Thursday, April 29, 2021

The Phrygian nobility

Long piece on Helladic DNA.

Found here - I'd say, verified here - is that modern Greeks are, by ancient standards, northerners. Elati-Logkas is the site in question, Middle Bronze Age. I mean, we all pretty much knew that; the Dorian language (not-quite-extinct today) was spoken in Macedon and the Spartans sure weren't going up there. And north-to-south has been the historic pattern in Greece, as witness the Aromanians and Slavs brought in by (probably) the mediaeval "Macedonian" Dynasty at Constantinople (whom I suspect as full Yugoslavs).

What's new here is the marker for the Mycenaean nobility LHIII. They look like Armenians - partly.

When I think of Greek-like, Armenian-like crossovers I think of Iron Age Phrygia before the Cimmerians and Lydians dismantled it. Could it be that the Trojan War really was a war between cousins? If so the LHIII nobility was a high caste of Luwian-Thracian overlords, speaking [a form of] Greek, but not in much contact with the dâmos.

The bad news in this theory is that it takes away some of the evidence on what the dâmos was speaking. There have been some musings that the Dorians were already here, like the "ME-ZA-NA" in Linear B who may have been protoMessenians. The Arcadians kept Linear B's Greek but they were very much the minority by the Archaic Era.

At a guess, the local populace may have been Ionic. That language is kinda sorta close to Linear B. Last I looked it wasn't deemed a descendent like Arcadian is a descendent. But I could understand a High Speech / Low Speech situation over LHIII, with Doric (and Aeolic) ruled as Barbarian Speech.

UPDATE 5/14: Davidski calls shenanigans. They didn't even mention the later Slavic invasions, it seems. That makes the study useless in present form.

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