Hittites in Greece?

Also, making archaeology fit textual evidence is something that Western Ancient Historians have only just grown out of. Sometimes the archaeology needs to speak for itself.

Fair enough. Still, it's better than nothing, which is still the situation with the Indus civilization, as far as I know...

Having said that, I agree that it's likely that the 'Greeks' of the Illiad were not a united polity but rather several kingdoms. Also, Linear B is only found for some religious texts and mainly economic ones such as inventories. Even with the ability to read Linear B, it doesn't actually reveal much.

Well, it provides a bit of circumstantial evidence--namely what they thought was important enough to write down. So there's a bit of contrast to the Hittites or Egyptians, where we have extensive evidence of diplomatic correspondence. (Granted, as you point out, one discovery could change all this, if they found something like a Mycenaean equivalent to the Amarna letters or something.) And inventories do give us some idea about the material culture and economics, such as they were.

Also, the Greek Dark Age is more than just a discontinuity,

True, true. I may have been understating things a bit. :eek:

Urgh, sorry I feel like i've ranted a bit, and I do agree with your conclusions about what 'Ahhiyawa' was likely to have been like; I just feel like inserting a note of caution because we have so little information to go on about the Greeks in this period that we might find that one archaeological discovery is enough to reinvent our image of their society.

Hey, not a problem. As you may have noticed, Mycenaean Greece is sort of peripheral to my main area of interest. :D I'm always interested to hear other people's analyses...
 
If you are willing to consider the larger language branch that "Hittite" belonged to (the Anatolian branch of Indo-European), then a strong case can be made that Anatolian speakers DID occupy much of Greece in prehistoric times. Many currently Greek cities are known to have had names ending in -ssos or -nthos, both of which are apparently non-Greek in origin, but are instead typical west-Anatolian town suffixes. In addition, the archaeology suggests that eastern Greece and western Anatolia shared a common material culture from the middle of the third millennium BCE to the early second millennium BCE. Plus the early Greek historians (Herodotus being the most well known) report that non-Greek speakers were the original inhabitants of what became Greece, with the Greek speakers arriving later. Those non-Greeks who survived long enough to have their languages be recorded, spoke a west-Anatolian language. All of these were living in Anatolia by that late date, but originally they must have been spread widely over much of Greece.
 
If they lacked effective means of getting across The wider straits, The Hittites would need to secure the Northwestern Anatolia in order to have a chance of getting across.

Well at different times the Hittites do seem to have had a naval capability. There are records that they fought naval battles against the Sea Peoples in the final years of the empire, for example.
 

yourworstnightmare

Banned
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Do you mean Hittites settling in Greece instead of Anatolia, or the Hittite Empire subjugating Greece and enforcing tributary status on the Greeks?
 
Do you mean Hittites settling in Greece instead of Anatolia, or the Hittite Empire subjugating Greece and enforcing tributary status on the Greeks?

I guess I had been assuming the latter. On the other hand, Mongo's point about Anatolian-speakers in Greece before the Greeks seems to be backed up by this map:

1000px-Mass_migration_of_Greece_and_Turkey_in_1900BCE.svg.png


So maybe you could come up with some way for them to hold on, though they wouldn't quite be Hittites, per se. That far back, one could have a hard time coming up with a very definite POD, though.
 
duke/wanax

The greek name for king is to kuirwanas as duke is to herzog. The first part of the longer name means army, while the second part means leader or van as in vanguard.
If wanax comes from kuirwanas, this would mean that the greek kings were once in a vassal state to the Hittites. Kuirwanas was as regular name for a hittitge vassal.
 
I think the thread means the latter.

Admitting that some of this is speculation, I don't think that the Greeks of this period were weak. Whilst there may not have been a single polity, it's clear that either the entire culture or one section of it was able to project 'Greek' culture onto Cyprus with its valuable copper ores, Crete which had formerly been the seat of a major civilization/culture in the form of the Minoans, and as far West in the Mediterranean as Sardinia. This would indicate a state, or states, with developed naval infrastructure and knowledge for the time.
 
I think the thread means the latter.

Admitting that some of this is speculation, I don't think that the Greeks of this period were weak. Whilst there may not have been a single polity, it's clear that either the entire culture or one section of it was able to project 'Greek' culture onto Cyprus with its valuable copper ores, Crete which had formerly been the seat of a major civilization/culture in the form of the Minoans, and as far West in the Mediterranean as Sardinia. This would indicate a state, or states, with developed naval infrastructure and knowledge for the time.

I would tend to agree, but I will point out that there seems to be a gap of several hundred years between the fall of Crete and Mycenaean influence on Cyprus. (Which seems to have come with the waning of Hittite power in the region--Cyprus, known as Alasiya, was certainly in the Hittite sphere for a while.) I'd agree that Greek naval technology was probably as sophisticated as anyone's at the time, but the best chance for Greek-Hittite interaction was probably in between the events you mentioned. Presumably any Greek polities in that era would have had periods of strength and weakness, as most cultures/states did. A relatively strong and unified Greece would probably not have been vulnerable to Hittite influence, but it might have been during periods of weakness and/or disunity.
 
I think the thread means the latter.

Admitting that some of this is speculation, I don't think that the Greeks of this period were weak. Whilst there may not have been a single polity, it's clear that either the entire culture or one section of it was able to project 'Greek' culture onto Cyprus with its valuable copper ores, Crete which had formerly been the seat of a major civilization/culture in the form of the Minoans, and as far West in the Mediterranean as Sardinia. This would indicate a state, or states, with developed naval infrastructure and knowledge for the time.

It seemed that oftentimes the Greeks would cooperate on great pirate raids against the cities of Anatolia. Troy, or IIRC To-ro-ja, was a prominent example. They used their pentekonters to cross the sea and attack these cities, pillaging them and splitting the loot. This implied a fairly high level of cooperation, but this is one area where its extremely difficult to come to any sort of conclusion. AFAIK, there wasn't much evidence of battles between the states in Greece but I could be wrong.
 
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