When Homer writes of the “Achaeans” who waged war against Troy, is he not referring, with great respect, to the Mycenaeans? Homer certainly writes as though many of his Gods were also the Mycenaean Gods.
Which Olympian gods and goddesses ( and demi-god offspring) are accepted as imports into Greek myth?
If anything, I found more Indo-European name origins among the Titans than the Olympians. They are both mixed up, though. It looks to me like the Greek and non-Greek mythological material got thoroughly mixed up before the myths were even put into the form we know them as, let alone written down.
Proto-Greek interaction with pre-Greek cultures must have been lengthy and vivid. When I marked “?” in the list of names I meant it’s of unknown origin, but that’s almost certainly pre-Greek origins too, and they are many. One Pelasgian language that hasn’t been mentioned yet is Lemnian, which was spoken on an Aegean island and related to Etruscan and ancient Rhaetian. Most Pelasgian languages were obliterated before their names were recorded.
Anatolia itself was a very ancient palimpsest with two different waves of Indo-European (not counting Greek) over a prehistoric substrate known only from ancient Hattic, possibly related to the Northwest Caucasian languages. To the southeast of Anatolia was Hurrian, an isolate that had disappeared before the Greeks came, but influenced Hittite and other Anatolian religion, which proto-Greek could have come in contact with before the Bronze Age Collapse.
Out of 13 Titan names, about 9 are traceable to Indo-European origin.
Out of 13 Olympian names, only 2 or 3 are Indo-European, while 2 more are half-IE compounds.
So maybe the Titans were the original gods of the proto-Greeks, and the *Olympians *were the imports.
One’s thinking is kind of led in that direction, isn’t it?
Mycenean civilization collapsed around 1100 BC. It was at least 400 years after that until the Greek alphabet was invented. The *Iliad *and *Odyssey *probably date from around that time. The poet is putting to verse stories from over 400 years of oral tradition, which is some gap. Even so, the answer to your question is yes, Homer is conscious of a shared cultural identity with the Myceneans. Athens and Thebes were Mycenean cities that survived through the Greek Dark Ages and the Greek cultural identity survived with them.
That would require the proto-Greeks to have mostly abandoned the typical IE religion, only to regain it after settling Greece. Demeter and Zeus, especially, have cognates in most other IE cultures.
Hephaestus, in my best guess, is simply the smith that is common in other IE mythologies, like Wayland from the Germanics. He just got elevated to an Olympian at some point. That his name is pre-Greek or an import from elsewhere is a little surprising.
The Greeks emerged during and after an extremely turbulent period called the Late Bronze Age collapse, where the Sea Peoples and Aegean tribes played an important role. They must have benefited from events in which they were actively involved not only militarily but also culturally. There were a lot of cultural exchanges, I am sure, but then again it is difficult to determine property rights in relation to members of the pantheon, especially early ones such as Titans. How can one prove, for example, that modern humans didn’t take over the deities revered by Neanderthals or Denisovans (in the process of interbreeding or any other type of contact they might have had)?
Michael Witzel, Wales Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, traces mythology back 20,000 to 40,000 years — MICHAEL WITZEL — but feels that more data is needed before connections can be made to Neanderthals.
Cybele was a goddess whom the early Greeks in Anatolia understood they were adopting from a much older tradition, calling her Mother of the Gods. The name Cybele, conventionally understood as Mountain Mother, probably derives from a Luwian base (borrowed via Hurrian and Hittite from a Sumerian original) plus a Lydian suffix and a Phrygian suffix.
Dionysus brought along his foreign origins within his myth itself. The first part of his name, Dio-, means Zeus, but the -*nusos *part is a mystery. The cultus of Dionysus is thought by some to have been imported from the Kataragama of Sri Lanka. However, -nusos doesn’t really match up with anything.
It used to be thought that Dionysus must have been borrowed into Greek mythology relatively late, because of his foreignness. But
What I get from all of the above is
a) The Greeks mixed up their religion with other peoples’ a lot.
b) This mixing happened very early in Proto-Greek times.
Until I’m inclined to conjecture that
c) This mixing is itself what made the proto-Greeks as a people.
I agree to a certain extent, and yet it would be inaccurate to believe that the Greeks took over other people’s elements indiscriminately. On the contrary. Cultural exchanges are natural for human beings, but they occur when there is a biological, ethnic, or cultural connection between them.
Technically speaking, no believer’s god is his own god because he has inherited the deity from his father or taken that over from others who venerate that god. But it is this acceptance that validates that deity as a god on the one hand, and as his god on the other.
Most peoples the Greeks had cultural interchanges with were related with them ethnically or culturally by virtue of historical circumstance and/or choice. It is not impossible that there should have been even more “unnatural” mixings in the process due to the complexity of religious syncretism, which “happens quite commonly in areas where multiple religious traditions exist in proximity and function actively in a culture, or when a culture is conquered, and the conquerors bring their religious beliefs with them, but do not succeed in entirely eradicating the old beliefs or (especially) practices.”
Last but not least, when analyzing early human populations, it is often impossible to determine whether similarities occur due to cultural exchanges or because of common human experiences or mental patterns, which can lead to certain sameness even in the absence of contact.
We know plenty about the ancient cultural palimpsest that Anatolia presented when the Greeks first reached there, whenever that was (sometime before the Trojan War). We know about the pre-Greek Minoan civilization of Crete. We know about the pre-Greek tribes of Sicily and southern Italy.
What bugs me is how little we know about pre-Greek Greece. None of the names of Pelasgian languages in Greece, let alone any information about them, have survived, except for Lemnian. Key information needed for studying the cultural mixing of proto-Greeks is missing.
Also weird is at the time of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, the Greek ethnos was already formed, but there was a civilized south (Mycenae) and a barbarian north (Doris), and the Dorians clobbered the Mycenaeans and shut off their civilization, which had already been intertwined with Minoan, Anatolian, and Hera knows what else civilizations. Greeks had always defined themselves in contradistinction to barbarians. It must have been challenging for them to assimilate the concept of Dorian Greeks being barbarians. All of that took place long after Greek ethnogenesis itself, that somehow the Greeks themselves had become separated into civilized and barbarian. That separation was long after Greek identity itself had been established and already had submerged the Pelasgians and partially merged with elements from their civilization(s). The Greek ethnogenesis itself and associated cultural mixing with Pelasgians had to have taken place very early on.
We know that the Greeks came from the north, which means they would have had to pass through Dacia and Thrace (modern Romania and Bulgaria). The path from the proto-Indo-European homeland north of the Black Sea and Caucasus southward through the Balkans is clear. But consider: proto-Greek shared innovations in common with proto-Indo-Iranian. Then Indo-Iranian went east while the ancestors of the Greeks went west. The last chance they’d have had to be in contact would have been in the proto-Indo-European homeland itself, which means still early in the process of differentiation of proto-IE dialects. Proto-Greek also shares some similarities with Thracian(?), Phrygian, and Armenian, all of which shared some of the arc of their journey counter-clockwise around the Black Sea through the Balkans.
In the Proto-Indo-European homeland north of the Caucasus and Black Sea, certain dialects within the area before its unity broke up are discernible. One isogloss, running east to west, saw PIE *s- changed to *h-; this isogloss had proto-Greek and proto-Iranian together on the south side of it. Another isogloss, running north to south, had PIE *ḱ- changed to *s-; Greek on the western side was not included in this but on the eastern side it included proto-Balto-Slavic and proto-Indo-Iranian; this was the famous “satem” grouping and Greek was on the “centum” side where *ḱ stayed k.
Another isogloss took in Greek and Armenian sharing conservation of PIE initial laryngeals as vowels.
Proto-Greek, proto-Armenian, and proto-Indo-Iranian would have had to be in the southern edge of the PIE homeland, along the shores of the Black Sea and slopes of the Caucasus. Proto-Greek took off westward and then south through the Balkans, counterclockwise around the Black Sea, along with the Dacians and Thracians who settled in the northern and central Balkans. The Phrygians too are known to have lived in present-day Bulgaria before entering Anatolia; this is attested in epigraphy. Proto-Indo-Iranian moved eastward and then south through Central Asia. My conjecture is that proto-Armenian moved south, along the eastern shore of the Black Sea, having to get past the existing Caucasian peoples to reach Transcaucasia.
I’m looking back to when all these language groups were dialects of proto-Indo-European, which parts of the homeland they probably started from, and which directions they took to get to where they wound up. All the above took place some time after the proto-Anatolian languages had separated and found their way to Anatolia, whether clockwise or counter-clockwise around the Black Sea I don’t know.
When linguists posit IE subgroups with Greek as a member, like “Greco-Aryan,” “Greco-Armenian,” “Greco-Phrygian,” and the like, they miss the mark. The PIE dialect that became proto-Greek didn’t function as a member of any of those hypothetical groups. Rather, within the PIE homeland that pre-proto-Greek dialect had different isoglosses running different directions, making it share certain innovative features with certain dialects while sharing certain conservative features with certain other dialects.
Consider an analogy: The non-rhotic dialects in North America are Eastern New England, New York City, Coastal South, and New Orleans. An over-imaginative linguist could posit a “Southo-NE-NYC” dialect taking in all the isoglosses of non-rhoticism. They’d be flat wrong. There never was such a dialect grouping. Non-rhotic was just one feature the disparate dialects happened to share.
Once the speakers of PIE dialects dispersed to the four winds, proto-Greek found itself to be a language on its own. An isolate within the IE subgroupings.
Look at the patterns: PIE dispersed into large subgroups with many members that powered up and traveled far: Anatolian went south, Italo-Celtic went west, Germanic went northwest, Balto-Slavic went north, Tocharian (a small one, but hey) went east, and the very large Indo-Iranian went southeast. But southwest into the Balkans? I’m tempted to call it trickling, how this odd handful of isolates wound up in the Balkans: Dacian, Thracian, Phrygian, Illyrian, and Greek. What’s up with that? One more isolate that shared Greek isoglosses, Armenian, might have gone the Balkan route too, though IMHO it went south through the Caucasus. We know who the proto-Armenians mingled with when they got there: lots of Hurrian and Urartian vocabulary was introduced to Armenian.
It was the 12th-century BC Late Bronze Age Collapse that brought down the Hittite Empire and allowed new peoples/languages to establish themselves in Anatolia: Armenian in Transcaucasia, Phrygian in central Anatolia, and Greek in western Anatolia. The Greek contribution to this is mythologized as the Trojan War.
Simple geography may be key to the details of I-E expansion. The Hungarian Basin and the Balkans were natural destinations for steppe people.
The oxen-drawn wheeled wagon was invented after Anatolian separated from I-E but while the other known branches were still united in an “Indo-European Proper.” It’s uncertain where the wagon was invented — its use spread very rapidly — but it had the greatest impact and benefit on the pastoralists of the East European steppes — the Proto-Indo-Europeans. Wagons were not too helpful in mountainous areas, nor where sedentary people operated fixed farms, but for the breeders of horses, cows, sheeps and goats in level terrain, eager to seek new pastures, the wagon was a game-changer. P-I-E prosperity and population boomed. The close similarities of Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian, despite a large distance, is evidence for the high mobility of the P-I-E people in the vast steppe lands. The high mobility also gave them valuable knowledge: they could connect metallurgists to the ores they needed 2000 miles away. Some of their elites may have been riding horses at about the same time the oxen-drawn wagon was invented. Many centuries later, expertise in horse-riding and the use of horse-drawn war chariots gave I-E conquerors a huge military advantage.
From present-day Romania, mountains dictate one of three west-directed migration routes: northwest-ward along the Dniester River toward Poland; westward along the Danube to Hungary(); and southwest-ward following the coast to Thrace and Greece. ( - Because the Hungarian Basin has terrain very similar to the East European steppes, it has been a popular destination for Eurasian invaders: early I-E people (Celto-Italics, Slavs, Cimmerians), Huns, Magyars, etc.)
It’s 30 minutes long and rather tedious — is there a transcript? — but here is a podcast focused on the Usatovo Culture (3500-3000 BC near Moldava) which discusses the geography of migration and the effect of terrain on the economy. (Usatovo was a hybrid culture, with steppe pastoralists raising sheep in the lowlands, and cereal farmers operating looms in the highlands to make textiles from sheep’s wool.) The non-IE members of Usatovo probably adopted the elite IE language and — let’s be blunt — elite I-E males likely enjoyed greater procreative success.
The podcast assumes that Usatovo was the linguistic ancestor of pre-Germanic (who migrated up the Dniester River), while the ancestors of the I-E dialects of southern Europe were a separate I-E tribe which passed through the Usatovo domain on their way to the Danube (Italo-Celtic etc.) or Thrace. (I think it’s uncertain whether pre-Greeks entered Greece via Thrace, or came from Hungary.)
Take this with a disclaimer — I am no expert — but I noticed several statements in the podcast that seemed wrong to me:
[ul][li] The early Indus civilization was NOT Indo-European, as the podcast claims.[/li][li] The very earliest work at Stonehenge was done BEFORE the arrival of the Bell Beaker people.[/li][li] The elites of the Bell Beaker people almost surely spoke an I-E language (Italo-Celtic) contrary to podcast claim.[/li][li] The Corded Ware people share genes, burial customs, and pottery decorations with Bell Beaker and/or Pit Grave, so I think the podcast’s claim that they were non-Indo-European may be misleading.[/li][/ul]
That worked out great for Hungarians, when they showed up thousands of years later. Moldova was also their staging area for that incursion, the ancient Magyar state of Etelköz. Moldova is the last all-steppe country before the mountains begin.
Greece, however, is full of mountains. Has almost no flat land at all. What does your IE settlement theory do with that?
The Indo-Europeans had social or political advantages as well as an economy productive in steppe lands. As horse breeders rather than cereal farmers, their society naturally emphasized muscular strength, special skills, individual ownership, warrior ethos, entrepreneurship, as compared with the more egalitarian and communalistic societies appropriate to cereal farming. (I’m very afraid that sentence will make me sound like a right-winger! :eek: ) And I think the I-E’s are credited with introducing specific technologies: wool, leather(?), and perhaps hemp rope and the ox-drawn plow.
The mutation for lactose tolerance was important. It spread quickly, but still gave a big initial advantage to any invading culture with the gene.
Finally, population levels in Neolithic Europe fluctuated, probably due to climate shifts. The success of the Bell Beaker people in Western Europe is attributed in part to the low population density there at the time of their invasion. I don’t know about Greece’s population at the time of the I-E invasion (there was a sharp population collapse circa 1200 BC, of course too late to explain the initial I-E arrival); but there was a well-known collapse in Serbian metallurgical activity roughly coincident with the initial I-E expansion.
When the Bronze Age began in the West, the Indo-Europeans were already fairly well entrenched — their bronze-working competitors were mostly other Indo-Europeans(*). However the Mycenaean Greeks were opposed by the Bronze-working Minoans. Why did the Greeks prevail in that struggle? Perhaps in part due to the warrior ethos mentioned above.
(* - Although it was before the use of Bronze, there was a strong Copper-working culture in southern Spain with spectacular fortified cities like the one at Los Millares. The relationship of that culture to Bell Beaker still seems to be controversial.)
What I was wondering specifically was how all the IE linguistic isolates (except for Armenian) fell into the Balkans. Like that was the bin that the odds and ends were tossed into. With a pattern like that going on, it must indicate something. Maybe it has some bearing on how the Proto-Greeks mixed their religion with those of others.