Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition
Cambridge University Press, 6/1/2009
EAN 9780521107990, ISBN10: 0521107997
Paperback, 220 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
By systematically confronting Greek tradition of the Heroic Age with the evidence of both linguistics and archaeology, Margalit Finkelberg proposes a multidisciplinary assessment of the ethnic, linguistic and cultural situation in Greece in the second millennium BC. The main thesis of this book is that the Greeks started their history as a multi-ethnic population group consisting of both Greek-speaking newcomers and the indigenous population of the land and that the body of 'Hellenes' as known to us from the historic period was a deliberate self-creation. The book addresses such issues as the structure of heroic genealogy, the linguistic and cultural identity of the indigenous population of Greece, the patterns of marriage between heterogeneous groups as they emerge in literary and historical sources, the dialect map of Bronze Age Greece, the factors responsible for the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation and finally, the construction of the myth of the Trojan War.
1. Introduction
2. The heterogeneity of Greek genealogy
3, The pre-Hellenic substratum reconsidered
4. Kingship in Bronze Age Greece and Western Asia
5. Marriage and identity
6. The spread of the Greek language
7. The end of the Bronze Age
8. Continuities and discontinuities
Appendix
References
Indexes.