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By Root 393 0

came to call the Greeks yavana too—although their first major encounter was with a warlike force led by Macedonians. § Near Oropus, which is on the coast facing Eretria, according to Strabo, ix.2.10. ¶ Two other ethnonyms for Greek, seemingly much older, are Danaoi and Akhaioi. They are the words used by their ethnic poet Homer, writing some time in the early first millennium BC. The name Danaoi has associations with the city of Argos, a major city at the time when Homer represents Greece. Danaos is a legendary king of that city. Akhaioi, when it is used specifically, refers either to the people of an area in the north of the Peloponnese, with no particular claim to representative status, or to the people of Phthiotis, which is also notable in Homer as another part of the kingdom of Achilles (Iliad, ii.684). Its Latin form, Achîvî, shows that it originally had a W at the end of the stem (hence really ’Akhaiwoi’). But in this form, with an inversion of the A and I, as Ahhiyawa, it does seem to figure as a term for a major kingdom in other documents, namely the royal correspondence (in cuneiform on baked clay tablets) of the Hittites who dominated Anatolia in the second millennium BC. So it seems that, early on, the Greeks were known abroad by yet another name.

Both these terms may have been used by the Egyptians. There is an inscription c. 1370 BC (on a statue base in a funerary temple of Amenophis III) which mentions the TNY along with a variety of other names locatable in Crete. Egyptian hieroglyphics usually omit vowels, and i or y between vowels is often lost in Greek, so this could be an explicit reference to the Danaioi. In another inscription c. 1186 BC, the DNYN are mentioned as one of the Sea-Peoples attacking Egypt. But in an earlier inscription c. 1218 BC, the IKWS, which could just possibly be the Akhaiwoi or Ahhiyawa, are mentioned as allies in the resistance against the Sea-Peoples (Strange 1980; Muhly et al. 1982).

* In this chapter, Greek names in the text are given in the conventional Latinised form: hence not Hēródotos, Akhaiós but Herodotus, Achaeus. In the romanised transcription, h has much the same force as in English, but is often used to aspirate a consonant: kh, ph, th could more accurately have been written kh ph th in fact as in English ‘Can Pete take it?’ Except in diphthongs, au, eu, the Greek u was pronounced in Attic much as it is today in French, phonetically [y]; ou was a long ū, as in English rune. The accents in Greek up to the early centuries AD give some image of the pattern of tone, not stress; thereafter they just mark the stressed syllable.

* As it happens, this pre-eminence of Attic was the result of cultural and commercial, not military, dominance. Athens, as we have seen, was early a major trading centre. But until the fifth century Greek literature had been the joint product of many different dialects.

* Compare the figures for modern spoken English: two forms for most nouns (word, words), four for most verbs (talk, talks, talked, talking).

* The fact that Greek speech was so dialectally riven at the time had an interesting impact on these styles and genres: for the first few centuries after written literature began, each became associated with a particular dialect, typically that of its first practitioners, even though the literature was largely shared. So epic poetry had to be written in Homer’s mixture of Ionic and Aeolic, lyric poetry in Doric, history at first in Ionic, tragedy in Attic. This played some role in perpetuating knowledge of the dialects, even after the increasing unity of the Greek world was pushing them out of actual use in conversation. It is a particularly good example of how so much of a language’s flavour comes purely by association.

* It also had one colony on the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, Amisūs, modern Samsun.

† Although not prohibited by Carthaginian or Phoenician influence, the Adriatic received rather little attention from Greek colonists, and was not identified with a particular metropolis. However, it was de facto a Dorian area.