The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples - RePub - Erasmus Universiteit ...

the way to Tartessos just outside the pillars of Herakles in
southern Iberia is reflected in the archaeological record of
Huelva by north-Ionian bird bowls and Aiolian bucchero
dating from c. 630-580 BC. 25 Apparently to accommodate
this long-distance trade the Phokaians founded colonies
along the route at Marseilles (= Massalia, c. 600 BC) and
Ampurias (= Emporion, also c. 600 BC). 26
With a view to linguistics, it deserves our attention
that there can be distinguished four types of names for the
Greek colonies in general: (1) after or derived from geographic
names in the motherland, like Cumae, Megara Hyblaia,
and Naxos; (2) based on Greek divine names, like
Apollonia, Herakleia, and Posidonia; (3) based on Greek
vocabulary words, like Emporion, Naukratis, Olbia, and
Khersonesos; or (4) derived from local geographic (especially
river) names, like Borysthenes, Gela, Histria, and
Sybaris.
Fig. 2. Distribution of the Greek dialects (from Hall 1997: 154,
Fig. 25).
Thus far our interdisciplinary method to detect protohistorical
ethnic groups, notwithstanding its shortcomings,
seems to work fairly well. But what about less contrastive
situations, when a population shift takes place from one
point to another within a cultural continuum? The best example
of such a case is the migration of the Dorians from
various regions in Phokis and Thessaly to the Peloponnesos
under the leadership of Heraklid kings, who, as the
25 Cabrera & Olmos 1985; cf. Best & Woudhuizen 1989: 150.
26 Shefton 1994: 61-3 (east-Greek and Korinthian wares reported
for the earliest layer); 70-1
23
myth goes, return to their ancestral lands some time after
the Trojan war. In fact, the evaluation of the historicity of
this event is a central theme in Hall’s study of ethnicity in
antiquity.
The problem of the coming of the Dorians and the return
of the Heraklids involves three categories of evidence:
linguistic, historical (or mythical), 27 and archaeological.
The linguistic thesis is presented by the map of the distribution
of the Greek dialects (see Fig. 2). What strikes us
about this distribution is that speakers of Arkado-Cyprian –
which is the dialect closest to the Mycenaean Greek language
as attested for Linear B tablets from the Late Bronze
Age – besides their extension to Cyprus (not on the map),
are locked up in the Arkadian upland plain in the centre of
the Pelopponesos and entirely surrounded by speakers of
the West Greek or Doric dialect. From this distribution pattern
it may be extrapolated that Arkado-Cyprian was once
spoken in a wider area including the coastal regions of the
Pelopponesos in order to explain the maritime connection
with Cyprus, and that West Greek or Doric is a latecomer
in the region, having been introduced in the Pelopponesos
and spread to Crete, the Dodekanesos, southwest Asia Minor,
and Rhodes after the downfall of the Mycenaean civilization.
The historical antithesis consists of mythical traditions
that the Dorians once lived in various regions of
Thessaly (first Phthia in the south and later Histiaiotis either
at the foot of the Pindos mountain in the midwest or
between mounts Ossa and Olympos in the northeast) and
Phokis (Dryopis, later called Doris). In Thessaly, the Dorians
became associated with a royal house descended from
Herakles, who during his labors visited the region of Histiaiotis
and helped the Dorians to defeat their enemies, the
Lapiths, in return of which he received a third share of the
land and the kingship from them. Now, Herakles is, like
Eurystheus, who through the wiles of Hera became king in
his place, a member of the Perseid dynasty of Mycenae.
This latter dynasty was subsequently replaced by the house
of Pelops, to which Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae at
the time of the Trojan war, belongs. After a futile attempt
of the Heraklids to regain their throne under Herakles’ son
Hyllos, the great-grandson of the latter, Temenos, together
27 In general, concerning the category the historical or mythical
evidence as presented by the literary sources, Forsdyke’s (1957:
162) adagium that “Plausible fiction can only be distinguished
from fact by external evidence (…).” should be applied whenever
possible.