Pelasgians
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The name pelasgos (from the ancient Greek Πελασγοί Pelasgoí, singular Πελασγός, Pelasgós) was used by some ancient Greek writers to referring to the predecessor peoples of the Hellenes as inhabitants of Greece, "a catchall term for any ancient, primitive, and presumably indigenous people in the Greek world". In general, "Pelasgians" has come to refer broadly to all indigenous inhabitants of the Aegean lands and their cultures before the advent of the Greek language. This is not an exclusive meaning, but other meanings require clarification. During the classical period several sites with this name survived in various locations on mainland Greece, Crete and other Aegean regions. These peoples identified as "Pelasgians" spoke one or more languages that were then identified as foreign to Greek, even though some ancient authors described the Pelasgians as Greek. The tradition also survived that large parts of Greece had once been Pelasgians before being Hellenized. These parts used to fall into ethnic domain which, by the 5th century B.C. C., was attributed to ancient Greek speakers who were identified as Ionians.[citation needed]
The classification of Pelasgic languages, known only through non-Greek elements within Ancient Greek and detectable in some place names, even though Pelasgic was not a single language, and the relationship of Pelasgians to prehistoric Hellenes are ancient questions that do not have definitive answers. This field of study looks for new evidence to fill in the gaps. There are many past and current theories, some of which are colored by contemporary nationalist issues, which compromise their objectivity.
During the 20th century, archaeological excavations have unearthed artifacts in regions traditionally inhabited by the Pelasgians, such as Thessaly, the Attica and Lemnos. Archaeologists excavating at Sesclo and Dímini have described the Pelasgic material culture as Neolithic; Others have related it to Middle Helladic and even Late Helladic cultures like the Mycenaean, where the corpus of short inscriptions is already in an early form of Greek. Even the relationship of material archaeological evidence to linguistic culture has been called into question by Walter Pohl and other modern scholars of ethnogenesis.
Etymology
Much like other aspects of the Pelasgians, their ethnonym (Pelasgoí) is of extremely uncertain origin and etymology. Michel Sakellariou collects fifteen different etymologies from philologists and linguists over the past 200 years, though he admits that "most... are bizarre."
An ancient etymology based on simple phonetic similarity links Pelasgos to pelargos, 'stork', and postulates that the Pelasgians migrated like storks, possibly from Egypt, where they nested. Aristophanes does play with this etymology in his comedy The Birds. One of the laws of "the storks" in the satirical country of the cuckoos in the air, playing on the Athenian belief that they were originally Pelasgians, is that adult storks must support their parents by migrating elsewhere and participating in the war.
Gilbert Murray summarizes the derivation of pelas gē, 'neighboring land', thus: «If Pelasgoi is related to πέλας, 'nearby', the word would mean 'neighbor' ' and would allude to the strange people closest to the Greek invaders."
Julius Pokorny derives Pelasgoi from *pelag-skoi (‘inhabitants of the plain’, and specifically of the Thessalian plain). The Indo-European root is *plāk-, ‘flat’. Pokorny details an earlier derivation, appearing as early as William Gladstone's Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age (1858). If the Pelasgians were not Indo-European, the name in this derivation must have been assigned by the Hellenes.
The ancient Greek word meaning 'sea', pelagos, comes from the same root, *plāk-, as the Doric word plagos, 'side'. Therefore, Ernest Klein simply interprets the same form *pelag-skoi as 'the men of the sea', where the sea is the flat. This interpretation does not require that Indo-Europeans have a word for 'sea'. ', which they probably would have lacked had they lived inland, since upon finding the sea they would simply have used the same word as for 'plain'. The plainsmen could also acquire what must have been a namesake for the Hellenes, 'the men of the sea'. Furthermore, if the Late Bronze Age Egyptians encountered maritime marauders with this name, they would have translated it as 'people of the sea'.
Mentions in the literature
Literary analysis has been carried out since Classical Greece, when writers of the time read earlier works on the subject. Definitive answers have never been obtained thanks to this method, serving rather to better define the problems. The method was perhaps at its peak in the Victorian era, when new methods of systematic comparison began to be applied in philology. Typical of this time is the long and detailed study of William Ewart Gladstone, who was an expert classicist. All the evidence presented in this section appears in Gladstone. Without the appearance of more ancient texts not much more can be said, so the most likely source of progress remains archeology and related sciences.
Homer
The Pelasgians appear for the first time in Homer's poems: in the Iliad among Troy's allies are the Pelasgians. In the section known as the Catalogue of the Trojans, they are mentioned among the Hellespontic cities and the Thracians of southeastern Europe (i.e., on the Hellespontic edge of Thrace). Homer calls his city or district "Larisa" and characterizes it as fertile, celebrating its inhabitants for their skill as spearmen. He also records that their chiefs were Hippothoo and Pileus, sons of Leto, son of Teutamo, thus giving them all names that were either Greek or so deeply Hellenized that they lacked any foreign features.
In the Odyssey, Odysseus, pretending to be a Cretan, mentions the Pelasgians among the tribes of the ninety cities of Crete, where "various languages are heard mixed".
The Iliad also alludes to "Pelasgic Argos", who most likely is the plain of Thessaly, and "Pelasgic Zeus", who rules and lives in Dodona, thus must be the oracular of Epirus. However, no passage mentions genuine Pelasgians: the Myrmidons, Hellenes, and Achaeans specifically inhabit Thessaly, and the Seals by Dodona. They all fought on the Greek side.
Post-Homeric Poets
Later Greek authors offer little unanimity about which places and regions were Pelasgians.
Hesiod calls the oracle of Dodona, identified by the reference to the oak, the "seat of the Pelasgians", clarifying Homer's Pelasgic Zeus. He also mentions that Pelasgus (in ancient Greek Πελασγός, the eponymous ancestor of the Pelasgians) was the father of Lycaon, king of Arcadia.
Asius of Samos describes Pelasgus as the first man, born from the earth.
In Aeschylus' play The Supplicants, the Danaids fleeing Egypt ask for asylum from King Pelasgus of Argos, who says they are in the Strymon including Perrebia to the north, the Thessaly Dodona and the slopes from the Pindus Mountains to the west and the marine coasts to the east; that is, a territory that includes the classic Pelasgiotis, being a little larger. The southern border is not mentioned; however, Apis was said to have reached Argos 'through' (peras) the Naupactus, implying that Argos includes all of eastern Greece from northern Thessaly to the Peloponnesian Argos, where it was probably conceived that the danaids arrived. Pelasgus claims to be "the son of Palecton ['ancient land'], born of Earth."
The Danaids call the country the "Mountains of Apis" and claim it understands karbana audan (accusative case, and in Doric dialect), which can be translated as 'barbarian accent', but Karba (where the Karbanoi live) is actually a non-Greek word. They claim descent from ancient Argos ancestors even though they are of a 'dark race' (melanthes … genos). Pelasgus admits that the country was once called Apia but compares them to the women of Libya and Egypt and wants to know how they can be from Argos, they then answer that they descend from Io.
In a lost work, The Danaides, Aeschylus defines the country of origin of the Pelasgians as the region around Mycenae.
In a fragment of a lost work, Inachus, Sophocles presents Inachus as the greatest of the lands of Argos, the hills of Hera, and among the Tyrsenoi Pelasgoi, an unusual noun construction, 'tirsenios-pelasgos'. Interpretation is open, even though translators usually make up their minds, but Tyrsenoi may well be the eponymous Tyrrhenoi.
Euripides calls the inhabitants of Argos "Pelasgians" in his work Orestes. city of Inaco (Argos), issued a law according to which the Pelasgians were renamed "Danaos".
The Roman poet Ovid wrote:
Without knowing Príamo, the father of Ésaco, that with his wings
He lived, cried. A tumulus too, his name had,
Hector and his brothers had offered him some funeral offerings.
He missed that sad service the presence of Paris,
that shortly after, together with his kidnapped wife, a long war
He lured his homeland, and allies pursued him
a thousand boats, and with them the common of the people sinned.
Here, according to the custom homeland, in preparing Jupiter for his sacrifices,
When the old ara was enchanted with the fires,
bluish saw a reptile.
towards a banana that was close to those engaged in sacrifices.
One nest was, of birds twice four, in the supreme of the tree:
to whom and to the mother, who was flying about their losses,
once he snatched the serpent and buried them in his mouth,
all were suspended, but of the truth the omen
Testórida: “We will begin,” he says, “beware of it, Pelasgos.
Troy will fall, but it will be a long delay in our gestation."
and the nine birds in the years of the war distributes.
She, which was embraced green to her branches in the tree,
it becomes stone and sign with the image of a snake such a rock.
Historians
Hecataeus of Miletus
Hecataeus of Miletus states in a fragment of his Genealogiai that the clan (genos) descended from Deucalion ruled Thessaly, and that the country was then called Pelasgia by the king Pelasgus. A second fragment says that he was the son of Zeus and Niobe and that his son Lycaon founded a dynasty of Arcadian kings.
In a fragment of the works of Acusilaus it is stated that the Peloponnesians were called Pelasgians after Pelasgus, a son of Zeus and Niobe.
Hellenic
Hellanicus deals in fragment 7 of the Argolica with a word in a line from the Iliad, "horse-breeder", applied to the Peloponnese. What is said about her is collected by several authors and all the versions differ. The explanation is trivial and mythical but all the versions agree that Hellanicus said that the term Argeia (gē) or Argolis was once applied to the entire Peloponnese and that Pelasgus and his two brothers received it as an inheritance. of his father, called Triopas, Arestor or Foroneo. Pelasgus built the citadel Larisa de Argos on the Erasinus river, from which the Pelasgic (from Peloponnese) name Argos comes, but later settled inland, built Parrhasia and baptized the region or caused it to be called Pelasgia, which would later be renamed Arcadia with the arrival of the Greeks. According to fragment 76, from Phoronis, Pelasgus and his wife Menippe arose a lineage of kings: Frastor, Amyntor, Teutamides and Nasas (kings of Pelasgiotid). With Nasas reigning, the Pelasgians "rose up" against the Hellenes (who had presumably taken Thessaly) and marched on Italy, where they first conquered Crotona and then founded Tyrrenia. The inevitable conclusion is that Hellanicus believed that the Pelasgians of Thessaly (and indirectly of the Peloponnese) were ancestral to the Etruscans.
Herodotus
The Greek historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus wrote:
What was the tongue that the Pelasgos spoke, I can't say for sure. However, we must be governed by certain conjectures taken from the Pelasgos, which still exist: first, of those who inhabit the city of Crestona, located on the Tyrrhenians (which in the old were neighbors of those who now call dorios, and then died in the region that is now called the Thessaliótide); second, of the Pelasgos, which in the Helesponcite founded Placia and Esten By the conjectures that all these peoples give us, we can say that the Pelagians should speak some barbaric language, and that the attices, being Pelags, by joining the Hellens should learn their own language, abandoning their own. The truth is that neither those of Crestona nor those of Placia (citizens who speak to each other the same language), have the same as those peoples who are now their neighbors, where they are inferred that they retain the same language they brought with them when they migrated from those regions.
In any case, Herodotus alludes to other districts where Pelasgians lived under other names: Samothrace and "Antandro, city of the Pelasgians" in the Troad are probably examples of these. He also mentions that there were Pelasgian populations on Lemnos and Imbros. He depicts those on Lemnos as Hellespontic Pelasgians who had lived in Athens but had been expelled there by the Athenians, who later found it necessary to reconquer. Herodotus also names the Cabyri, the gods of the Pelasgians, whose cult gives an idea of where they once were.
In general, Herodotus was convinced that the Hellenic population was descended from the Pelasgians:
On the contrary, the Hellenic nation, in my opinion, always speaks from its origin the same language. Weak and separated from the pelagic, he began to grow from small principles, and he came to form a great body, composed of many people, mostly when they were raiding him and joining in large numbers other barbaric nations, and from here he resigned, as I imagine, that the nation of the Pelasgos, which was one of the barbarians, could never make great progress.
He states that the Pelasgians of Athens were called Skulls and that the Pelasgian population among the Ionians of the Peloponnese were the Aegialean Pelasgians.
Thucydides
Thucydides affirms that:
...before the time of Helén, the son of Deucalion; the various tribes, of which the Pelasgos was the most widespread, gave their own names to the different districts. But when Helén and his sons became strong in Ftiótide, his help was requested by other cities, and those who joined them gradually began to be called heleas, although he spent a long time before the name prevailed throughout the country.
Thucydides considers that the Athenians had lived in independent settlements scattered throughout Attica but sometime after Theseus they moved to Athens, which was already populated. A plot of land below the Acropolis was called "Pelasgian" and was considered cursed, but the Athenians settled on it anyway.
In connection with the campaign against Amphipolis, Thucydides notes that various settlements on the Acte promontory were home to:
their inhabitants were a massive mixture of barbarians, who spoke Greek in addition to their native language. A few are in fact calcidic, but most of them are pelasgos (followers of the Tyrrhenians who once inhabited Lemnos and Athens), and hives, crestones and eedons. They all died in small cities.
Ephorus
The historian Ephorus of Cime developed, from a fragment of Hesiod that accredits a tradition of an aboriginal Pelasgian people of Arcadia, a theory by which the Pelasgians were a people who followed a military way of life ( stratiōtikon bion) "and who, by converting many peoples to the same way of life, gave their name to all", meaning 'all of Hellas'. They colonized Crete and extended their rule as far as Epirus, Thessaly, and by implication everywhere else the ancient authors said they had been, beginning with Homer. The Peloponnesian War was called Pelasga.
Dionysus of Halicarnassus
Dionysius of Halicarnassus gives a multi-page synoptic interpretation of the Pelasgians from the sources available to him, concluding that the Pelasgians were Greek:
After some of the Pelasgos inhabiting Tesalia, as it is now called, were forced to leave their country, settled among the aborigines and along with them they waged the war against the syllabuses. Aboriginals may receive them in part in the hope of gaining their help, but I think it was mainly because of their kinship, as the Pelasgos were also originally a Greek people of the Peloponnese.
Dionisio goes on to add that the people wandered a lot. Originally they were natives of the "Achaean Argos" descended from Pelasgus, the son of Zeus and Niobe. From there they emigrated to Haemonia (later called Thessaly), where they "expelled the barbarian inhabitants" and divided the country into Phthiots, Achaia, and Pelasgiotid, in honor of Phthius, Achaeus, and Pelasgus, "the sons of Larissa and Poseidon." Later "about the sixth generation they were expelled by the Curetes and Leleges, who are now called Aetolians and Locrians".
From there the Pelasgians spread to Crete, the Cyclades, Histaeotis, Boeotia, Phocis, Euboea, the Hellespont coast and its islands, especially Lesbos, which had been colonized by Macareus, son of Crinaco. Most went to Dodona and ended up marching from there to Italy, then called Saturnia. They arrived at Espina (ancient city), at the mouth of the Po. Others even crossed the Apennines to Umbria and from there reached the country of the aborigines. They submitted to a treaty and settled in Velia. Together with the aborigines they conquered Umbria but were expelled by the Tyrrhenians.
Dionysius goes on to detail the tribulations of the Pelasgians and then moves on to the Tyrrhenians, whom he carefully distinguishes from the former.
Geographers
Pausanias
In his Description of Greece, Pausanias says that the Arcadians hold that Pelasgus (along with his followers) was the first inhabitant of the country. After becoming king, Pelasgus was responsible for the invention of huts, sheepskin cloaks, and a diet consisting of acorns. Furthermore, the country he ruled was called "Pelasgia". When Arcas ascended the throne, Pelasgia was renamed "Arcadia" and its inhabitants (the Pelasgians) were called "Arcadians". Pausanias also says that it is the work of the Pelasgians a wooden image of Orpheus in a sanctuary of Demeter in Theras, as well as the expulsion of the Minians and Lacedaemonians from Lemnos.
Strabo
Strabo devotes a section of his Geography to the Pelasgians, detailing both his own views and those of earlier authors. Of his own opinions he says: "As for the Pelasgians, almost everyone agrees, in the first place, that some ancient tribe with that name spread throughout Greece, and particularly among the Aeolians of Thessaly."
He defines the Pelasgic Argos as "between the outlets of the river Penaeus and Thermopylae as far as in the mountainous land of Pindus" and states that they took their name from the Pelasgian kingdom. It also includes the tribes of Epirus as Pelasgians (based on the opinions of "many"). Lesbos is called Pelasga. Caere was a settlement of Pelasgians from Thessaly, who called it by its old name, Agylla. The Pelasgians also settled around the mouth of the Tiber in Italy, at Pirgi and a few other places during the reign of Maleo.
Mythology
Robert Graves' version of the Pelasgian creation myth features a single creator goddess, Eurynome, who dominates man and precedes all other deities. The goddess gives birth to all things, fertilized not by a male partner but by symbolic seeds shaped like wind, beans, or insects.
Language
In the absence of certain data on the identity (or identities) of the Pelasgians, several theories have been put forward. Some of the most accepted by researchers are presented below. Since Greek is classified as an Indo-European language, the main question is whether the Pelasgian language was also Indo-European.
Pelasgian as Pre-Indo-European
Unknown source
One major theory uses the name "Pelasgians" to designate the inhabitants of the lands around the Aegean Sea before the arrival of the Proto-Greeks, as well as the enclaves traditionally identified as their descendants that continued to exist in Classical Greece.. The theory derives from original insights by Paul Kretschmer, whose views prevailed through the first half of the 20th century and continue to hold some credibility.
Although Wilamowitz-Moellendorff described them as mythical, the results of archaeological excavations at Çatalhöyük by James Mellaart (1955) and F. Schachermeyr (1979) led them to conclude that the Pelasgians had migrated from Asia Minor to the basin. Aegean in IV a. In this theory, several possible non-Indo-European linguistic and cultural characteristics are attributed to the Pelasgians:
- Groups of linguistic loans in the Greek language that are apparently not indo-European, and were taken in their prehistoric development.
- “The Greeks of the region, and which contain the consonant groups, ‘the same thing’, ‘the same thing’, ‘the same thing’, ‘the same thing,’” These chains appear in other craving names, of presumably inherited substratum, as Asaminthos (‘baño’), apsinthos (‘absenta’), terébinthos (‘terebinto’), etc. Other toponyms without apparent indo-European etymology are Athēnai (‘Atenas’), Mycēnai (‘Micenas’), Messēnē (‘Mesene’), Kyllēnē (‘Cilene’), Kyrēnē (‘Cirene’), Mytilene (‘Mitilene’), etc. (advert the common termination -ēnai/ēnē); and also Thebes, Delfos, Lindos, Ramnunte and others.
- Certain mythological stories or deities that seem to have no parallels in the mythologies of other Indo-European peoples (e.g. the Olympics Athena, Dioniso, Apollo, Artemisa and Afrodita, whose origins seem anatolios/levantines).
- Inscriptions craving across the Mediterranean, such as the Lemnos stella.
George Grote summarizes the theory as follows:
There are, in fact, a number of names asserted to designate the pre-Hellenic inhabitants of many parts of Greece: the Pelasgos, the Leleges, the Healers, the Cons, the Aonians, the Aonians, the temmikes, the hiantes, the telquins, the tracios beocios, the telebeos, the ephiros, the lyrics, etc. These are names belonging to the legend, not to history, and extracted from a variety of contradictory legends by logographers and subsequent historians, who drew with them a supposed history of the past, at a time when the conditions of historical evidence were very little understood. That these names designate real nations can be true, but here our knowledge ends.
Poet and mythologist Robert Graves claims that certain elements of that mythology originate with the native Pelasgian peoples (particularly the parts related to their concept of the White Goddess, an archetypal Earth Goddess) taking further support for this conclusion his interpretations of other ancient literature: Irish, Welsh, Greek, Biblical, Gnostic, and Medieval.
Tyrsenius
According to the Iliad, there was no Pelasgian on Lemnos but a Minian dynasty. Linguists have proposed the existence of a Thyrsenian language family.
Ibero-Caucasian
Some Georgian researchers (including M. G. Tseretheli, R. V. Gordeziani, M. Abdushelishvili, and Zviad Gamsakhurdia) link Pelasgian to the Ibero-Caucasian cultures of the prehistoric Caucasus, a land known to the Greeks as Colchis.
Pelasgian as Indo-European
Anatolian
In western Anatolia, many place names with the infix '-ss-' come from the adjectival suffix also present in cuneiform Luwian and some Palaitic. The classic example is the Bronze Age Tarhuntassa (roughly, 'city of Tarhun', the Hittite storm god), and the later Parnassus may be related to the Hittite word parna- or ' home'. These elements may have led to a second theory, according to which Pelasgian was to some degree an Anatolian language.
Greek
In 1919, N. Giannopoulos published an inscription from Farsala (Thessaly) supposedly containing a term in «Pelasgian». Werner Peek published his analysis of the inscription in 1938, and concluded that the inscribed language was Greek.
Thracian
Vladimir Gueorguiev asserted that the Pelasgians were Indo-European, with an Indo-European etymology of pelasgoi coming from pelagos, 'sea' as in the Sea Peoples, the prśt of the Egyptian inscriptions, and related them to Thracian neighbors. He proposed a model of the phonetic shift from Indo-European to Pelasgian.
Albanian
In 1854, the Austrian diplomat and Albanian language specialist Johann Georg von Hahn identified the Pelasgian language with Proto-Albanian. This theory is completely rejected by contemporary archaeological and historical circles, but enjoys staunch support among Albanian nationalists.
Undiscovered Indo-European to date
Following Vladimir Gueorguiev, who placed Pelasgian as an Indo-European language "between Albanian and Armenian", A. J. van Windekens (1915–1989) offered rules for a hypothetical unrecorded Pelasgian Indo-European language, selecting vocabulary for the that there was no Greek etymology among the names of places, heroes, animals, plants, garments, objects, and social organization. His 1952 essay was critically received.
Registration of registrations
Documentary evidence for the Pelasgians of Pelasgiotis is at least as early as 150–130 BCE. C., when an inscription written in the Thessalian koinón dialect on a fragment of a marble stela in Larisa (Thessaly) records that at the request of the consul Quinto Cecilio Metello, son of Quinto, "friend and benefactor of our country ( ethnei hēmōn)» in gratitude for the services rendered by him, his family and the SPQR, the Thessaly League decreed to send 43,000 chests of wheat to Rome, to be collected from different regions of the league. The Pelasgiōtai and the Phthiōtai were to provide 32,000 chests while the Histiōtai and Thessaliōtai provided the remaining 11,000, 25% going to the army, all in different months.
Archaeology
Early 20th century
Attica
During the early XX century, archaeological excavations by the Italian School of Archeology and the American School of Archeology Classical studies on the Athenian Acropolis and elsewhere in Attica uncovered Neolithic dwellings, tools, pottery, and skeletons of domesticated animals. All of these finds showed important similarities to the Neolithic discoveries made on the Thessalian acropolises of Sesclo and Dimini, and helped to give physical confirmation to the literary tradition that describes the Athenians as descendants of the Pelasgians, who in turn appear to descend continuously from the Neolithic inhabitants of Thessaly. In general, the archaeological evidence indicates that the Acropolis was inhabited by farmers as early as the 6th millennium BC. C. Prokopiou states:
About forty years ago the excavations in the Athenian Acropolis and elsewhere in the Atica brought to light many signs of neolithic life—living, vessels, tools, sheep skeletons—which confirmed the traditions gathered by Herodote that the Athenians descended from the Pelasgos, the Neolithic inhabitants of Tesalia. In fact, the neolytic vessels of the Atica date from the first neolytic period (5520–4900), such as the ceramics of the Tessalia acropolis of Sesclo, as well as the late neolytic period (4900–3200), as the other acropolis tesalia of Dimini... The search for remains of the neolytic period in the Acropolis began in 1922 with the excavations of the Italian School in Archaeology near the Asclepeion. Another settlement was discovered in the vicinity of the Pericles Odeon, where many pieces of ceramic and a stone axe were unearthed, both of the Sesclo type. The excavations carried out by the American School of Classical Studies near the Clepsidra discovered twenty-one wells and countless handmade ceramic pieces, remnants of the Dimini type, instruments of the late Stone Age and bones of pets and fish. The discoveries reinforced the theory that permanent settlements of farmers with their flocks, their bone and stone tools and their ceramic utensils had existed on the Acropolis rock as soon as in the sixth millennium.
It should be noted however that contrary to what Prokopiu suggests about the results of American excavations near the Clepsydra spring, Sara Imerwahr states unequivocally in the definitive publication of the prehistoric material that no Dimini-type pottery was unearthed.
Lemnos
In August and September 1926, members of the Italian School of Archeology conducted test excavations on the island of Lemnos. A brief account of them appeared in the Messager d'Athénes on January 3, 1927. The general aim of the excavations was to shed light on the "Etruscan-Pelasgian" civilization of the island, and they were made at the site of the city of Hephaistea (that is, Paleópolis), where according to Herodotus the Pelasgians surrendered to Miltiades of Athens. A Tyrrhenian necropolis was discovered there (c. IX–VIII century BC) containing bronze objects, ceramic vessels and about 130 ossuaries. These contained different funerary decorations for men and women: in the male ossuaries there were knives and axes while the female ones contained earrings, bronze pins, necklaces, gold diadems and bracelets. The decoration of some of the gold objects contained spirals of Mycenaean origin, but lacked geometric shapes. According to their ornamentation, the vessels discovered at the site were from the geometric period, but nevertheless they also preserved the spirals typical of Mycenaean art. The results of the excavations indicate that the Tyrrhenians or Pelasgians of Lemnos were a rest of the Mycenaean population. Alessandro della Seta tells:
The absence of bronze weapons, the abundance of iron weapons, and the type of vessels and pins give the impression that necropolis corresponds to the ninth or seventh century BC. The weapons show that it did not belong to a Greek population, but to a population that appeared in the eyes of the Hellenes. Greek weapons, daggers or spears are missing: the guns of the barbarians, the axe and the knife are common. Since this population, however, retains so many elements of micenic art, Lemnos' tirrens or pelasgos can be recognized as a rest of a micenic population.
Late 20th century
During the 1980s, the Plain of Skourta project identified Middle and Late Helladic sites on the mountaintops near the Skourta Plains. These fortified montane settlements were, according to tradition, inhabited by Pelasgians until the Late Ages. of the Bronze. Furthermore, the location of the sites is an indication that the Pelasgian inhabitants sought to distinguish themselves ethnically and economically from the Mycenaean Greeks who controlled the Skourta plain. E.B. French recounts:
The fourth and last season of study of the Skourta plain was directed in 1989 by M. and M. L. Z. Munn (ASCSA). "The explorations started in 1985 and 1987 were extended to new areas of the plain and the surrounding valleys, so that now a representative portion (approximately 25 per cent) of most of the habitable regions of the three has been intensively examined (approximately 25 per cent). koinotites (rural communes) from Pyli, Skourta and Stefani. 66 deposits were discovered or studied for the first time in the course of this very productive season, which represents a total of 120 premodern deposits studied by our project since 1985. The studies should have identified all major settlement sites (approximately 5 ha) and a representative sample of minor deposits in the working area. A summary of the main conclusions to be drawn from the four seasons can be made.... The average heladic settlement (HM) is located on two peaks dominating the plain..., one of which, Pankaton..., becomes the most important heladic site in the area. A fortified HM settlement is also located on a top of a steep terrain on the northeastern edge of the plain... between the Mazareika and Vountima valleys, where other settlements were established at the HA... The remoteness of this north-east sector, and the great natural force of the MH and the nearby HA IIIC cities, suggest that the inhabitants of these canes and rocks sought to protect themselves and separate themselves from the peoples beyond the peaks surrounding them, perhaps because they were ethnically different and more or less economically independent of the micenic Greeks who dominated the plains. Pelasgo traditions in these mountains at the end of the Bronze Age raise the possibility that these may have been pelagic deposits. Once abandoned, in the HA IIIC or protogeometric eras, most of these deposits in the north-east sector were not inhabited for much more than a millennium. In other parts, within the most accessible extension of the Skourta plain itself, the HA settlements were founded on many deposits that became important later in the C...»