Do Ancient Greeks have African Origins?

[Carlin]

[tchaiku]

Ancient Greeks show less affinity with Levant and Africa than Sicilians and Aegean islanders in terms of genetics.
The African and Asiatic origin of the old Greeks is a myth.

[Carlin]

Foundation Tales as Cultural Thievery.

Celebrated characters from legend could serve as founders of foreign nations. Or, more inventively, fictive tales ascribed names derived from extant peoples to fabricated figures who became those peoples' progenitors. The Hellenic penchant for peering through parochial spectacles is well known. Alien nations became transformed and familiar when fitted into Greek traditions.

That held true even for the supposed archenemy, Persia. According to Herodotus, the Hellenic hero Perseus wed his rescued damsel Andromeda whose son by him was named Perses. And from him the Persians took their own name. So Herodotus (or rather his sources). The story is a noteworthy one. The most inveterate foe of Hellas thus came within the Hellenic embrace. Greeks slipped one of their most celebrated legendary figures into a fictitious narrative of Persian history, thus to account for the very name of the people.

That fable, in its many manifestations, may be the most dramatic instance of identity theft. But far from the only one. Another tradition took this maneuver a step further. The ruling house of Persia carried the designation of Achaemenids. That played nicely into the hands of Greek fashioners of legend. They concocted an Achaemenes as founder of the dynasty, made him a son of Perseus, and explained his name as derived from his grandfather, who came from Achaea in the Peloponnese. So even prime villains of the Greek master narrative, the Achaemenid clan and the Persian empire, turn out to be Greek in origin. That is appropriation indeed.

If Persians could be hellenized, anyone was fair game.


Page 224 -- Rethinking the Other in Antiquity, Erich S. Gruen.

[Carlin]

The Classical Quarterly (New Series)

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=1BB3D548C8F2A33E81F31DA1E8C078D3.journals?fromPage=online&aid=8269171

Classical Quarterly 61.1 91-113 (2011)

NEAR EASTERN SLAVES IN CLASSICAL ATTICA AND THE SLAVE TRADE WITH PERSIAN TERRITORIES

During the Classical period, Athens and a number of other poleis relied upon trade with 'barbarian' territories on the periphery of the Aegean world to maintain large slave populations which played an integral role in economic life and formed the bedrock of elite wealth.

[Carlin]

Crna Atena, Martin Bernal - p. 385 (Macedonian Edition):

"Vo sekoj slucaj, kako opstoprifaten fakt, barem sto se odnesuva do epohata na procutot na helenizmot, se zema deka oficijalen jazik na Krit vo negoviot ran period bil fenikiskiot jazik. Na primer, postoi eden zapis napisan od Lukij Septimij, koj datira od IV vek od nasata era, vo koj se veli koga po zemjotresot od 66 g.n.e. bile pronajdeni izvesni dokumenti koi ocigledno poteknuvale od antickoto minato na Krit, imperatorot Neron, so cel da gi razgatne, povikal uceni semitisti."*

* - Poglednete kaj Evans (1909, p. 109). Toj dava pricini za prifakanjeto na ogledot na Septimius; isto taka, mozete da poglednete i kaj Gordon (1966b, p. 16).

[Carlin]

The Historian's History of the World, Ulrich von Willamowitz-Moellendorff:

"[t]he umpires at the Olympian games are the first to apply the name of Hellenes to the nation - more exactly speaking, to the class. For here it has come to pass that, though politically divided into numberless cantons, though involved in perpetual feuds and irreconcilable local animosities, the members of this class recognise one another, intermarry, call a truce for the festivals, and find a common interest in maintaining their class supremacy against the encroachments of the lower orders [sic]." (1989: 67). See also Schaefer 1963: 283.

The suggestion is arresting: the Olympic Games were originally restricted to a transregional community of aristocrats.

[Carlin]

Continued.

The Greeks had no monopoly on this sort of "identity theft." Egyptians employed the same form of imaginary lineage that attached foreign cultures to themselves. Egyptian mythology that made its way to Diodorus of Sicily included a tale of the wanderings of Osiris, most venerable and sacred of the nation's deities. The story has Osiris venture across the Hellespont to Thrace and beyond. In the course of his travels he left behind a son named Macedon as ruler of a land that was henceforth to be known as Macedonia. And, for good measure, he behind another son, now aged, who would oversee the cultivation of plants in Thrace and found a city there, duly to be designed as Maroneia.

Macedonians may have installed an alien dynasty on the Egyptians' land -- But, on this concoction, Macedonia itself owed its origin to an Egyptian dynasty.

[Carlin]

Foundation Tales as Cultural Thievery.

Celebrated characters from legend could serve as founders of foreign nations. Or, more inventively, fictive tales ascribed names derived from extant peoples to fabricated figures who became those peoples' progenitors. The Hellenic penchant for peering through parochial spectacles is well known. Alien nations became transformed and familiar when fitted into Greek traditions.

That held true even for the supposed archenemy, Persia. According to Herodotus, the Hellenic hero Perseus wed his rescued damsel Andromeda whose son by him was named Perses. And from him the Persians took their own name. So Herodotus (or rather his sources). The story is a noteworthy one. The most inveterate foe of Hellas thus came within the Hellenic embrace. Greeks slipped one of their most celebrated legendary figures into a fictitious narrative of Persian history, thus to account for the very name of the people.

That fable, in its many manifestations, may be the most dramatic instance of identity theft. But far from the only one. Another tradition took this maneuver a step further. The ruling house of Persia carried the designation of Achaemenids. That played nicely into the hands of Greek fashioners of legend. They concocted an Achaemenes as founder of the dynasty, made him a son of Perseus, and explained his name as derived from his grandfather, who came from Achaea in the Peloponnese. So even prime villains of the Greek master narrative, the Achaemenid clan and the Persian empire, turn out to be Greek in origin. That is appropriation indeed.

If Persians could be hellenized, anyone was fair game.


Page 224 -- Rethinking the Other in Antiquity, Erich S. Gruen.

[Carlin]

i) Hekataios of Miletos (1 FGrH 119) mainatained that most of Greece had formerly been occupied by 'barbarians' such as the Phrygians, the Egyptians, the Dryopes, the Kaukones, the Pelasgians, the Leleges, the Thrakians and the Phoenicians.

Some of these non-Hellenic peoples were evidently still occupying parts of the Aegean during the fifth century: Pelasgian-speaking populations are attested for the Khalkidike peninsula (Macedonia), the regions west of the river Strymon (Macedonia and Thrace) and the island of Lemnos, while the cities of Hermione in the Argolid, Asine in Messenia and Styra on Euboia together with the island of Kythenos were populated by Dryopes. The Leleges are said to have once occupied the Megarid, Lakonia and above all the islands.

(Above taken from Hall's book "Hellenicity".)

ii) Sir John Linton Myres, Wykeham Professor of Greek History at the University of Oxford.

Wikipedia link -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Myres

Myres examined all the physical anthropological, linguistic, religious and archaeological evidence that was available to him before proceeding to test it against what he termed the 'folk memory' of the (ancient) Greeks themselves. For example, analysis of skeletal remains and particularly skull types - a favourite preoccupation of scholars in these decades - revealed the coexistence of 'Alpine-Armenoid', 'Mediterranean' and 'Northern' types, leading him to believe that the Greek people emerged 'from mongrel ancestry' (1930: 532). Myres also saw this original 'hybridity' reflected in the development and distribution of the historical (ancient) Greek dialects, in the Greek pantheon and in the material culture of the Bronze Age, which he attributed to both indigenous development and external influence from areas as distant as North Africa, Asia Minor and the Lower Danube. Furthermore, these findings appeared to accord with the myths that told of the arrival of 'foreign' heroes such as Pelops, Kadmos or Danaos. In short:

The Greeks of classical times were of mixed descent, spoke different dialects of a hybrid language, combined Olympian with chthonic cults and rituals ... and their traditions intermixed indigenous stocks, which were not Greek, with immigrant culture-heroes, pervasive Hellenes, migratory Dorians and Aeolians transposed and superposed on other kinds of Greeks. (1930: 531)

(Quoted in "Hellenicity".)

iii) Jonathan Hall's quote, page 227 of his book "Hellenicity" - Epilogue.

The geography and history of the Greek peninsula long conspired to militate against the emergence of an overarching, transregional Hellenic consciousness. There is not the slightest evidence that Greeks of the Late Bronze Age recognized themselves as a singular ethnic entity nor - despite claims to the contrary - is there any compelling support for the notion that confrontation with indigenous 'others' on the periphery of the Greek world triggered a sense of Hellenic 'sameness' in the 8th century BC.

The testimony suggests instead that Hellenic identity arose in the elite environment of the Olympic Games during the course of the 6th century and that it served both to cement alliances between ruling families of various regions and to promote the hegemonic claims of the Thessalians over their neighbous in central Greece. Hellenicity in the Late Archaic period was predicated on ethnic criteria to the extent that affiliation was legitimated aggregatively through genealogical discourse rather than by means of a conscious reification of language, religion or culture, but it was noninclusive in the sense that Hellenic membership was denied to certain populations that we would today consider Greek.

Just at the point, in the immediate aftermath of the Persian War, where an oppositional construction of Hellenicity could have permitted a more inclusive basis of enrolment, its ethnic foundations imploded and retreated rapidly before more cultural criteria.

[SirGeorge8600]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroups_by_nations

Now then,see the graph about Greek people (continental,north,south etc.).See which haplogroup is most frequent in Greek DNA.As shown,it's E1b1b,a.k.a.E-M215,it varies from 20% till up to 50%.[/IMG]

Yes, the numbers posted around 20% that average around the Balkans are from tests sampling modern Greeks. The numbers below going up to 47% are from this test:

http://www.cell.com/AJHG/fulltext/S0002-9297%2808%2900547-8

Where they used sampling from ancient Greek colonial sites and graves. It doesn't make much sense that they would test modern Greeks if they wanted their paper to focus strictly on ancient Greeks. After all they found no Turkish blood which I find remarkably hard to believe. Needless to say the same group did blood samples from participants when they published a paper on Jews and Palestinians which they talk about in their paper about the ancient Greeks.

[Carlin]

More on the bilingualism & multilingualism of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Excerpt from "Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture", By Jonathan M. Hall.

Pages 113-116:

Communication would certainly have been facilitated by bilingualism, a natural consequence of intermarriage between alloglots: thus, Herodotus (6.138.2) recounts how the Athenian women kidnapped by the Pelasgians of Lemnos taught their children the Attic tongue (glossa Attike). But the earliest attested instance of bilingualism in Greek literature is found in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (113-16), where Aphrodite disguises herself as a Phrygian woman who addresses the Trojan Ankhises in his own language. Indeed it is more commonly non-Greeks who are credited with a multilingual proficiency: for example, the mid-seventh-century Egyptian Pharaoh Psammetikhos is said to have entrusted Egyptian children to his Greek mercenaries in order to learn the Greek language; at a vast banquet held in 479 B.C. to which the Thebans invited Persian dignitaries, Thersandros of Orkhomenos was addressed in Greek by his Persian dining partner; and the Karians and the populations of the Khalkidike were apparently competent in the Greek language. There are, however, also instances of Greeks who possess varying levels of bilingual competence. The characterization of a Lydian woman by the late sixth-century poet Hipponax betrays some knoweledge of Lydian and even Phrygian vocabulary; Histiaios, the tyrant of Miletos, is said to have been able to speak Persian and a similar competence in Persian is attributed to Themistokles and to Alkibiades, while Pythagoras is supposed to have learnt Egyptian.

Iamblikhos' notice (Life of Pythagoras 34.241) that Pythagoras ordered all Greek Pythagoreans to speak Greek is interesting in that it suggests that many of the Greeks of South Italy may have employed indigenous idioms. Bilingualism would also have facilitated (though it is not necessarily required by) the transmission of the Greek alphabet, adopted by Phrygians, Etruscans and Lydians in the 8th century, the Karians in the 7th century and the Lykians, Sikeloi and Elymoi in the 6th century.

PS: An early conception of a singular Hellenic language is illusory in documentation. In fact, it is not until the 5th century that we find a concrete expression on this concept in the phrase he Hellas glossa ('the Greek tongue'). This is also the period when the verb hellenizein first appears.

The fact is that what we term the Greek language was in reality a collection of myriad regional dialects. It is often assumed that these were mutually intelligible and that therefore the greater ease with which Greeks could have understood one another as opposed to speakers of other languages would have engendered a growing consciousness of a shared Greek language. Yet quite apart from the already noted lack of terminology to express such a consciousness prior to the 5th century, there are many documented instances within ethnolinguistic research which demonstrate clearly that dialect speakers are often able to comprehend dialects of another language group better than some dialects within their own language group.

[momce]

Interesting. I assume this DNA cluster would be stronger around the original greek settlement areas around the insular coast lines of the area? Explains alot. Isnt there evidence that Macedonians have more ancient Hellenic(Doric, not to say they were total Dorians) DNA then modern greeks?(note difference Hellenic from greek)

[DraganOfStip]

This is a response to a certain Kaka (I bet he's Greek) that was having a discussion with me yesterday via personal messages about how Greeks weren't black and all that.Well,since he has blocked me from sending any more personal messages,I'll enlighten him through this very thread so he can read it and have a think.
OK,let's make it simple for our friend here.This is a graphic description of all Y-DNA haplogroups in human DNA by nation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplogroups_by_nations

Now then,see the graph about Greek people (continental,north,south etc.).See which haplogroup is most frequent in Greek DNA.As shown,it's E1b1b,a.k.a.E-M215,it varies from 20% till up to 50%.After you've done that,Google this haplogroup and you'll find the following : place of origin - EAST AFRICA,time of origin - approx 22 400 years ago.
Meaning,your black ancestors migrated to the southern balkan peninsula,mixed with the locals and in time lost their black features.But as I said earlier in our messages - PEOPLE LIE,DNA DOESN'T.Simple as that.Oh,and just in case you question the haplogroup chart,in the top right corner of every number there is another number featured in blue.Just place your mouse cursor on top and it shows you who made the research,when,etc etc.WE didn't make these researches,it was made by smart people with degrees in biology,chemistry,genetics etc,people that are masters of their craft,people that unlike you actually KNOW what they're talking about.And finally,here's the route of distribution of your ancestors blood,you can clearly see WHERE E1bib (E-M215) originates for yourself.TOUCHE!

[momce]

the greeks lived in myths & legends.They lived the make bleive.

I dont even think thats totally true. Ur-phenomenon have a tendancy of reappearing all the time. Im sure most people in the ancient world were bilingual or multilingual or of mixed natures. Can we say for example what exactly or distinctly was ancient greek as opposed to the homogeneous constructs we are usually taught?(and that distinctly ancient greek has nothing to do with ancient Macedonia or even modern greece that world is dead and buried). Was it linguistic changes that took place in what was known as greece proper-i.e attica and peloponnese, was it geometrical art etc)I doubt we actually know exactly how the ancient greeks or anyone exactly lived or thought. Most of the way we are taught to think is the result of centralisation.

[momce]

the greeks lived in myths & legends.They lived the make bleive.

I dont even think thats totally true. Ur-phenomenon have a tendancy of reappearing all the time. I doubt we actually know exactly how the ancient greeks or anyone exactly lived or thought.