Pelasgians is a name applied by ancient Greek writers to a group of people who dwelled in several locations as neighbors of the Greeks, and spoke a different language. It has since come to be used by scholars to indicate the autochthonic inhabitants of these lands before the arrival of the Greeks. Pelasgians were also one of the ancient peoples of Asia Minor.

Table of contents

1 Classical Greek uses of "Pelasgian" 2 Modern Theories 3 Links and References

Classical Greek uses of "Pelasgian"

The name Pelasgian first appears in the poems of Homer, where they appear in the Iliad among the allies of Troy. In the section known to scholars as The Catalogue of Ships, which is otherwise in strict geographical order, they stand between the Hellespontine towns and the Thracians of south-east Europe, i.e. on the Hellespontine border of Thrace (2.840-843). Their town or district is called Larissa and is fertile, and they are celebrated for their spearmanship. Their chiefs are Hippothous and Pylaeus, sons of Lethus son of Teutamus. Iliad, 10.428-429, describes their camping ground between the town of Troy and the sea; but this obviously proves nothing about their habitat in time of peace.

Odyssey, 17.175-177, places Pelasgians in Crete, together with two apparently indigenous and two immigrant peoples (Achaeans and Dorians), but gives no indication to which class the Pelasgians belong. In Lemnos (Iliad, 7.467; 14. 230) there are no Pelasgians, but a Minyan dynasty. Two other passages (Iliad, 2.681-684; 16.233-235) apply the epithet "Pelasgic" to a district called Argos about Mount Othrys in southern Thessaly, and to Zeus of Dodona. But in neither case are actual Pelasgians mentioned; the Thessalian Argos is the specific home of Hellenes and Achaeans, and Dodona is inhabited by Perrhaebians and Aenianes (Iliad, 2.750) who are nowhere described as Pelasgian. It looks therefore as if "Pelasgian" were here used connotatively, to mean either "formerly occupied by Pelasgian" or simply "of immemorial age."

Hesiod is quoted by Strabo as expanding on the Homeric phrase, calling Dodona "seat of Pelasgians" (fr. 225); he speaks also of a person named Pelasgus, the father of the culture-hero of Arcadia, Lycaon. After Hesiod, a number of early authors flesh out this brief statement. An early genealogist Asius, describes Pelasgus as the first man, literally born of the earth to create a race of men. An early poet, Hecataeus, makes Pelasgus king of Thessaly (expounding Iliad, 2.681-684); Acusilaus applies this Homeric passage to the Peloponnesian Argos, and engrafts the Hesiodic Pelasgus, father of Lycaon, into a Peloponnesian genealogy.

Hellanicus a generation later repeats this identifiaction, and identifies this Argive and Arcadian Pelasgus with the Thessalian Pelasgus of Hecataeus. For Aeschylus (Supplices I, sqq.) Pelasgus is earthborn, as in Asius, and rules a kingdom stretching from Argos to Dodona and the Strymon; but in Prometheus 879, the "Pelasgian" land simply means Argos. Sophocles takes the same view (Inac/jus, fr. 256) and for the first time introduces the word "Tyrrhenian" (meaning the Etruscans) into the story, apparently as synonymous with Pelasgian.

Herodotus, like Homer, has a denotative as well as a connotative use. He describes actual Pelasgians surviving and mutually intelligible (a) at Placie and Scylace on the Asiatic shore of the Hellespont, and (b) near Creston on the Strymon; in the latter area they have "Tyrrhenian" neighbors (Persian Wars 1.57). He alludes to other districts where Pelasgian peoples lived on under changed names; Samothrace and Antandrus in Troas are probably instances of this. In discussing Lemnos and Imbros, he describes a Pelasgian population who were only conquered by Athens shortly before 500 BC, and in connection with this he tells a story of earlier raids of these Pelasgians on Attica, and of a temporary settlement there of Hellespontine Pelasgians, all dating from a time "when the Athenians were first beginning to count as Greeks."

Elsewhere "Pelasgian" in Herodotus connotes anything typical of, or surviving from, the state of things in Greece before the coming of the Greeks. In this sense all Greece was once "Pelasgic"; the clearest instances of Pelasgian survival in ritual and customs and antiquities are in Arcadia, the "Ionian" districts of north-west Peloponnese, and Attica, which have suffered least from hellenization. In Athens itself the prehistoric wall of the citadel and a plot of ground close below it were venerated in the 5th century as "Pelasgian"; so too Thucydides (2.17). We may note that all Herodotean examples of actual Pelasgi lie round, or near, the actual Pelasgi of Homeric Thrace; that the most distant of these is confirmed by the testimony of Thucydides (4.106) as to the Pelasgian and Tyrrhenian population of the adjacent seaboard: also that Thucydides adopts the same general Pelasgian theory of early Greece, with the refinement that he regards the Pelasgian name as originally specific, and as having come gradually into this generic use.

The historian Ephorus preserves a passage from Hesiod, that attests to a tradition of an aboriginal Pelasgian people in Arcadia, and developed a theory of the Pelasgians as a warrior-people spreading from a "Pelasgian home", and annexing and colonizing all the parts of Greece where earlier writers had found allusions to them, from Dodona to Crete and the Troad, and even as far as Italy, where again their settlements had been recognized as early as the time of Hellanicus, in close connection once more with "Tyrrhenians."

The copious additional information given by later writers is all by way either of interpretation of local legends in the light of Ephorus's theory, or of explanation of the name "Pelasgoi"; as when Philochorus expands a popular etymology "stork-folk" into a theory of their seasonal migrations; or Apollodorus says that Homer calls Zeus Pelasgian "because he is not far from every one of us,". The connection with Tyrrhenians which began with Hellanicus, Herodotus and Sophocles becomes confusion with them in the 3rd century, when the Lemnian pirates and their Attic kinsmen are plainly styled Tyrrhenians, and early fortress-walls in Italy (like those on the Palatine in Rome) are quoted as "Arcadian" colonies. The character of the ancient citadel wall at Athens has given the name "Pelasgic masonry" to all constructinos of large, unhewn blocks fitted together with mortar, from Asia Minor to Spain.

Modern Theories

From this tribal name, both Classical historians and archeologists have come to use the name "Pelasgian" to describe the inhabitants in the lands around the Aegean Sea and their descendants before the arrival of the waves of Greek-speaking invaders during the 2nd millenium BC. The results of archaeological excavations in Asia Minor by J. Mellaart (1975) and F. Schachermeyr (1979) led them to conclude that the Pelasgians had migrated from Asia Minor to the Aegean basin in the 4th millennium BC. Further, a number of non-Indo-European linguistic and cultural features have been attributed to them:

• Groups of non-Indo-European loan words in the Greek language, that were borrowed in its prehistoric development
• Non-Greek place names in the region containing the consonantal strings "-nth-" (e.g. Corinth) or "-tt-" in the penninsula of Attica, or with "-ss-" (e.g. Larissa)
• Certain mythological stories or deities (usually goddesses) that have no parallel to the mythologies of other Indo-European peoples like the Germans, Celts or Indians.
• A number of non-Greek inscriptions, the best known found on Lemnos. These inscriptions are written in the same alphabet used in Etruscan inscriptions.

The poet Robert Graves in his works on Greek Mythology, asserts that certain elements of their mythology were taken from the native Pelasgian people -- namely the parts related to his concept of the White Goddess, an archetypical Earth Goddess -- drawning support for his conclusion from his interpretations of ancient Irish, Welsh, Greek, and medieval writings. Mainstream scholarship considers Graves' thesis controversial, at best, although it has been accepted in certain literary circles and by many neo-pagan groups.

The French author Zacharia Mayani (1899- ) put forth a thesis that the Etruscan language was related to the Albanian language, which was embraced for propaganda reasons by the regime of Enver Hoxha, and extended to include the Pelasgians in this association. Mayani's arguments have received little serious attention by mainstream scholars.

A Turkish scholar, Polat Kaya, has recently offered a translation of one of the inscriptions on Lemnos, based on his theory that it was written in a language related to the Turkish language. However, the Turkish people at the period the inscription is believed to have been written are known to have lived several thousand miles away in southeastern Siberia, and only began to migrate westward about AD 300, a fact that has hindered acceptance of his translation.

Perhaps the least unlikely theory connects at least some of the Pelasgians with the Iberian-Caucasian cultures of the ancient Caucasus, known to the Greeks as the Colchis. Dutch Professor E.J. Furnee and Numerous Georgian scholars, who include M.G. Tseretheli, R.V. Gordeziani, M. Abdushelishvili, and Dr. Zviad Gamsakhurdia claim both linguistic and anthropolgical similarities between the Pelasgians and the early inhabitants of the Caucasus -- as well as with almost every known non-Indo-European language in Europe. Homer knew about the existence of Aea-Colchis and Colchian (west-Georgian) tribes. In the Iliad (II, 856), Halyzones, a Pelasgo-Colchian tribe is mentioned for the first time: "Halyzones came from the eastern silver-making town of Halyb". Strabo identifies the tribe of Halyzones with the ancient Georgian (Colchian) tribe of Halybes (Georgian form: Khaldi), who were famous for iron making.

Links and References