8 THEY CAME FROM STEEP WILUSA Albanian, Armenian, Greek
And suddenly there they were, the long-haired Greeks, clad in bronze, stealing other people’s women and brooding on eternal fame. Achilles, Helen, Agamemnon and the rest, the first protagonists of European literature, brought back to life by a poet or poets we call Homer. The Greek audiences who flocked to hear The Iliad took it for granted that those individuals had lived and breathed, and they were right, more or less. Homer may have embroidered their deeds and bloodlines, but he was singing about real people, contemporaries of the Hittite kings and the outsized personalities who inspired the Vedas. People who trod the shores of the Aegean hundreds of years before him, in the time of heroes.
Homer’s inspiration, the models for Achilles and Agamemnon, belonged to the Mycenaean civilisation which arose around 1700 BCE and reached the peak of its splendour four hundred years later. These were the Greeks who came bearing gifts, the ones who won the Trojan War, but not long after that triumph they vanished from the historical scene – victims, it’s thought, of the same wave of calamity that claimed the Hittites and brought the Bronze Age to a close. Greece was plunged into its Dark Ages, a period of chaos during which almost no art was created, but generations of preliterate poets nevertheless kept the stories alive in the way they always had, by word of mouth.
Eventually a new civilisation arose in Greece, one that had borrowed an alphabet from the speakers of a Semitic language. This alphabet would go on to inspire all modern European alphabets, a fact preserved in its English name, which fuses the first two Greek letters, alpha and beta. It was this same alphabet in which versions of the stories attributed to Homer were first recorded between the sixth and ninth centuries BCE. And it wasn’t just the tales that were captured for posterity; The Iliad and The Odyssey are unique repositories of archaic expressions and poetic devices, threads connecting Homer’s linguistic world to that older one. As well as being great works of art, his epics are key pillars of evidence that the real Achilles and Odysseus spoke an Indo-European language, an ancestor of Ancient and hence Modern Greek.
Besides their reputation, the Mycenaeans left many physical traces of themselves behind. Starting in the late nineteenth century with Heinrich Schliemann, an amateur who had earlier excavated at Troy, archaeologists have brought to light ruined palaces, the graves of heavily decorated soldiers and clay tablets that preserve scraps of the Mycenaean language in their own script. This was not the first script to be used in Greece. Before the Mycenaeans, the Minoans – the people named for the mythological King Minos, who inhabited the island of Crete – had used a script known as Linear A, which in turn grew out of older, hieroglyphic systems.1 When the nearby volcano Santorini erupted around 1600 BCE, altering the climate and sending Minoan society into a tailspin, the Mycenaeans moved into Crete and developed their own script, modelling it on Linear A. The Mycenaean system, known as Linear B, was a syllabary, meaning that each of its symbols represented a syllable rather than a speech sound as in an alphabet. Linear B spread from Crete to the rest of the Greek-speaking world.
In 1936, a group of schoolchildren visited an exhibition in London marking fifty years of the archaeological research institute known as the British School at Athens. Sir Arthur Evans, the archaeologist who had excavated the Minoan Palace of Knossos several decades earlier, happened to be present. Then aged eighty-five, he proceeded to show the visitors certain finds from Knossos, including some Linear B tablets. ‘Did you say the tablets haven’t been deciphered, Sir?’ one fourteen-year-old boy asked. His name was Michael Ventris, and ever since learning about the Egyptian hieroglyphs at the age of seven he had nurtured a passion for ancient scripts. Though he went on to become an architect and was never formally trained as a philologist, that passion, and his cryptographer’s mind, led him to crack the Linear B code just sixteen years after meeting Evans.
Ventris might have hoped that the tablets contained the Mycenaeans’ own version of events at Troy, but they turned out to consist mostly of receipts and IOUs. They are nevertheless among the oldest documents that exist in any Indo-European language, being about the same age as the Rig Veda and only a little younger than Hattushili I’s will. Their immense value lies in the fact that they prove what Homer had hinted at: the Mycenaeans spoke an archaic form of Greek, not some unrelated language that had died out in the Dark Ages. Linear A has yet to be deciphered, so nobody knows what language the Minoans spoke, but the strong suspicion among linguists – bolstered in recent years by new kinds of evidence – is that it was non-Indo-European. The Minoans and the Mycenaeans were related to each other, as were their scripts, but the tongues they spoke were probably not. The language of Achilles came from far beyond the wine-dark sea.
How did Greek get to Greece? The language itself nudges us towards an answer. Greek is generally considered to belong to a ‘Balkan’ sub-group of Indo-European languages that also includes Albanian, Armenian and Phrygian.2 It has more in common with these languages, in other words, and probably more shared history with them, than with other Indo-European languages. The exact relationships within the Balkan group are disputed, but the closest thing to a certainty is that Greek and Phrygian sprang from a common parent. Most historical linguists would also agree that Greek forms a kind of central hub in the group, with all the others being more closely related to it than they are to each other, and the Greek–Phrygian connection being the closest of all.
Connections beyond the Balkan group are more controversial. There are undeniable similarities between Greek and the Indo-Iranian languages. They modify verbs in the same way, to indicate that action took place in the past. There is striking overlap between their vocabularies too, especially when it comes to ritual and poetry. Their poets referred to the gods by the same shorthand, ‘those who give riches’, and certain of their deities had the same names modified only by the relevant sound laws (think Greek Kérberos and Indic Śárvara, mentioned in Chapter Six). But these similarities may only be apparent because Greek and Indo-Iranian boast such copious ancient literatures compared to other languages. And there are important differences between them too. Greek is a centum language that does not obey the ruki rule (according to which s becomes sh after r, u, k and i), whereas the Indo-Iranian languages are satemised (a hard k becomes a soft s before certain vowels) and do obey the ruki rule. Many linguists suspect that Greek and Indo-Iranian developed in the same neighbourhood, but that Greek and its Balkan relatives departed before satemisation and the ruki rule arose – after Tocharian, Italic, Celtic and possibly Germanic, but before Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian.
Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed that Armenian is included in the Balkan group, even though Armenia is nowhere near the Balkans. Despite the fact that this country lies south of the Caucasus and is surrounded by Turkic- and Caucasian-speaking populations today (with one other Indo-European language to the south, in Persian), its language’s closest relatives are indeed to be found in the Balkans. This is why trying to plot the prehistoric itineraries of the Balkan languages is almost comically complicated. There are those who say that they were born in the Caucasus, like Anatolian. Armenian stayed put, according to this scenario, while the others struck out west across the Turkish peninsula to reach their ultimate destinations. Others claim that the entire group departed from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, heading anti-clockwise around the Black Sea. Albanian peeled off first, gravitating to its mountain realm, then Phrygian split from Greek and crossed the Bosporus to reach western Anatolia, from where an offshoot drifted east to root itself in the Armenian highlands, becoming Armenian. A third theory has the Balkan languages part ways on the steppe. Greek, Phrygian and Albanian headed west, while Armenian moved south through the Caucasus.
The fact that each Balkan language is alone in its branch doesn’t help. Each of those branches was surely more crowded in the past, with phantom languages that died before they could be written down; but since there is no record of them, it’s impossible to compare siblings and difficult to hazard a date for when each branch’s proto- or parent language was spoken. On top of that, linguists have to deal with a very lopsided body of evidence when it comes to the Balkan group. Greek is very well attested, and from an early date, but mere fragments exist for Phrygian, and Armenian was only written down in the fifth century CE. Albanian was the last of all the known Indo-European languages to be documented, in 1462, by which time it had evolved so far from its roots that it takes a trained eye to see that it is Indo-European at all (linguists refer to it as the ‘stepchild’ of the Indo-European family for that reason). The Albanian words for ‘six’ and ‘eight’, gjashtë and tetë, don’t look anything like their Latin counterparts sex and octō, even though they too descend from Proto-Indo-European *sék’s and *ok’to-´ by predictable sound changes. We first ‘see’ the Balkan languages at very different stages of their evolution, in other words. Because of these difficulties, ancient DNA evidence has had an outsized impact on the Balkan story, upweighting certain scenarios with respect to others. If ancient languages tracked ancient migrations, then the hypothesis considered most plausible today is the third: the Balkan languages split on the plains north of the Black and Caspian Seas, and a predecessor of Armenian crossed the Caucasus. But by no means everybody agrees with that.
In the last few years, ancient DNA has given us our first glimpse of who Homer’s heroes really were, and where they came from. The Mycenaeans were related to the Minoans in that both were descended from the first farmers to cross the Aegean from Anatolia, over eight thousand years ago. But they differed in one important respect: the Mycenaeans could also claim heritage in the steppe. They, alone of the two, were the products of interbreeding between farmers and nomadic migrants from the north. The migrants must have been the Yamnaya or their direct descendants, rather than the Corded Ware people who streamed into central and northern Europe, because Mycenaean males carried Y chromosomes that match those found in Yamnaya – but not Corded Ware – men. This is one of the reasons why scholars are now more confident that the Minoans spoke a non-Indo-European language: King Minos’ subjects were not related to the steppe people who likely brought Greek to Greece.
As we saw in Chapter Five, the Corded Ware immigrants traversed Europe in a few generations and drove an almost complete replacement of the gene pool. They suppressed the indigenous population, likely by force, and kidnapped local women. The migration into Greece could hardly have been more different. It was gradual, probably not discernible within a single or even several generations. The steppe migrants blended thoroughly with the local farming populations, and there is no sense that they imposed themselves as an elite. In 2015, a tomb was opened at a site known as Nestor’s Palace near the Mycenaean town of Pylos in the Peloponnese. It contained a man in his thirties who had been given a hero’s burial, with riches worthy of Achilles himself. Among them was an ivory plaque carved with a griffin, a mythical creature that merged lion and eagle. The Griffin Warrior, as the individual is known, died around 1450 BCE, when the Mycenaean civilisation was approaching its zenith. He bore no steppe ancestry, but that ancestry has been found in some very humble Mycenaean graves. Whatever it was that granted you high status in Mycenaean society, then, it wasn’t a blood link to the migrants from the north. Yet those migrants managed to impose their language. They are the reason that Greeks speak Indo-European.
The Yamnaya themselves didn’t get as far as Greece. When they moved out of the Pontic steppe around five thousand years ago, heading west, most followed the Danube into what is now Hungary and regions north – as we also saw in Chapter Five – but some veered south into Serbia, Kosovo and Albania. (To archaeologists’ surprise, Yamnaya burials have even been found in the mountainous parts of the Balkan peninsula. It’s possible that early mixing with local populations allowed them to adapt quickly to that unfamiliar environment.) But they only ventured as far as the borders of modern Greece, so it must have been their descendants who carried their genes further south. Steppe ancestry first entered Greece around 2000 BCE, from the north-west. From there it spread, but without ever attaining the high proportions seen in central and northern Europe. By 1500 BCE it was present throughout the modern territory of Greece.
Greek is remarkable among Indo-European languages in that it has remained a single language for the more than three thousand years of its recorded existence (compare its contemporary Sanskrit, which engendered many daughters). It has long existed in different dialects, however, and by comparing these linguists infer that Proto-Greek was being spoken by 2000 BCE.3 The date at which one southern Greek dialect, Mycenaean, stepped off the mainland into the islands is probably around 1500 BCE. The Minoans had abandoned Knossos a hundred or so years earlier, and for the first time the labyrinth where Theseus slew the Minotaur rang to Indo-European. Given that the Balkans received many small waves of immigration over time, it’s possible that Albanian was seeded by a separate group of migrants from the one that seeded Greek, or that the two languages are different blends of older Indo-European dialects. The chariot reached Greece too, in this period, though again it might have been ushered in by people other than those who brought Greek (one suggestion is that it was a legacy of the Srubnaya, the culture responsible for the industrial-scale copper-mining in the Urals). What’s clear is that two steppe innovations – an Indo-European language and the formidable Bronze Age war machine – collided in the Mycenaeans, and that the collision would shape European culture to this day.
Chariots appear throughout The Iliad, not only as lethal weapons but in races and, on one occasion, as the instrument of a shocking act of revenge. Having slain the Trojan prince Hector for killing his beloved Patroclus, Achilles slit Hector’s ankles, threaded through some leather straps and hitched the dead man to his chariot. ‘Then he lifted the famous armour into his car, got in himself, and with a touch of his whip started the horses, who flew off with a will. Dragged behind him, Hector raised a cloud of dust, his black locks streamed on either side, and dust fell thick upon his head, so comely once, which Zeus now let his enemies defile on his own native soil.’4
‘Are you archaeologists?’ I asked the American pair seated at the next table in the hotel restaurant at Boğazkale, who like me were delecting in a midday meze.5 It seemed a good bet. The man had addressed the proprietor in fluent Turkish. We were in a small village whose only obvious attraction was the ruins of the Hittite capital, and, what can I say, they had an air of academia about them. ‘Yes,’ they replied, laughing, ‘does it show?’ A moment later I was chatting with Brian Rose, director of excavations at the Phrygian capital, Gordion, and his fellow archaeologist and Near Eastern expert Elspeth Dusinberre. They were taking a break from their work at Gordion to visit the capital of the older civilisation.
The Phrygians were those people once regarded as having spoken the first Indo-European language on the Turkish peninsula, until Bedřich Hrozný deciphered the clay tablets from Boğazkale in 1915 and showed that the Hittites had spoken one centuries earlier. They are thought to have come from the Balkans, crossing the Bosporus around 1200 BCE and reaching central Anatolia by the eighth century BCE. The Hittite Empire was no more, and they built their capital, Gordion, over the remains of a Hittite city. Gordion was named for its founder, Gordias, whose son Midas was immortalised in Greek mythology for turning everything he touched to gold. In a less well-known episode of his mythologised life, Midas was slapped with a pair of donkey ears for marking the god Apollo down in a music competition.
Recalling a documentary I had seen about the Phrygians, to which Rose had contributed, I asked him if he had found Midas yet. There is a huge burial mound at Gordion nicknamed the ‘Midas Mound’, that was excavated in the 1950s, but archaeologists later concluded that it was too old to be his. It was more likely to belong to his father, namesake of the fabled Gordian knot (the one that Alexander of Macedon sliced through in 333 BCE).
‘Not yet,’ Rose replied, so I scrolled through my phone to find a picture I had taken a few days earlier, of a skull on display at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. The label read ‘Midas’ Skull’. Rose raised an eyebrow and told me that since the skull came from the Midas Mound, it was more likely to be that of Gordias. Then he told me that a minuscule fragment of that skull was about to be sent for genomic analysis. If any of Gordias’ DNA had survived the more than three thousand years since he was laid in his tomb, the results might reveal something about his ancestry. A single individual can never give you the full picture, but I knew that archaeologists and geneticists were scouring Anatolia for other ancient human remains, and together with these Gordias could shed light on the prehistory, not only of the Phrygians and their language, but also of the Armenians and theirs.
Phrygian probably split from Greek in the Balkans, when the band of migrants whose descendants would found Gordion struck out for the Bosporus. The case for the Phrygians having seeded Armenian rests in part on Herodotus. ‘The Armenians, who are Phrygian colonists, were armed in the Phrygian fashion …’ wrote the father of history/father of lies. But although some linguists see significant overlap between Greek and Armenian, the linguistic evidence for a close relationship between Armenian and Phrygian is weak. It doesn’t help that there is little to go on when it comes to Phrygian – mainly votive inscriptions and graffiti at Gordion, along with curses on anyone intending to desecrate tombs – and nothing at all for Armenian in the same period. Armenian wouldn’t be written down until long after the Phrygians had vanished.
So far, studies in ancient DNA have only undermined the Armenian-from-the-west theory. As the steppe ancestry flowed down through the Balkans, it became diluted. There were ancient Albanians, Croatians, Serbians and Bulgarians who were practically indistinguishable from the Yamnaya, genetically speaking, but the Mycenaeans only carried about a third as much steppe ancestry. The Phrygians, apparently the first people to bring steppe ancestry into Anatolia (where, as we saw in Chapter Three, it had been all but absent throughout the Copper and Bronze Ages), had lower levels again. But prehistoric Armenians had very high levels of Yamnaya ancestry, around twice as much as the Mycenaeans, which is hard to explain if they were descended from Phrygians.
Meanwhile, the theory that speakers of a forerunner of Armenian carried the language across the Caucasus has been rising up the rankings. As early as the second or even third millennium BCE, Armenian and the languages of the unrelated Caucasian family loaned words to each other. Linguists can’t always tell who lent what to whom, but they don’t doubt the great age of these loans since they predated certain important sound changes in the languages concerned. (The direction of the loan of the ‘wine’ word – gini in Armenian, ğvino in Georgian – is particularly controversial, since both Georgians and Armenians claim to have invented wine. It is nevertheless possible that the word and the thing it describes have different origins.)
We also know that people were moving through the Caucasus, from the steppe, in the third millennium BCE. Geneticists have detected the southward flow of steppe ancestry from 2500 BCE, and they say that within five hundred years it had shown up in the Armenian highlands. It maintained an uninterrupted presence south of the Caucasus for the next thousand years or so, and the Y chromosomes that accompanied it persisted for even longer. Today, many Armenian men strolling past Soviet-era buildings in the capital, Yerevan, or drinking coffee in the city’s many cafés, carry Y chromosomes that they inherited from the Yamnaya (the proportion of Greek men of whom this is true is much smaller, reflecting post-Bronze Age population displacements in Greece). Armenian men are, in the words of Iosif Lazaridis, a geneticist in David Reich’s group at Harvard, ‘literally the last male-line descendants of the Yamnaya people’.
The genetic transformation of the Caucasus between 2500 and 2000 BCE might have brought an Indo-European language into Armenia. It certainly coincided with a major cultural shift in the region. For fifteen centuries prior to that, the societies that dominated much of the Caucasus were radically egalitarian. They seem to have recognised no difference in social worth between men and women, or between rich and poor. Adam Smith, an archaeologist at Cornell University, sees their collective burials, stripped of all status symbols, as a strong statement: a wholesale rejection of the hierarchical model of Uruk and the other Mesopotamian cities to the south. He suspects that the people buried in those communal graves may have been bound by a religion that enshrined egalitarian values.6 But by 2500 BCE these prehistoric refuseniks had gone, and a very different culture had taken their place.
These new societies were radically unequal, but not in the way that Uruk was. They were societies of cattle-herders and horse-breeders who buried their dead individually, beneath kurgans. Women and men received different treatment in death, and some of the kurgans were, in Smith’s words, ‘unbelievably garish’. The largest would have taken hundreds of person-hours to build, and they were filled with precious metals and sacrifices, including human sacrifices – something the region hadn’t known until then. The burials speak to an uptick in violence too, often in the form of sword wounds.
If this was the moment when the Indo-Europeans arrived in the Caucasus, it could have been they who left the dozens of basalt stelae that litter the Armenian highlands at altitudes of over two thousand metres (between six and seven thousand feet). These ‘dragonstones’, or vishaps as they are known locally, have now mostly toppled on to their sides, but they once stood up to five metres (sixteen feet) tall. Many were carved to look as if the hide of a horned animal had been draped over them, prompting some to draw parallels with the animal sacrifices that the Yamnaya once performed in the flatlands to the north.
By 2000 BCE the Yamnaya had gone from the Pontic-Caspian steppe, and their descendants had been replaced there by those of the Corded Ware culture or the Sintashta further east. It’s possible, though by no means proven, that the future Armenian-speakers, the last males in the Yamnaya line, departed with their clans just as this reconfiguration was taking place. Leaving behind neighbouring populations of Proto-Greek-speakers to the west, and Proto-Indo-Iranian-speakers to the east, they headed for the mountains, hugging the Caspian coast of what is now Dagestan to bypass the higher peaks. As time went on they interbred with the people they encountered, who spoke Caucasian languages, and little by little their beliefs and their burial rites changed. But they retained the elements of ritual and poetry that they had once shared with the future Greeks and Aryans.
Detecting this migration is one thing. Connecting it to the birth of the Armenian language is another. If you’re standing in the present and looking back, it’s not easy to discern the moment at which the Armenians first appear. The name ‘Armina’ is preserved in Persian and Greek inscriptions from the sixth century BCE, where it refers to a Persian satrapy or vassal state. The Persians had just defeated the Urartians, who spoke a non-Indo-European language related to Hurrian, and who had controlled the Armenian highlands for several hundred years before that. One theory holds that the Urartians had ruled over an indigenous, Armenian-speaking population, and that the Armenians seized the opportunity of the Persian conquest to throw off the Urartian yoke and be recognised in their own right. (Eventually, they would declare their independence from Persia too.)
But Armenians don’t call themselves Armenians, or their country Armenia. They are Hayer from Hayastan, and traditionally they trace themselves back to a tribal confederation that entered history long before the ‘Arminans’ mentioned by the Persians. This was the Hayasa, who lived close to Lake Van and fought the Hittites in the thirteen hundreds BCE. (Lake Van is in eastern Türkiye today, but along with Mount Ararat it was once part of Armenia.) We know about this conflict because the Hittites wrote about it. Unfortunately the Hittites didn’t tell us anything about the Hayasan language, but if the Hayasa spoke a predecessor of Armenian, they were there long before the Phrygians arrived – further undermining the theory that Armenian came from the west.
There is one last, slender strand of evidence to add to the other, more robust ones that Armenian came through the Caucasus. The mythical founder of Hayastan was a handsome, friendly giant called Hayk. You can see a statue of him today, in Yerevan, extending his mighty bow. Hayk is supposed to have stood up to the Babylonian tyrant Bel and to have led his large family into exile. Setting off ‘with his sons and daughters and sons’ sons, martial men about three hundred in number’, he stopped first at the foot of Ararat.7 Then, leaving that region to his grandson, he moved on towards Lake Van and settled to the north-west of it. When Bel tried again to get Hayk to submit to him, offering him the command of his youthful warband, Hayk again refused and called Bel ‘dog’. A battle ensued in which Hayk killed Bel, and at the site of his victory he built an estate: Armenia, or Hayastan.
Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity as its state religion, in 301 CE, and Hayk’s story wasn’t written down until after that. The earliest preserved version of the myth dates to the fifth century and already carries a biblical gloss. Hayk is presented as a descendant of Noah, and his nemesis, Bel, is equated to Nimrod, who the Bible says built the Tower of Babel (indeed, Armenians celebrate Hayk as the only one to oppose the plan to build that tower). But some scholars have noted that beneath the gloss the story harbours some very Indo-European themes, from the patriarch at the head of his clan to the canine slur and Bel’s band of hunting youths. And although the myth tells us that Hayk led his family away from Babylon, its internal geography contradicts that. Hayk reached Lake Van by way of Ararat, as if he had been travelling south-west. Extrapolate that path backwards and one might be tempted to think that he was coming, not from Babylon in the south, but from the mountains in the north.
Albanian, like Basque, has to some extent been protected by its mountain situation. It likely once had relatives, in its branch, that vanished during the many reconfigurations of Europe’s linguistic landscape over the last five thousand years. Albanian, alone of those siblings, resisted. It withstood the Roman Empire, the arrival of the Goths (who left it a word for ‘trousers’, tirq) and that of the Slavs who followed the Goths south. If you look at a linguistic map of the Balkans today, you’ll see that Albanian is surrounded by a sea of Slavic languages – Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian among them – except at its southern frontier where it comes up against Greek.
To say that Albanian resisted these onslaughts is true, much as English resisted Romance, but also in some ways misleading. History certainly left its mark in Albanian. It borrowed vocabulary from Ancient Greek, Latin, Slavic, Turkish, Romani and Italian, as well as from its direct neighbours in the Balkans. It has been estimated that, today, originally Albanian words comprise only ten per cent of the Albanian lexicon.8 The Latin loans entered after the third century BCE, when the Romans crossed the Adriatic and pushed east, but so much time elapsed between their absorption and the earliest recording of Albanian that linguists failed to recognise their Latin-ness until the nineteenth century. The Albanian word mik (friend), they now agree, comes from Latin amicus, while mbrët (king) is actually Latin imperator – which referred to a high-ranking soldier before it referred to an emperor – transformed by predictable sound changes over two thousand years.
Albanian has slowly been converging with its Balkan neighbours in its grammar and sound, matching what has happened between Basque and its Romance neighbours. In the early centuries of the Common Era Basque was influential in forming the Romance languages of south-west Europe – especially Spanish and Occitan. These days, however, the influence is almost exclusively in the other direction. Lexically, Basque is now considered a mixed language, since over half its words are of Latin or Romance origin. Are Albanian and Basque fighting a losing battle, or adapting to survive? Perhaps the best way to describe them, though their situations differ in important ways, is as holding up remarkably well two thousand years, or more, into an unrelenting siege.
And once again Albania cowered in a hut
In her dark mythological nights
And on the strings of a lute strove to express something
Of her incomprehensible soul,
Of the inner voices
That echoed mutely from the depths of the epic earth.9
Archaeology has long provided a counterweight to the testimony of writers from the classical period, but the ability to read ancient DNA, and to reconstruct extinct languages, has put those writers to the test like never before. In general, they are turning out to be reliable guides – sometimes more reliable than they have been given credit for.
Take Homer. He sings of a world united behind a single ruler, Agamemnon, ‘king of men’. Rival factions may have strained at the leash, but they did their leader’s bidding in the end. They went to war when he asked them to. In this aspect of his portrayal of the Achaeans – Homer’s name for the Mycenaeans – scholars have long suspected him of poetic licence. They consider that Bronze Age Greece had a number of power centres, among them Pylos and Agamemnon’s fief Mycenae, that were too small and inward-looking to pose any serious threat to the major powers of the day. Homer, who certainly lived in a world of squabbling city-states, must therefore have been looking back at the past through rose-tinted glasses. Over the last few decades, however, an alternative view has been gaining ground: that Homer was right, and Mycenaean Greece was a state worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as the contemporary empires of the Near East – the Hittites, Babylonians, Assyrians and Egyptians.
This subversive proposal is inspired in part by an absence of evidence. The documents that have been preserved from Bronze Age Greece conjure local bureaucrats who saw no further than the palace they served and the few surrounding villages that kept it in olive oil. Their instincts were tribal and their ‘cities’ glorified farmsteads. These ‘Potemkin palaces’, as one scholar disdainfully dubbed them, hadn’t moved far beyond the state of chiefdoms.10 In a confrontation with the mighty Shuppililiuma, or Ramses the Great, they would have been swatted like flies.
Already in the 1950s, however, Michael Ventris had warned against reading too much into those documents, or rather too little. They were all written on clay, but clay was not, in his opinion, the ideal medium for the fine lines and delicate curves of Linear B. He suggested that it may have been used for rough drafts before the texts were transferred to papyrus or animal skin, on which those texts were reproduced with pen and ink. Since the paper or skin had not survived, and since clay tablets could be recycled, there might once have been a much larger body of documents than the one that had come down to us. More of the population might have been literate than archaeologists had allowed and, crucially, the palaces might have been in communication with each other.
A Dutch scholar, Willemijn Waal, has pushed Ventris’ thinking one step further. The Mycenaean scribes shaped some of their clay tablets like palm leaves, and she thinks this may be a clue that the texts were ultimately transferred to real palm leaves. The Greek term phoinikeia grammata, usually translated as ‘Phoenician letters’ and assumed to refer to the Semitic alphabet that the Greeks adopted in Homer’s day, could in fact have referred to the palm leaves that they had written on for centuries before that, since phoinix can mean both a palm tree and the land of Phoenicia (roughly modern Lebanon, where Semitic languages were spoken).11 It’s a controversial theory, and difficult to test since no leaf letters survive, but the implication is that the palaces were regional hubs in a larger state – one, perhaps, led by a single ruler.
This novel way of thinking about Bronze Age Greece doesn’t rest only on the materials that scribes wrote upon. Jorrit Kelder, an archaeologist and colleague of Waal’s, points out that some Mycenaean palaces contain paired structures that he interprets as throne rooms – one for the local governor, one for the visiting supremo. Hittite texts refer to the ‘Great King’ of a foreign country that they call Ahhiyawa. Very few leaders were granted the title Great King in the Near East at that time, because it signified real power, including the power to declare war on, and sign treaties with, foreign states. Ahhiyawa is now generally accepted to be the same as Homer’s Achaea. The first Ahhiyawan the Hittite scribes mention is Attarissija, which looks suspiciously like Atreus or his sons the Atreids, Agamemnon and Menelaus. The scribes also discuss a city called Wilusa that was probably Troy – the city the Greeks knew as Wilios (the W was eventually dropped giving Ilios, after which The Iliad is named), and that both Anatolian and Greek poets described as ‘steep’.
We know that the Mycenaeans ventured into western Anatolia, where Troy lies. Traces of them have been detected in the region as early as the fourteen hundreds BCE. If the Ahhiyawans really were the Greeks, and if Wilusa really was Troy, then the Hittite archives record that Hittites and Greeks fought several wars over that city in the next two centuries. Any of those wars, or all of them, could have inspired The Iliad. The poet could have left us a portrait of Greece in the time of Agamemnon that was close to reality – in which case, once that Greece vanished, its unity and sophistication weren’t retrieved for a very long time.
What of Herodotus; should we also give him the benefit of the doubt? He was a historian, not a poet, so he doesn’t have the excuse of poetic licence. He still told what we would consider some pretty tall tales – describing one tribe as sporting a single eye in the middle of their forehead, and another as uniformly bald. But Herodotus wasn’t a historian in the modern sense. He saw it as his duty to convey the sources to the reader, not to select from them or to decide which was right. Coming from another era and another understanding of history, we have to learn how to read him. Even if his descriptions of those tribes were fanciful, they may have existed. And if they existed, then we have to admit that we know very little about many of them. We are a long way from understanding the multiplicity – including the linguistic multiplicity – of the ancient world. The work goes on, then, with the pleasing prospect that in decades to come, modern scientists will work hand in hand with the chroniclers of the classical age.
