with the migration into Anatolia. There is in fact archaeological evidence that
would be consistent with its introduction to Anatolia at that period.^17 It is
possible that its carriers could have crossed from Europe by a land bridge,
the Black Sea being still an enclosed lake; at any rate the Black Sea’s water
level appears to have been much lower then than it is now.^18
It has come to be widely accepted that Greek-speakers were preceded in
Greece by speakers of an Indo-European language of the Anatolian type,
similar to Luwian.^19 These were the people responsible for the numerous
place-names ending in -nthos and -ssos. Parnassos, for example, is happily
explicable in terms of the Luwian parna- ‘house’ and possessive suffix
-ssa-, and Hittite and Luwian texts attest an Anatolian town (or towns) of the
same name, Parnassa. We may call this pre-Hellenic language Parnassian.
From the distribution of the names, it seems to have been current in the
Early Helladic II period, which began around 2800. I take it to betoken not an
invasion from Anatolia, but a parallel movement down from Thrace by a
branch of the same people as entered Anatolia, the people who were to appear
1,500 years later as the Luwians.
Thefirst speakers of Greek –– or rather of the language that was to develop
into Greek; I will call them mello-Greeks^20 –– arrived in Greece, on the most
widely accepted view, at the beginning of Early Helladic III, that is, around
2300.^21 They came by way of Epirus, probably from somewhere north of
the Danube. Recent writers have derived them from Romania or eastern
Hungary.^22
The Phrygians, whose language shows a number of noteworthy similarities
to Greek,^23 crossed into Anatolia after 1200. Previously they had been
(^17) See W. H. Goodenough in Cardona (1970), 261 (appearance of battle-axes in western
Anatolia); M. M. Winn, JIES 2 (1974), 120 f. (east Balkan Chalcolithic cultures antecedent to
Troy I); J. Mellaart, JIES 9 (1981), 135–49 (spread of north-west Anatolian cultures to the later
Luwian lands around 2700–2600); Sergent (1995), 409 f.
(^18) The Early Bronze Age site of Kiten on the Bulgarian coast, now ten metres under water,
was still inhabited in 2715 ± 10 (dendrochronological date), when its last pilings were
driven: P. I. Kuniholm in Drews (2001), 28.
(^19) L. R. Palmer, TPhS 1958, 36–74; id., Mycenaeans and Minoans (2nd edn., London 1965),
321–57; Alfred Heubeck, Praegraeca (Erlangen 1961); Sergent (1995), 140–4; O. Carruba,
Athenaeum 83 (1995), 5–44; R. Drews, JIES 25 (1997), 153–77; M. Finkelberg, Classical World
91 (1997), 3–20. Note the reservations of Anna Morpurgo Davies in Gerald Cadogan (ed.), The
End of the Early Bronze Age in the Aegean (Leiden 1986), 109–21.
(^20) From Greek μλλω, ‘I am going to be’.
(^21) Cf. West (1997), 1 with n. 2.
(^22) Sergent (1995), 413–15; J. Makkay, Atti e memorie del Secondo Congresso Internazionale di
Micenologia (Rome 1996), 777–84; id., Origins of the Proto-Greeks and Proto-Anatolians from a
Common Perspective (Budapest 2003), 47–54.
(^23) G. Neumann, Phrygisch und Griechisch (Sitz.-Ber. Österr. Ak. 499, 1988); Sergent (1995),
122 f.
8 Introduction