I find that unlikely, though a scholar specializing in the subject may not agree with me. The Balkans, like the Caucasus, has seen wave after wave of migration. However, the waves did not usually override or merge with the existing cultures, as happened in many other regions. There are geographic and political reasons for it, but the important thing is that in both regions there are a lot of small micro-cultural pockets.
Which Olympian gods and goddesses ( and demi-god offspring) are accepted as imports into Greek myth?
I tried to address this with the first sentence of a previous post:“Simple geography may be key to the details of I-E expansion. The Hungarian Basin and the Balkans were natural destinations for steppe people.” but didn’t develop this idea.
When rocks tumble down a mountainside, or when a patio is swept, there is a place where things naturally end up. Tribes continually flowed westward from the Eurasian steppes and ended in a natural stopping place — often to disappear when overrun by subsequent invaders, unless they sought refuge in mountains.
So the interactions of the Greeks with other Indo-European tribes may be complicated, not to mention interactions with non-Indo-Europeans. And the critical period for the origin of Classical Greece coincides with the Epoch of the mysterious Sea Peoples. Good luck disentangling it all!
What I’m getting from this is that Balkan geography allowed disparate groups to settle there without being overrun and assimilated by larger groups. This brought the proto-Greeks into contact with many different peoples and cultures, both on their way to Greece and after they’d settled there. Is this a consensus shaping up for this thread? Any dissensions?
We’re used to “balkanization” meaning a jumble of disparate groups jammed into a narrow space. We’re used to it with peoples who showed up much later in history: Romanians, Magyars, South Slavs. Our look into the Bronze Age is revealing the same patterns, though, with earlier peoples who’ve disappeared. Only the Greeks, and the Albanians as descendants of the Illyrians, are still there.
The multicultural mixture of Greek mythology seems to have set in place long before the Late Bronze Age Collapse, considering how even the most foreign of Greek gods, Dionysus, was in the picture way back then.
Athens was already a city before the Mycenaeans or any other Greeks came there. The identity of Athena and her city are so bound up together that it means Athena was already a goddess before the Greeks learned of her. That goes likewise for Posdeidon inasmuch as he’s part of Athena’s myth. Poseidon was a chthonic god of underground places before he went to sea. The founding myth of Athens in which Poseidon plays a chthonic role is definitely pre-Greek.
What’s becoming clearer to me in this discussion is something I really hadn’t considered before: Anatolian culture had spread through Greece before the Greeks got there. But it makes sense. They would have picked up Anatolian deities like Artemis and Dionysos while still in Greece. That removes the problem of the Greeks’ very early adoption of Anatolian deities before they had actually gone to live in Anatolia.
First of all, I want to thank **Johanna **for her amazingly informative posts.
Second of all, there’s one obvious import we all forgot: Adonis, who originated from the Semetic-speaking world. The name itself is derived from the Canaanite/Hebrew word “Adon”, or “Lord”, and is very similar to “Adonai”, a common Jewish term for God.
The Semitic Adon/Adonai is considered cognate to Egyptian Aten (Pharaoh Akhenaton’s Sun God). (It may not be clear who borrowed from whom.)
As I mentioned in another thread, the Great Hymn to Aten written by Akhenaton is very similar to the Bible’s Psalm 104.
Hey, thanks!
Of course! :smack: Couldn’t miss it, he even came with the shipping label still on him.
Do you say so?
I was careful to use the passive voice (“is considered”) here to avoid any personal guilt! I am not a linguist. I know the connection Adon/Aton is controversial though that doesn’t mean it’s certainly wrong. (Are there examples of a D/T substitution in Egyptian transliterations? Does Daphne/Taphnis serve?) There was contact between Egypt and its neighbors over many centuries; the Egyptians did borrow the names of other Semitic Gods.
(BTW, Sigmund Freud was a proponent of the Adon==Aten hypothesis!)
I made a quick look into the etymologies before posting and didn’t find any suggestion of a connection. Freud, huh.