What is a Greek?
A Greek physician (iatros) and his patient. Others wait
in line, including, on the other side of this Attic aryballos, a dwarf carrying
a dead hare.
Paris, Louvre, attributed to the “Painter
of the Clinic”. 480-470 BCE.
(Both Illustrations from Chefs-D’Oeuvre
de la Ceramique Grecque dans les Collections du Louvre, 1994, pp.
136-137)
“Greeks” came into Greece around 2000 BCE. They were different from the people already living there in five ways, and thus we can “define” the earliest Greek by these characteristics:
1. They made houses with curved, or “apsidal” ends, instead of squared or round all around;
2. They buried their dead individually, instead of communally;
3. They used a peculiar kind of pottery, which has been called “Grey Minyan Ware”**: gray fabric, sharply angled, and made on a potter’s wheel (see below);
4. They used horses;
5. They spoke Greek.
SOME PRE-GREEK WORDS survive in Greek, mostly place names (toponyms) which are not linguistically related
to Greek. Greeks of later times called these pre-Greek peoples PELASGIANS
or LELIGIANS, or CARIANS.
Such names end in the following:- ssos, -ttos, -nthos
Examples: KORINTHOS (Corinth), TIRYNTHOS (Tiryns), KNOSSOS
(Cnossus), TYLISSOS (site
in Crete), HALICARNASSOS (Halicarnassus
in Asia Minor, home of Herodotus),THALASSA
(sea), HYMETTOS and LYKABETTOS
(mountains in Athens), and KEPHISOS,
and ILISSOS (rivers in Athens).
What American parallels to this phenomenon can we adduce?
[John Camp The Archaeology of Athens (Yale, 2000) 13; J. B. Bury,
Russell Meiggs A History of Greece (St. Martin’s 1975) 7]
Early and Middle Helladic Peoples (Pre-Greeks?) used a shape of vessel
which we call “Sauce-Boat.” These stopped being used around the
time the Greeks became prominent in Greece, in the Middle Helladic Period:
Here is one that dates between 2500 and 2000 BCE:
Here is a Sauce Boat from Lerna (Early Helladic 2)
**Grey Minyan Ware is illustrated below.
Early Greeks used “Minyan Ware” vessels……
But they were not simply brought in by Greeks and introduced to the pre-Greeks.
The Dartmouth Archaeology website says,
“Until about 1960, Gray Minyan was often identified as the pottery
of northern invaders who destroyed EH civilization ca. 1900 B.C. and introduced
MH material culture into the Greek peninsula. However, Caskey’s excavations
at Lerna as well as more recently excavated sequences at several other sites
have made it abundantly clear that Gray Minyan, rather than being new in
the MH period, is the direct descendant of the fine gray burnished pottery
of the EH III Tiryns culture. Moreover, it seems likely that the Black/Argive
variety of Minyan is nothing other than an evolved version of the EH III
“Dark slipped and burnished” class. Thus Minyan pottery, if it
is to be associated with an intrusive population element at all, must be
connected with an EH III “invasion” ca. 2200/2150 B.C. and not
with a MH one ca. 1900 B.C. Furthermore, there is nothing particularly “northern”
about the ancestry of the EH III progenitors of MH Minyan except that they
almost certainly came to the northeastern Peloponnese from central Greece
(i.e. from the north with respect to the Peloponnese). How they arrived,
or alternatively developed indigenously, in central Greece is a question
which has yet to be resolved.”
J. G. Pedley Greek Art and Archaeology, figure 2.15
Minyan ware goblet, from Mycenae. MH
Emily Vermeule Greece in the Bronze Age: Red Minyan fruit bowl,
Eutresis. H. Goldman, Eutresis, Pl. 10.
Kantharos Middle Helladic. Wheel made. Grey Minyan Ware. Reynold Higgins
Minoan and Mycenaean Art, pl. 74.
**Middle Helladic “Minyan Ware”
Notes from Reynold Higgins MINOAN AND MYCENAEAN ART, (Prager,
1967) 68-69.
- Technically excellent, well-refined clay and fired hard.
- Surface is smooth and soapy to the touch.
- Angular shapes and ‘are probably taken from metal originals’.
- Small repertoire: goblet (above, top), fruit stand (above, middle),
and kantharos (graceful two-handled bowl, bottom).
Grey Minyan: 2200-1500. One-stage firing in reducing atmosphere. Rare
in burials.
Yellow Minyan: 1700-1400 fired in oxidizing atmosphere.