Pelasgians

Pelasgians (Ancient Greek: Πελασγοί, romanized: Pelasgoí,singular: Πελασγός Pelasgós) was a name used by ancient Greek authors to describe the ancestors of Greek people.^[1]^[2] The name was also used to describe all the indigenous peoples of the Aegean Sea and their cultures.^[3]

History

Herodotus

The Pelasgians are mentioned many times in the Histories written by the Greek historian Herodotus. They are mentioned in the first volume of the Histories when Croesus wanted to learn who the strongest Greeks were to befriend them.^[4] Herodotus called the Pelasgian language "barbarian" but thought of the Pelasgians to have been Greek.^[5] Herodotus also wrote about different places where Pelasgians, or Pelasgian-speakers, lived as neighbors of the Dorians and the Athenians.^[6]^[5]

Herodotus also wrote about the relationship between the Pelasgians and the (other) Greeks.^[7]^[8] The relationship mirrored the "rivalry within Greece itself between [...] Dorian Sparta and Ionian Athens."^[9] Herodotus wrote that the Hellenes split from the Pelasgians with the former outnumbering the latter.^[10]

In the second volume of the Histories, Herodotus wrote that the Pelasgians called their gods theoi before naming them because the gods put things in order (thentes).^[11] The historian also wrote that the gods of the Pelasgians were the "Cabeiri" and that all of Greece, or Hellas, was first called "Pelasgia".^[12]

In the seventh volume of the Histories, Herodotus wrote that the Aeolians were known anciently as "Pelasgians".^[13]

In the eigth volume of the Histories, Herodotus wrote that the Pelasgians of Athens were once called "Cranai".^[14]

Dionysius of Halicarnassus

The Greek historian Dionysius of Halicarnassus gave a summary of the Pelasgians in his work Roman Antiquities. He concluded based on the sources available to him that the Pelasgians were Greeks originally from the Peloponnese.^[15]

Language

According to Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the Pelasgians spoke Greek because the places where the "Pelasgi" traditionally lived, like Arcadia and Attica, only spoke Greek.^[16] Also, the few Pelasgian words and texts that exist betray a Greek language even though ancient Greeks called the Pelasgian language "barbarian".^[16]

According to Thomas Harrison, the Greek etymology of Pelasgian words in Herodotus like theoi (from Greek thentes) shows that the "Pelasgians spoke a language at least 'akin to' Greek".^[17] According to Pierre Henri Larcher, if this linguistic connection is true, then it proves that the Pelasgians and the Greeks were the same people.^[18]

Outdated theories

In 1854, Johann Georg von Hahn, an Austrian diplomat and Albanian language scholar, suggested a connection between Early Albanian and Pelasgian.^[19] But this theory has been rejected by modern scholars.^[20]^[21]

References

Citations

↑ Abel 1966, p. 13: "Common fifth century tradition claimed not only that the Pelasgians were the oldest inhabitants of Greece and among the ancestors of the Greek heroes."; p. 49: "Fifth century opinion assumed that the Pelasgians were the ancestors of the heroic Greeks, e.g. the ancestors of the Danaans, Arcadians and Athenians.".
↑ Brug 1985, p. 41: "The Greek sources identify the Pelasgians as forerunners of the Greeks in the Peloponnesus and Attica.".
↑ Rhodios & Green 2007, (Commentary on I.987).
↑ Herodotus. Histories, 1.56.
↑ ^5.0 ^5.1 Georges 1994, p. 134: "Herodotus, like other Greeks, instinctively imagined the non-Dorian inhabitants of 'ancient' Greece—Achaeans, Argives, Danaans, Ionians, Pelasgians, Cadmeans, Lapiths, and all the rest of the races of myth and epic—to be essentially "Greek" and ancestral to themselves, as Aeschylus imagined the Pelasgian Argives in the Supplices [...]"
↑ Herodotus. Histories, 1.57 (Herodotus & Strassler 2009, p. 32: "I am unable to state with certainty what language the Pelasgians spoke, but we could consider the speech of the Pelasgians who still exist in settlements above Tyrrhenia in the city of Kreston, formerly neighbors to the Dorians who at that time lived in the land now called Thessaliotis; also the Pelasgians who once lived with the Athenians and then settled Plakia and Skylake in the Hellespont; and along with those who lived with all the other communities and were once Pelasgian but changed their names. If one can judge by this evidence, the Pelasgians spoke a barbarian language. And so, if the Pelasgian language was spoken in all these places, the people of Attica being originally Pelasgian, must have learned a new language when they became Hellenes. As a matter of fact, the people of Krestonia and Plakia no longer speak the same language, which shows that they continue to use the dialect they brought with them when they migrated to those lands.").
↑ Herodotus. Histories, 1.56–1.58 (Herodotus & Strassler 2009, pp. 32–33).
↑ Georges 1994, p. 131: "Herodotus argues near the very beginning of his work that most of the people who later became Hellenes were Pelasgians, and that these Pelasgians were barbarians and spoke a barbarian language. From these Pelasgians Herodotus derives the descent of the Ionians, as well as that of all the other Greeks of the present day who are not Dorians (1.56.3–58) [...]".
↑ Georges 1994, pp. 129–130.
↑ Herodotus. Histories, 1.58 (Herodotus & Strassler 2009, p. 33: "As for the Hellenes, it seems obvious to me that ever since they came into existence they have always used the same language. They were weak at first, when they were separated from the Pelasgians, but they grew from a small group into a multitude, especially when many peoples, including other barbarians in great numbers, had joined them. Moreover, I do not think the Pelasgian, who remained barbarians, ever grew appreciably in number or power.").
↑ Herodotus. Histories, 2.51.
↑ Herodotus. Histories, 2.56.
↑ Herodotus. Histories, 7.95 (Herodotus & Strassler 2009, p. 533).
↑ Herodotus. Histories, 8.44.
↑ Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Roman Antiquities, 1.17: "Afterwards some of the Pelasgians who inhabited Thessaly, as it is now called, being obliged to leave their country, settled among the Aborigines and jointly with them made war upon the Sicels. It is possible that the Aborigines received them partly in the hope of gaining their assistance, but I believe it was chiefly on account of their kinship; for the Pelasgians, too, were a Greek nation originally from the Peloponnesus [...]"
↑ ^16.0 ^16.1 Lytton 1837, pp. 5–8.
↑ Harrison 1998, pp. 25–26: "Herodotus' account, for example, of the adoption by the Pelasgians of the names of the gods (2.52.1) suggests a much closer relationship between the Pelasgian and Greek languages. Before they heard the names of the gods, the Pelasgians (assuming, interestingly, the existence of a number of gods) called them simply θεοί, on the grounds that they had 'established (θέντες) all affairs in their order'. This etymology, advanced apparently in all seriousness, seems to suggest that the Pelasgians spoke a language at least 'akin to' Greek."
↑ Larcher 1844, p. 54: "If this affiliation of language be admitted, then the Pelasgians and Greeks were of the same race."
↑ Hahn 1854, IV. Sind Die Albanesen Autochthonen?, pp. 211–279.
↑ Mackridge 2007–2008, pp. 16–17: Soon after this the "Pelasgian theory" was formulated, according to which the Greek and Albanian languages were claimed to have a common origin in Pelasgian, while the Albanians themselves are Pelasgians and hence come from the same ethnological stock as the Greeks. The "Pelasgian theory" began to take shape in the 1850s and 1860s and became widespread in the 1870s. [...] Needless to say, there is absolutely no scientific evidence to support any of these theories..
↑ See Schwandner-Sievers & Fischer 2002.

Sources

Abel, V. Lynn Snyder (1966). Fifth Century B.C. Concepts of the Pelasgians. Stanford, CA: Stanford University.
Georges, Pericles (1994). Barbarian Asia and the Greek Experience: From the Archaic Period to the Age of Xenophon. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0-8018-4734-6.
Hahn, Johann Georg von (1854). Albanesische Studien (in German). Jena: F. Mauko.
Harrison, Thomas (1998). "Herodotus' Conception of Foreign Languages" (PDF). Histos. 2: 1–45.
Herodotus; Strassler, Robert B. (2009) [2007]. The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories. New York, NY: Random House Incorporated. ISBN 978-1-4000-3114-6.
Larcher, Pierre-Henri (1844). Notes on Herodotus: Historical and Critical Comments on the History of Herodotus, with a Chronological Table (Volume I). London: Whittaker.
Lytton, Sir Edward Bulwer (1837). Athens: Its Rise and Fall. Vol. I. London: Saunders and Oatley.
Mackridge, Peter (2007–2008). "Aspects of Language and Identity in the Greek Peninsula since the Eighteenth Century". The Newsletter of the Society Farsarotul. Vol. XXI and XXII, no. 1 and 2. Society Farsarotul.
Rhodios, Apollonios; Green, Peter (2007). The Argonautika. Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-25393-3.
Schwandner-Sievers, Stephanie; Fischer, Bernd Jürgen, eds. (2002). Albanian Identities: Myth and History. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-21570-6.