Greek people, were they? So I wonder – what gods did they worship? Did Schliemann’s (and later) excavations of Troy turn up any clues? And what language did the Trojans speak? It might be impossible to answer that question, since, so far as I know, the Trojans had no system of writing. But it is historically relevant: The Romans had a tradition that they were not native to Italy but descended from Trojan refugees (as Vergil recounts in the Aneid). If there were any truth to that, we might expect the Trojan language to resemble Latin.
The late Bronze Age Greeks did have a system of writing. Actually 2: Crete Linear A* and Crete Linear B. The later has been deciphered (an amazing tale, in and of itself). Linear A, however, may not have been a full writing system. Possibly more for inventories and such.
Linear B has been found at several Mycenaean palaces on the Greek mainland. If the Trojans were archaic Greek, there were probably tablets of Linear B there at one time. However, any that may have survived the centuries were probably destroyed by the hack diggers of modern times.
Based on pottery and other evidence, Troy is classified as a Mycenaean city. I.e., part of the late Bronze Age Greek world.
*Some insist that Linear A is “Minoan” and not archaic Greek. I have no idea why…
I found this link…
http://www.kultur.gov.tr/portal/arkeoloji_en.asp?belgeno=815
which looks pretty good (Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Culture) which says that the Trojans didn’t speek Greek and not only that but didn’t have a common language between them.
The author doesn’t believe the theory that Troy was a Mycenaean city [B ]ftg**, but can’t say why exactly.
On this issue, I’m afraid I wouldn’t put much faith in a site sponsored by the Turkish government, any more than I would a site sponsored by the Greek government. They both have political interests in this issue.
To get back to the OP, it wouldn’t surprise me if the Trojans were some offshoot of the Greeks. Certainly during the classical period of Greek history, there were Ionian Greeks settled on the west coast of what is now Turkey. I don’t know how far back those settlements dates, but it wouldn’t be unreasonable for Greek-speakers to be there during the Mycenaen period.
Latest research seems to indiacte that Troy/Ilios/Wilios may have been identical to the Arzawa kingdom of Wilusa in western Anatolia, a state in correspondance with and perhaps at one point vassal to, the Hittite kingdom and a bone of contention between the Hittites and a people tentatively identified as the Mycenaen Greeks. They probably spoke Luwian/Luvian, a language closely related to that of the Hittites. One article:
http://www.archaeology.org/0405/etc/troy3.html
- Tamerlane
Now Tamerlane commenting on it - that I would take over both the Turkish and Greek governments!
Here’s a PDF that discusses one perspective on Wilusa, it’s likely location, relation to Homer’s Troy, and to the Hittites:
http://www.uni-tuebingen.de/troia/eng/lataczwilusaeng.pdf
- Tamerlane
Shoot, my first link wasn’t quite the one I wanted. Here 'tis from the beginning ( the above was just the third page ) :
http://www.archaeology.org/0405/etc/troy.html
- Tamerlane
If we accept the Hittite theory, here’s what Encyclopædia Britannica has to say in their article “Hittite:”
In that case, I suppose their language was fairly close to Lycian, which stuck around until about the time of Alexander.
Shouldn’t there be some archaelogical clues about Trojan culture / language from the site of Troy itself? Cultural indicators if not any written tablets etc? Or did Schliemann screw all of that up with half-arsed excavations?
It has to be remembered too that Greek religion was notoriously syncretistic, taking deities of people with whom they came in contact and identifying them with the characteristic Greek deities. The “Artemis” worshipped in Ephesus was not a virgin huntress but Magna Mater Deorum. The characters of Poseidon and Aphrodite varied significantly from city to city, and Apollo was similarly applied to a wide range of deities. The passage in the Book of Acts in the Bible where Paul and Barnabas are mistaken for Hermes and Zeus is a strong case in point – what is known of Paul’s appearance bears virtually no resemblance to Praxiteles’s figure of Hermes, which has become his canonical representation. Several historians and geographers carefully identify the deities of other cultures by a similar parallelism.
Well, the above pdf mentions:
The discovery in 1995 of a bronze seal with Luwian hieorglyphic script ( a combination of syllabic script and logograms ) on both sides of the Citadel area of Wilusa also only goes to confirm…just how normal regular written communication between Wilusa and Hattusa was - naturally in cuneiform and in the official state language, which was Hittite.
- Tamerlane
It’s my understanding that Virgil was essentially writing propaganda about how great Rome was. The Romans had no ancient explanation for their origins. This tradition was yet another instance of them ripping off the Greek myths.
I seem to recall one myth about how Rome started:
Two twins chunked out by mom.
She-Wolf Earth Mother type suckles the twins.
One twin kills the other.
Other twin founds Rome on the Tiber which is
wheres the She-Wolf Mom raised them.
Twin who founded Rome was called Remus,
one who died was called Romulus.
shrug
Don’t know if I got it all right,
been a while from mythology class.
??? Are you sure? I know the Aneid was intended as propaganda, but I didn’t think Virgil made up the story of Aneas; I thought he just took an existing myth and set it down in Homeric-style epic form. I read Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome novels – fiction, but very well researched, with a glossary of Roman political, legal, military, cultural and religious terms in the back of every volume; and the last one is set at least a decade before Vergil wrote his epic. And in her stories, the Romans sometimes allude to their supposed Trojan origins as if that somehow made them superior to the other peoples of Italy – they use the word “Italians” in a disparaging way and clearly do not intend the word to refer to themselves.
The pre-Virgilian Romans had Aeneas founding the city of Alba Longa (and the family Iulius traced their ancestry back to him), but Romulus is the son of Ares and a Vestal Virgin, and suckled by a she wolf, and there’s another myth that ignores Alba Longa altogether, and says that Aeneas was the father of Romulus, but Virgil is the first, as far as I know, to make Romulus both a descendent of Aeneas and include the Vestal/she-wolf story.
Also, just to make things more complicated, the Republican Romans classified the people on the Italian peninsula in three categories…there were the Romans, the confederation of tribes who had full rights under Roman law, the Latins, who were inhabitants of the old Latin speaking city states of the Latin League (the Latin League originally contained 30 city states, and eventually shrank to 13), who, because of treaties, had pretty much every Roman right except the franchise, and the Italians, who were the non-Latin speaking peoples of the peninsula, and who didn’t have any rights. So, if a Roman at that time talked about an “Italian”, he just meant an inhabitant who wasn’t Roman or Latin.
After the Marsic/Social War, when the Italians got citizenship, the distinction disappeared.
Another thing we have to think about, is that the Greeks of 1250 BC are quite different from the Greeks of 650 BC. The stories of the “Heroic Age” – Iliad/Oddyssey, Oresteiad, Oedipus trilogy, Medea, Aeneid, etc. – all describe a Mycenaean world in terms of the Greek culture of several centuries after the fact – sort of in the way Mallory described King Arthur’s court as late-medieval knights in armor, rather than 6th-century Romanized Briton warriors. And with probably just as much accuracy on anything but the really big picture – IOW, yes, there probably was a major war between powers on the opposite shores of the Aegean that ended badly for one side and not that wonderfully for the victors, just as there was a confrontation between Christian Britons and pagan Saxons. But from there to golden apples, a goddess beauty pageant, a quasi-indestructible gay warrior, a prophetess with no credibility, a really big horse, and someone taking 10 years to get from Turkey to Ithaca, is as much a reach as to nature wizards, grand tournaments, swords in stones, ladies in lakes, holy grails and your best knight humping the queen.
And being as the Trojans were themselves being cast as noble heroes just as much as the Acheans, it kind of makes sense the storytellers recast them as “Greek”, so that they could be considered equals. (Besides, there was probably quite a bit of cultural overlap for Troy, which whould be a border city on trade routes).
All those stories of how all the great powers of the Heroic Age (Trojans, Pelleids, Atreids, etc.) fell to various and sundry wars, curses, totally capricious acts of meanness by the gods, and overall Terrible Things, would seem to paint a picture of what was left in the collective mind after the collapse of the first Aegean civilization: that things went so wrong that it must have been that someone pissed off the gods.
According to Vergil’s theory, After six books of wandering made specifically to one-up The Oddysey and six books worth of war, Aeneas, a Trojan hero and second cousin of Paris, founds the Latin race and lives for three more years. Then his son Ascanius/Iulus rules for 30 in Alba Longa, after which the Alban kings rule for another 300.
Then Rhea Silvia (the Vestal Virgin) births the twins Romulus and Remus by Mars/Ares, raised by the she-wolf, etc.
This is all remembered from a High School Latin class where we translated about half the damned book, so it’s going to be forever ingrained in my memory since this is mentioned enough times that I could recite the Latin from memory by the end of the year.
I could swear Vergil also wrote something about Romulus giving a speech at Remus’s funeral, but that’s irrelvant.
No, that’s Ovid! (ba-dum-bum-ching!)