|
|
In popular superstitions as well as in
traditional linguistic studies Greeks are considered as an independent
offshoot of the Indo-European family. Comparative grammar believes that about
3000 BC it split off as a domain of Proto-Greek or Hellenic in the southern
Balkans. The chief argument confirming the purported ethnic unity of Greek is
seen in the cultural integrity of myths and legends. Only few adherents of linguistic
glottochronology such as R. Gray and Q. Atkinson propose hypotheses of an Anatolian
Graeco-Armenian family. Apart of such attempts Greeks are standardly treated
as one compact ethnic group with several synonymous denominations. Their most
common name Greeks (Greek Graikoi) is generally identified with the
alternative catch-word Hellenes (Greek Έλληνες) but their ethnic labels collide with
conventions of Homeric ethnonymy. In
his Iliad and Odyssey Homer refers to Trojan heroes as Achaeans (Ἀχαιοί, Akhaioí) and only once he
mentions Panhellenes (Πανέλληνες)
and Hellenes. With moderate frequency he called his own
countrymen also Argives (Greek Argeioi ‘inhabitants of Argos or Argolid’) or
Danaans (Δαναοί).
The last term seems to correspond to the term T(D)-n-j or Danaya (Tanaju) in ancient
Egyptian records.
In times when Europe is
believed to have spoken one undifferentiated Indo-European language, it is
absolutely necessary to bring back Homer’s words about regions of Greece
where “the people spoke many different languages which overlapped one
another”. Another wording of
Homer’s description of Crete
mentioned “language mixing with language side by side”. The traditional view regarding
ancient Greeks as one homogeneous nation peeled freshly off Indo-Europeans is
shattered to pieces when Herodotus treats Dorians and other regional
minorities as ethnos, i.e.
an independent nation. This witness proved three leading guidelines governing
prehistoric linguistics, (a) the principles of huge diversity instead of
structural uniformity, (b) assimilative mixing instead of pure unity and (c)
hybrid intertwinedness instead of compactness and organic homogeneity.
The crucial difficulty obviously consists
in the ethnic diversity of the earliest Greek inhabitants. The Pelasgian Sea
Peoples (les peuples de la mer)
had a brotherly moiety of Danaans. The tribal moieties of Argives and
Mycenaeans are surmised to have derived their ethnonyms from a Mycenaean
loanword for megalithic castle fortifications built by Cyclopes between 1600
and 1300 BC. Their etymology is probably paralleled by Anatolian Mysians and
Ugarites, who represented the two main brotherly phratries of megalithic
tumulus cultures and showed their remote Ugro-Scythian origin. Such
ethnonymic pairs crop up also in the names of other megalith-builders such as
Abkhaz, Basques, Scots and mythic ‘ogres’.
Most
ancient tribes exhibited a long-term existence lasting for ages and evidenced
tribal identity by their ethnonymy. As their ethnonyms showed incredible
stability, they cannot be explained by Max Müller’s aetiologism and simple
natural ad hoc etymologies. Pelasgian and Dorian were originally
non-Greek foreign languages absorbed by the Greek cultural medium and
secondarily Hellenised into Greek dialects. Julius Pokorny derived the
etymology of Dorian from dōris, ‘woodland’
or ‘upland’ and the tribe of Pelasgoi
from *pelag-skoi ‘Flach-landbewohner’, i.e.
flatland-inhabitants settling in the flat Thessalian plain. Such interpretations are difficult to
believe, because true etymology may be found only in age-old tribal endonyms.
Classic Greeks called themselves Hellenes
because their ethnic element won in competition with other tribal minorities.
They won in social struggles thanks to the process of demotisation
perceptible in Periclean Greece and
the Hellenistic demotic koiné (Greek ἡ
κοινὴ
διάλεκτος). The real Hellenes
never reigned over Greece as
kings and dominant land-owners, they formed only the most populous core of
the urban working-classes. The genuine Hellenes (so to say ‘Eteo-Hellenes’) seem to have
drifted with Ionians and Aeolians from Anatolia after the
dramatic Fall of Troy. One of their favourite stations was Epirus, the birthplace
of the flood myth relating about the descent of Hellenus from Deucalion.
Deucalion was compared to Noah and celebrated as a survivor of a great
deluge. His sons Aeolus
and Dorus acted as eponymous
ancestors, they were responsible for the rise of the ethnic groups of Aeolians and Dorians. In addition, Hellenus’s
third son Xuthus became father to Hellen’s grandsons
Achaeus and Ion, who became progenitors of the
tribes of Achaeans and Ionians. This story sounds like a Pro-Hellenic rendering of ethnic conditions
ruling in ancient Epirus
(modern Albania).
A plausible solution of the Greek ethnic
crux was foreseen by Aristotle. He sought the cradle of Hellenes in the region Hellas (Ἑλλάς)
situated in Epirus
(other sources localise it in the province of Thessaly).
As he saw it, the site of Deucalion’s deluge lay between Dodona and
the Achelous river. His
cogitations shed light also on the etymology of Grecian Graikoi. Epirus
was inhabited by the tribes of Graii, whose name was used for
the people of Epirus.
In his opinion the ancient Illyrians applied
the term Graikos to the local native Dorians.
This means that for Illyrians the Graikoi were
a native name of a Dorian tribe in Epirus and
they were closely affiliated with Dorians in Sparta.
This explains why the Spartan Dorians were reported to have come from Epirus and
northwest regions of Thessaly.
|
|
|
Palaeolithic
types
|
Neolithic
categorisation
|
Anthropological
races
|
Archaeological
groups
|
|
Leaf-shaped
Lanceolithic
|
Mycenaean
Ware, globular
amphoroceramic
pottery
|
Scythids,
Argives
Cyclopes
|
Cycladic 3000
BC
Mycenaean.
1450 BC
|
|
Leptolithic
long
blades/knives
|
Epi-Cardial
Impresso Ware
palatial
architecture
|
Pelasgids,
Danaans
Sea Peoples
|
Palatial
era 1900 BC
Minoan 1900 BC
|
|
Microlithic
trapezoid
flakes
|
Black
Burnished Ware
pointed-bottom
vessels
|
Hebroid
Graecians
Titanids
|
‘Helladic’
2800 BC
Minyan
|
|
Macrolithic
rough
hand-axes
|
tell-sites,
multi-cellular
labyrinths
with flat-roofs
|
Elamitoids
Hattian,
Hittites
|
Ubaidan (6,500
BC)
Karanovo
(6,200 BC)
|
|
Macrolithic
double-axe, labrys
|
collective
long houses
for great
agrarian families
|
Danubian
Europids
‘Idaeans’, Hektones
|
Eleusian cults
Phrygian
longhouses
|
|
Pyrolithic
cremation
burials
|
burial
hut-urns, anthropo-
morphic
face-urns
|
Alpinids,
Albanians
Caucasian
Colchids
|
Geometric Ware
Dark Age of Greece
|
Table 45. The interdisciplinary transitions of evolutionary
categories in Ancient Greece
The subcategorisation of Greek ethnicities
Table 45 sketches ethnic interrelations in the general framework of Greek
cultural studies. The dominant ethnicity was represented by the short-sized
Hellenic Alpinids with brachycephalous skulls and cremation rituals. They
formed the peaceful plebeian race of Hellenes that exhibited
short-sized Lapponoid countenance with broad round heads, short legs and
concave noses. They had nothing to do with the Dorian militant slave-holders
or the proud aristocratic Achaeans residing in unconquerable castles. The Illyrian
myths about the descent of Achaeans and Dorians from Hellenes could reflect
only their local social prevalence in Epirus but this
hierarchy of castes could not be generalised as valid for the rest of Greece.
The Ancient Greek society was composed of
several heterogeneous components and their analytic decomposition has to
start from the earliest Palaeolithic beginnings. Table 46 sketches a handy
ethnic typology tracing Greek plantations back to the Neolithic peasantry and
autochthonous prehistoric plant-gatherers. Their Eleusinian mysteries had
much to do with Minoan cults in Crete and
Adoniac rites in Syria.
Owing to great antiquity they lacked an appropriate ethnonymic denomination.
Their ritual centres nevertheless suggest association with the mythical races
of Hektones (< Goth, Hat-), Idaeans (Goth, *Yad-) and Eleusians (< Elis, Illion, Elam).
The advent of Pelasgians may be related to Aurignacians (36 000 BC) but their
cultural hegemony culminated with the Minoan palatial architecture about 1900
BC. In the mid-2nd millennium BC their cultural leadership was
replaced by Mycenaean and Argive cyclopes, Titanids with Minyan ware
and Achaeans of Anatolian provenience. It is an apparent misnomer to classify
their military and economic rule as Helladic cultures because the genuine Hellenes
migrated from Anatolia
after the Fall of Troy (1184 BC).
|
Tribes
|
Specific cultural differences
|
|
Pelasgians
Danaans
Minoans
|
huts on lacustrine and lakeside platforms,
post-dwellings, stilt-dwellings, columnal architecture with arcades and
porticos, twin myths, eating mush out of ground acorns, Apolline cults,
1900-1450 BC
|
|
Mycenaeans
Argives
Cyclopes
|
cupolar beehive dwellings and sepulchres (both
called tholoi) with a horizontal entrance (prodromos),
circular meeting-place, training-ground and town-hall (agora),
Mycenaean ware with tall globular amphorae and high handles, 1600 BC
|
|
Titanids
Graikoi
Dorians
|
Titanids, Minyan ware with monochromous black or
grey burnished/polished pottery, shaft graves with a vertical well and
horizontal corridors, burials on side benches in niches, 1550 BC
|
|
Atticans
Idaeans
Hektenes
|
chthonic cults of Mother Earth and Father Heaven,
bull-fighting and bull-leaping, multi-roomed labyrinth houses on artificial
tell mounds formed by the periodic burning of dwellings due to the
practices of shifting agriculture, Eleusinian mysteries
|
|
Achaeans
Hyksos
Aristoi
|
land-owning aristocracy, fortified castles and
strongholds, acropoleis on high promontories over a river, cults of
war-god Ares, Areopagus (senate and council of elders), heroic epic in
hexameters, 1300 BC
|
|
Hellenes
Ionians
Aeolians
|
short-sized and brachycephalous Lapponoid
physiology, artisan professions of potters and shoe-makers, cremation
burials with face-urns on columns or hut-urns in columbaria, Dipylon vases
and urns with key ornaments and Geometric Ware patterns, folklore with
trickster fables and mendicant carols, iambic poetry with logaedic verses,
arrival after 1100 BC).
|
Table 46. The cultural typology
of Greek tribes
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|
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|
In ancient Greek legends the first celestial divinities were Aether,
Uranos, Cronos and Zeus. Their divine family started from Chaos, who gave
birth to Erebos (Underworld) and Nyx (Night). Their son was Aether, Αἰθήρ,
who is interpreted as ‘air’ or ‘upper sky’ lying over the air ἀήρ. “From Chaos came forth
Erebus and black Night; but of Night were born Aether and Day, whom she
conceived and bare from union in love with Erebus.” Aether had his own cults and seems to
be the first real ethnic reference to the Boeotian mythical Hektones,
who were dubbed and erroneously nicknamed Hecatoncheires
(Hundred-Handed Ones).
In some myths Aether’s
took to wife the ‘wide-bosomed’ Gaia or Γῆ (Earth), a Greek
equivalent of the Roman Terra. They represented the first generation of gods
corresponding to the Egyptian couple Nut (Sky) and Geb (Earth). Such cults of
Mother Earth indicated the primordial role of Neolithic farmers associated
with the advent of Anatolian tribes to Greece. In Hesiod’s Theogony Gaia conceived her progeny by
parthenogenesis and claimed to be mother to three Gigantes and Hecatoncheires:
Cottus, Briareos and Gyges.
In his Works and Days Hesiod collected
fragmentary popular myths into a connected chronology that served as a germ
for beginnings of Greek historiography. Its backbone introduced periodisation
into epochs of the Golden and Silver Age. In his account Gaia bare her son
Uranos (starry Heaven), who symbolised the Bronze Age. He was hated as a
procreator of the evil Cyclopes. They made weapons out of alloys of copper
with tin and flooded Greece with ‘Cyclopean stones’. Their rule ended when they were substituted
by the Titans. Uranos married his mother Gaia and fathered Cronos, who
overthrew his reign on the Olympian throne. His takeover proceeded as a violent overturn. Cronos
conspired with his mother Gaia and agreed to unman his parent Uranos. Uranos
was castrated by a sickle and drops of bloods falling down from his testicles
gave birth to new races. Out of his blood came
two races of nymphs, the Erinyes (Furies) and the Meliai.
Notwithstanding, the ascent of Cronos brought prosperity and rich harvesting.
So his rule was welcomed and remembered as the
Golden Age (chrýseon génos).
Cronos
fell in love with his sister Rhea, took her to wife, and they together bare
their son Zeus. When Zeus was a little boy, Rhea hid him away from Cronos
lest he were abused by his father. Zeus contrived against Cronos and kicked
up a riot that ended with jailing Cronos in Tartarus. Their conflict was
described in the lost epic Titanomachia composed by Eumelus of
Corinth. At first Zeus’ government in Olympos provided flowering designated as the Silver
Age (argirón génos) but later among people there arose discontent and
riots that were punished by the Ogygian Deluge.
Such family quarrels
contained a lot of fabled superstitions but mixed with grains of historical
truth. They were described as events that occurred in the royal dynasty
reigning on Olympos. It served as a sacred mount with cultic groves visited
by pilgrims on ritual occasions. It acted as the seat of Greek Pantheon
worshipped by the Anatolian peasants. It intermingled all Greek deities into
a personal union and one large family of in-laws although it was clear that
they descended from different clans, ethnic factions and racial minorities.
Like all royal dynasties they closed exogamous marriage contracts with
opposite tribes in order to befriend them as allies. In mythological optics
all legendary heroes were depicted as giants because they were seen from the
dwarfish perspective of short-sized Hellenes. In fact, among these
tribal groups there were permanent cruel wars raging. Epic poetry reported
their course as civil rebellions of Theomachy, Gigantomachy and Titanomachy.
Their accidents bore resemblance to customs ruling in Hebroid countries of
the Near East. Sons were abused by their fathers, and when
they grew up, they revolted. They castrated their direct progenitor and got
hold of his throne.
|
Ethnos
|
Archaeological culture
|
Deity
|
Mythic race
|
Underworld
|
Paradise
|
|
Elamitoids
|
Karanovo 6200-5500 BC
|
Gaia (Earth)
|
Hittites
|
pithoi graves
|
Dilmun Eden
|
|
Boeotian
Hektenes
|
Thessalian Dimini and
Sesklo cultures 4400 BC
|
Aether
Gaia
|
Gigantes
Hecatoncheires
|
Chaos (Void)
|
Olympos
|
|
Scythoids
|
Cycladic 3000 BC
Mycenaean 1450 BC
|
Uranos
Arges
|
Cyclopes
|
Erebus
tholoi graves
|
|
|
Teutonids
|
Helladic 2800 BC
Minyan 1600 BC
|
Cronos
Minyas
|
Titanids
Titans
|
Tartarus
shaft graves
|
Asphodel
|
|
Idaeans
|
Aegean
|
Zeus
|
Olympians
|
pithoi graves
|
Elysium
|
|
Gothonids
|
Attican
Eleusian cults
|
Demeter
Persephone
|
Atticans
Eleusinians
|
Hades
|
Elysium
Olympos
|
|
Pelagoids
|
Palatial period 1900 BC
Minoan
|
Apollo
Minos
|
Pelasgiotes
Sea People
|
Hyperborea
|
Bile, Leucos
|
|
Hellenes
|
Geometric Ware 1150 BC
|
Hellenus
|
Ionians
|
cremations
|
Colchis
|
Table 47. The subcategorisation
of Ancient Greek cultural and mythological cycles
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|
The real historical background of such
motifs must be reconstructed by turning aside familial skirmishes and
focusing on tribal groups. The first autochthones in ancient Greece were Elamitoid harbingers of Neolithic
agriculture, who came from Anatolia between 7000 and 6500 BC. Their land-tilling advances were announced by the Dimini and Sesklo culture
remarkable for painted vessels with abstract patterns. Their ceramic style
was developed especially in eastern Thessaly and Epirus. Its artifacts were excavated abundantly in
Cakran in Albania. The Neolithic scene documented that there were
two agrarian cultures overlapping. On one hand, there were tell-sites
with flat-roof multi-roomed labyrinths and chessboard pottery jutting out of Anatolia to the Karanovo culture in Bulgaria and, on the other hand, there were Danubian
longhouses with spiral ornamentation that evidenced expansion as far as Phrygia. The ethnonyms of both groups of Neolithic
farmers must have read as derivations of Gothoid Guttians, Heteans, Hittim,
and Hittites. Their spelling echoed in the name of Hektones and also
the Hecatoncheires, Ἑκατόγχειρες.
Their Latinised form was Centimanes and literally meant ‘Hundred-Handed
Ones’. It referred to a triplet of heroes called Briareos, Kottos and Gyges.
They were all begotten by goddess Gaia worshipped by Greeks as Mother Earth
and known to Romans under her Latin name Terra. Their name was
composed of two parts, hekaton ‘hundred’ and χείρ,
cheir ‘hand’. They allegedly had ‘a hundred hands and fifty heads’,
which sounds more probable than an alternative phrase ‘each had a hundred
arms and fifty heads’.
The spelling Hecatoncheires
evidently arose as a false popular contortion of the correct spelling
Hektones. Popular fantasies depicted them as giant monsters instead of
conveying the veritable communication that they lived in collective
longhouses inhabited by a great families with as many as a hundred relatives,
as it was common among the Neolithic Linear Ware farmers. They must have
looked like Danubian Nordids and amazing notices concerning their giant or
gigantic figure mirrored only the fact that the Neolithic farmers were tall
dolichocephals of robust and strong figure. So it was no wonder that
neighbours described them as three giants of great strength.
Hesiod’s Theogony
maintained that Uranos was conceived by Gaia alone, but
other sources reported that his real father was Aether. The
etymology of Gyges stemmed from the compound ‘earth-born’. Some Classic and
Hellenistic pictures and statuettes depicted Gigantes as chthonic
earth-born creatures that crept out of volcanoes or other holes in the earth
and had snakes instead of legs. As seen in the Minoan figurines of a snake
goddess with the crown of hair swarming with snakes, serpents symbolised
subterrestrial servants of the Mother Earth. Neolithic peasantry revered
serpents as their tribal totemistic symbols and chthonic tutelary spirits.
“Archaic and Classical representations show Gigantes as man-sized hoplites (heavily armed ancient Greek foot
soldiers) fully human in form.”
Hoplites were middle-class farmers, who did not possess horses, so they had
to fight with common foot soldiers.
Myths about Gigantomachia left many
unclarities but looked like legends about peasants’ rebellions waging a civil
war against the oppression of Olympian gods. Some authors made it clear that Gigantes
revolted against Titanids and took part in Titanomachia. Other
notices suggest that they were born from drops of blood falling down to the
earth after the castration of Uranos. The general impression implies that
their tribal deities were Aether, Zeus, Demeter and Persephone. At last the
giants’ revolt was vanquished and their dead bodies were buries under
volcanoes.
The first alien invaders
of ancient Greece were Cyclopes, whose procreator and tutelary divinity was Uranos. He
was a sky tribal deity of Scythoid kurgan-builders related to the Vedic god Váruṇa,
his Mitanni twin Aruna and Zoroastric Ahriman. He was
feared as a cruel god of the starry night sky. He engendered the first
generation of one-eyed giant Cyclopes, whose names were Brontes (Thunder), Steropes
(Lightning) and Arges (Bright). Mycenaean tholos-builders were called Cyclopes,
which literally means ‘circle-eyed’ or ‘round-eyed’. The
myths of one-eyed Cyclopes originated thanks to their custom to blind and
unsight slaves beaten in combats and personal duels. Their original homeland
was in the Caucasus inhabited by their Abkhaz tribesmen. In
Caucasian stories “the cyclops is almost always a shepherd, and he is also variously presented
as a one-eyed, rock-throwing, cannibalistic giant, who says his name is ‘nobody’, who lives in a cave, whose door is blocked by a large
stone, who is a threat to the hero of the story, who is blinded by a hot
stake, and whose flock of sheep is stolen by the hero and his men. These
motifs are also found in the cyclops stories of Homer, Euripides, and
Hesiod.”
Cyclopes intimidated their neighbours as robust
one-eyed giants indulging in building large megalith constructions called ‘Cyclopean stones’ and ‘Cyclopean wallstones’. Their architecture was remarkable for drystone walls,
copula-shaped roofs and vaulted ceilings. In Mycenae their style was demonstrated by the Lions’ Gate symbolising their feline and leonine
cults. In Egyptian feline sphinges guarded entrance into pyramids while in
ancient Peru the same service was entrusted to sculptures of Jaguars. Their
supreme god was brother to the Egyptian son-god Ra, represented as the triangle
with an all-seeing eye of providence. Their geometry was based on the
incidence of sunbeams and their magic witchcraft on evil-eye charms. Their
remote relatives were Mesopotamian Urukans, who depicted their kings and gods
with accented binocular eye-orbits. On the other hand, their invasion (3000
BC) in the Cyclades developed a culture of blind eyeless statues.
An additional criterion of ethnic
classification may be found in residual consonantal nominal stems and plurals
(Table 48). Ancient Greek nouns had Sarmatoid t/d-stems,
Abkhazo-Median m/nk/k-stems, Turcoid r-stems,
Lydian l-stems and Hellenic o-stems with i/oi-plurals.
Such stems predefine their classification.
GREEKS ® k-Cyclopes + i-Hellenes
+ r-Dorians + l-Pelasgians
l-Pelasgians ® Paeones,
Pelasgiotes + Danaïdes + Karoi + Leleges
r-Dorians ® Doroi, Tauroi + Kimmerioi + Greeks, Geryones
k-Cyclopes ® Thracians + Bessoi, Mysioi, Mosxoi
i-Hellenes ® Galatians, Hellenes + Ionoi (<
*Jav/Alban) + Aeolians Aetolians (<
*Ant)
Table 48. Greek ethnicities classified by stems and plural endings
|
|
|
|
Greek myths assume that the earliest
autochthones of Boeotia were the Hectenes or
Ectenes, probably belonging to the earliest race of Neolithic farmers
(Eteo-Cretans, Hatti, Hittim, Gutti, Etio). They
represented an antediluvial culture similar to the inhabitants of Eridu in Mesopotamia. The next population
to come after the world flood were the Graecians (Γραικοί),
people who were rescued by the Greek Noahs in his
ark. Such saviours of Greece
appeared in several tribal myths narrating about the flood of Ogyges, the flood of Deucalion, and the flood
of Dardanus. Stories of the great world deluge were related
in many countries and in all regions their authors were Cimbrian or
Cimbroid seafarers. The Hebrews believed in the myth depicting Noah, champion
of the Noachian deluge and the Sumerians in Kish saw such a
rescuer of humankind after the world flood in Utnapishtim. The inhabitants of
Shuruppak had their own world flood champion Ziusudra and the Akkadians
attributed the same role to their hero Atrahasis. In ancient India humankind owed
their salvation to the first man Manu, who procreated the human race after a
huge tsunami wave. A similar story was told also by the Kimbern, the
Cimbrian mariners in the northern tip of Jutland.
In ancient Greece there were
several versions of these flood myths circulating and all of them linked
Greeks to the archaic nationalities of Graikoi and Titanids. A tribe
of Graecians was settled in Epirus (today’s Albania) and attributed
the role of Noah to the marital couple of Deucalion and Pyrrha. They saved
their lives by building a chest of wood. Deucalion’s son Hellenus was
venerated as the forefather of Hellenes in the district of Hellas
located in Thessaly. When enquiring into their
ethnic roots, Aristotle remarked that the Hellenes were originally
called Graeci (Graikoi ‘Greeks’)
settled as a tribe in Epirus. He situated
their seats between Dodona and the Achelous River, the assumed
locality of Deucalion’s great deluge.
Sextus Africanus found out
that people in Boeotia derived their origin from
the mythological ruler Ogyges, who became hero thanks to his lifesaving role
in the Ogygian deluge.
Theophilus, bishop of Antioch, maintained that
that Ogyges belonged to the stock of Titans. A local myth mentioned a hero Graecos
as an inhabitant of Γραία (Graia), a little
town on the coast of Boeotia. A descendant of his stock
was seen also in Minyas, the legendary founder of the Boeotian city-state
Orchomenos. The local Minyan Ware installed the Early Helladic tradition of
dark burnished pottery typical of most Cimbroid colonies in the Near East. The flood myth
made appearance also in the region Graiki in Attica but it is not
certain whether it concerned an independent locality or only the
afore-mentioned Boeotian part of Attica. The role of the
first man who survived the Poseidon’s tsunami was entrusted to the mythic
king Cecrops here. The citizens of Graia must have been aware of their
distant Cimbrian descent because when they colonised Italy about 900 BC,
they relentlessly searched for the ancient settlement of Cimbrian pirates in Cumae close to Naples. To sum it up, Greece was dismembered into many small tribal district, each
region of farmers had its own Olympos, each region of Graecoids its flood
myth, posthumous Acheron river and its own necropolis Tartarus.
The Bronze Age archaeology of
ancient Greece began with the
Early Helladic I (EH I) dated to c. 2800-2500 BC. Its cultural style was remarkable
for dark burnished pottery that copied the shapes of shallow open metallic
bowls and endeavoured to imitate their grey metallic polish. The German
archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann associated such ceramics with sites
excavated in Orchomenos and coined for their peculiarities the term Minyan
Ware. Its name hinted at the legendary king Minyas, who founded Orchomenus and
installed a powerful ruling dynasty in Boeotia. The semantic
extension of Minyans roughly corresponded to the nationality of mythic Graikoi,
because Herodotus spoke about Minyans as a full-fledged autochthnous tribe
that attempted to liberate Greece from the
Pelasgian supremacy. He recalled that Pelasgians were driven out Attica and took
vengeance by driving the Minyans out of the isle Lemnos. He also reported about a tribe of
Minyans from Amyklai in the south of Peloponnesus, who colonised
the island of Thera around 800 BC.
This remark might induce us to identify Minyans with Doric tribes, but this
is contradicted by tidings about their fights with the Doric forefather
Heracles. Heracles freed Thebans from paying tribute to Minyans, defeated
them as enemies and ordered them to pay tribute to Thebans. This implies that
Helladic Graecoids recruited from Hebroid drylanders, while Dorians were
descendants of Titanids born from Punoid coastlanders.
Graecoids. Irrespective of how close
the relation of Minyans to the Graikoi might be, the cultural
morphology of Minyans in the Early Helladic period exhibited strong
similarity to Natufian sites in Jericho. Both
civilisations have come a long way from gazelle hunting to goat herding and
from cave dwelling to abodes made of stone towers. Both were heirs to the
diaspora of Microlithic cultures in the Mesolithic (12,000-10,000 BC) and
both joined the pastoralist branch of Cimbrians. This transition from fishing
to small-game hunting and herding goats was probably due to assimilative
acculturation to Levantine Epi-Mousterians. It was them who gave Hebroids the
typical Semitic physiognomy with aquiline noses peculiar to Jews, Armenians
and Assyrian phenotypes. Another Scythoid contribution imported by Hebroids
to Greece were circular
and apsidal towers abundant at the Jericho site. Mutations
affected especially the Natufian and Hebrew settlers, while the Kebaran and
Phoenician culture remained relatively untouched and uninterruptedly
developed archaic traditions of fishermen.
Titanids. Such differentiation
affected also microlithic cultures and Turcoid tribes in the Middle East. Their
mainstream remained faithful to fishing economy and aggregated into the core
of the Sea Peoples in the Mediterranean waters. Their earliest ancestors were
probably the Ichthyophagi, who caught fish on the coasts of the Red Sea and Iranian
Gedrosia. Their descendants became seafaring pirates (Phoenicians, Punics,
Etruscans), mastered secrets of metallurgy and accumulated immense treasures
of gold by robbing sails of honest merchants. The bad repute of feared
buccaneers, who live on maritime piracy, adorned especially the tribes of
Phoenicians, Etruscans, Cretan Dorians, Cydonians, Lycians and Cilicians.
Thanks to the custom of hoarding treasures of silver and gold, they later
evolved into the influential social class of merchants, bankers, usurers and
urban patricians.
The Greek Titanids must have been their
remote relatives, because Poseidon was a Titanid holding control over the
oceans. Their fishing techniques did not use angling but Poseidon’s trident
fishspear resemblant to the three-pronged fishing spear leister of
Germanic Teutons. This manner of fishing suggests consanguinity with the
northern bog-people with pointed-bottom pottery and the Y-haplogroup R1a.
Their affinity to the Red Sea Ichthyophagi lack
convincing proofs because the latter are usually depicted with single-pronged
fishing spears.
The Turcoid native cradleland lay
somewhere in the Altai Mountains and its Microlithic industry came into being
as a side splinter of the Denisovan Leptolithic flake-tools cultivated by
ancestors of Tungusoid fishers. The race of Turanids took to living in rock
shelters in caves or under rock overhangs and fishing in Trans-Caspian marshlands.
Greek Graecians and Dorians originally made their living by herding. The
former were Graecoids, who sprang from Hebrew drylanders with burnished ware
and Y-haplogroup R1b.
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Cimbrians (microlithic ware,
goat herding, round stone towers and semicircular horseshoe apsidas, grey
burnished ware in imitation of metallic bowls, sickles inlaid with microlith
blades, water wells and tsenotes with hoards, three-pronged fishing
spear, Poseidon’s trident, Germanic Teutons’ leister, fallic cults,
terminal milestones hermai, artificial pederasty, abusing page-boys
for fellation.
Graecoids (round stone
towers, horseshoe apsidas, grey burnished ware),
▪ Titans (< Typhon, Taautus,
Teutones) [Thessaly, Mount Othrys, Mount Sipylus], Iapetids,
Atlantids, Hyperionides (< Cimbrians?), ten-year Titanomachy on Mount Othrys.
▪ Graecians (Γραικοί)
in Boeotia, Epirus and Thessaly, Ogygians,
Thebans, Minyans [Boeotia, Orchomenus, Lemnos, Amycles,
Thera],
▪
Dorians [Doris, Sparta in Laconia, eastern Crete], Heracleidae
(Heracleids),
▪ Cydonians (< Cydon, son of Hermes,
Chanians [northwestern Crete], Lemnians, Rutuli
(king Turnus, Juturna, goddess of fountains, Fontus, god of wells) [Latium], Etruscans-Tyrrhēnioi),
(Latin Mercurius = Etruscan Turms), Hermeides (< Hermes) [Arcadia, Mount Cyllene, Cyprus, Cilicia], the Harpies
(Iris, Celaeno), Cypriotes (< Cimbrians), Arcado-Cypriotes, caduceus (kerykeion),
phallic statuettes, milestones hermai.
▪ Geryonides (cliff-dwellers, pirates,
submarine caves, shaft graves), deities Typhon (Τυφών,
Typhaeus), Lernaean Hydra [Lycia, Mount Etna], Chimaera (<
Greek χίμαρος ‘she-goat’) [Corinth, Lycia, Cilicia], Gorgon, Scylla
[Lipari Islands, Isthmia, Corinth, Bosphorus Strait].
Table
50. A classification of Greek Cimbroids
The Early Helladic population lived in
circular stone houses reminiscent of round houses in Jericho. In Orchomenos
archaeologists dug out a site with round houses that dated back to the Early
Bronze Age (2800-1900 BC). They were built as stone towers amounting to two to six meters in diameter. In later time they formed
apsidal chambers. They were constructed like early Christian churches with a
semicircular or horseshoe-shaped apsida for the altar or the saint patron’s
icon. The apsida (Greek αψις, hapsis, Latin
apsis) is actually a circular niche or a horseshoe exedra formed by a
hollowing in the wall for laying aside some precious valuables. It had also a
round or semicircular ceiling called conch (Greek konché).
The population of Ancient Greece consisted
of two ethnicities descending from Mesolithic microlith cultures, the Dorian
and Graecoid drylanders and the sea people of Titanids headed by Cronos and
Poseidon. The former branch developed from the Kebaran and Natufian
Microlithic in the Levant but underwent a
metamorphosis due to the impact of the Tabunian culture with the prevalence
of Semitic and Armenoid types with aquiline nasal profiles. Owing to their
influence The Natufian settlers began to build horseshoe-shaped
towers with growing out of subterrestrial understructure. This style
reappeared in the Greek Early Helladic
I period (EHI) and its excavations denoted as ‘Eutresis culture’. At the site of Korakou it was
characterized by horseshoe-shaped towers and burnished or red slipped pottery. Natufians
represented a Levantine mutation of microlith cultures peculiar to Hebroids
and Hebrew people. The dominant racial types in Greece
are denotable as Graecoids derived from the Helladic I and Levantine
Hebroids.
Extract
from Pavel Bělíček:
The Analytic Survey of European Anthropology, Prague 2018,
pp.
145-155.
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