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Pelasgians is a classical Greek historians' and mythographers' term for the ancient autochthonous ("indigenous"), non-IndoEuropean peoples of Greece and the Aegean. Pelasgians were also one of the ancient peoples of Asia Minor.
Results of archaeological, historical, linguistic and anthropological investigations show that before the Indo-European expansion, before the end of the 2nd millennium BC. In the 4th - 2nd millennia BC, culturally-related "Proto-Iberian" tribes inhabited Asia Minor, the Caucasus and the Aegean Basin (Pelasgians). As a result of the Indo-European expansion, after the end of the 2nd millennium BC happened assimilation of the part of the indigenous "Proto-Iberian" tribes on the most part of Asia Minor, Balkan Peninsula and the Aegean Basin (Pelasgians). The Proto-Iberian peoples have kept their originality (indecipherable use) and statehood in the Caucasus (the Caucasian peoples).
Important data of the works of Herodotus, Strabo and Dyonisios Perieget (identification of Pelasgians and ancient Georgian (Kartvelian) tribe of Geniokh), important linguistic investigations of E.J. Furnee (1972, 1979, 1982), M.G. Tseretheli (1959) and R.V. Gordeziani (1985) confirmed a close relationship of Pelasgian and Georgian languages, Pelasgians and Georgians. Very important are also results of anthropological investigations (M. Abdushelishvili, 1968).
If the statements of ancient authorities are marshalled in order of their date it will be seen that certain beliefs cannot be traced back beyond the age of this or that author. Though this does not prove that the beliefs themselves were not held earlier, it suggests caution in assuming that they were. In the Homeric poems there are Pelasgians among the allies of Troy: in the catalogue, Iliad, ii. 840—843, which is otherwise in strict geographical order, they stand between the Hellespontine towns and the Thracians of south-east Europe, i.e. on the Hellespontine border of Thrace.
Their town or district is called Larissa and is fertile, and they are celebrated for their spearmanship. Their chiefs are Hippothous and Pylaeus, sons of Lethus son of Teutamus. Iliad, x. 428—429, describes their camping ground between the town of Troy and the sea; but this obviously proves nothing about their habitat in time of peace.
Odyssey, xvii. 175—177, notes Pelasgians in Crete, together with two apparently indigenous and two immigrant peoples (Achaeans and Dorians), but gives no indication to which class the Pelasgians belong. In Lemnos (Iliad, Vii. 467; xiv. 230) there are no Pelasgians, but a Minyan dynasty. Two other passages (Iliad, ii. 681—684; xvi. 233—235) apply the epithet "Pelasgic" to a district called Argos about Mt Othrys in south Thessaly, and to Zeus of Dodona. But in neither case are actual Pelasgians mentioned; the Thessalian Argos is the specific home of Hellenes and Achaeans, and Dodona is inhabited by Perrhaebians and Aenianes (Iliad, ii. 750) who are nowhere described as Pelasgian. It looks therefore as if "Pelasgian" were here used connotatively, to mean either "formerly occupied by Pelasgian" or simply "of immemorial age."
Hesiod expands the Homeric phrase and calls Dodona "seat of Pelasgians" (fr. 225); he speaks also of a personal Pelasgus as father of Lycaon, the culture-hero of Arcadia; and a later epic poet, Asius, describes Pelasgus as the first man, whom the earth threw up that there might be a race of men. Hecataeus makes Pelasgus king of Thessaly (expounding Iliad, ~i. 681—684); Acusilaus applies this Homeric passage to the Peloponnesian Argos, and engrafts the Hesiodic Pelasgus, father of Lycaon, into a Peloponnesian genealogy.
Hellanicus a generation later repeats this blunder, and identifies this Argive and Arcadian Pelasgus with the Thessalian Pelasgus of Hecataeus. For Aeschylus (Supplices I, sqq.) Pelasgus is earthborn, as in Asius, and rules a kingdom stretching from Argos to Dodona and the Strymon; but in Prometheus 879, the "Pelasgian" land simply means Argos. Sophocles takes the same view (Inac/jus, fr. 256) and for the first time introduces the word "Tyrrhenian" into the story, apparently as synonymous with Pelasgian.
Herodotus, like Homer, has a denotative as well as a connotative use. He describes actual Pelasgians surviving and mutually intelligible (a) at Placie and Scylace on the Asiatic shore of the Hellespont, and (b) near Creston on the Strymon; in the latter area they have “Tyrrhenian” neighbours. He alludes to other districts where Pelasgian peoples lived on under changed names; Samothrace and Antandrus in Troas are probably instances of this. In Lemnos and Imbros he describes a Pelasgian population who were only conquered by Athens shortly before 500 BC, and in connection with this he tells a story of earlier raids of these Pelasgians on Attica, and of a temporary settlement there of Hellespontine Pelasgians, all dating from a time "when the Athenians were first beginning to count as Greeks."
Elsewhere "Pelasgian" in Herodotus connotes anything typical of, or surviving from, the state of things in Greece before the coming of the Hellenes. In this sense all Greece was once "Pelasgic"; the clearest instances of Pelasgian survival in ritual and customs and antiquities are in Arcadia, the "Ionian" districts of north-west Peloponnese, and Attica, which have suffered least from hellenization. In Athens itself the prehistoric wall of the citadel and a plot of ground close below it were venerated in the 5th century as "Pelasgian"; so too Thucydides (ii. 17). We may note that all Herodotean examples of actual Pelasgi lie round, or near, the actual Pelasgi of Homeric Thrace; that the most distant of these is confirmed by the testimony of Thucydides (iv. 106) as to the Pelasgian and Tyrrhenian population of the adjacent seaboard: also that Thucydides adopts the same general Pelasgian theory of early Greece, with the refinement that he regards the Pelasgian name as originally specific, and as having come gradually into this generic use.
Ephorus, relying on Hesiodic tradition of an aboriginal Pelasgian type in Arcadia, elaborated a theory of the Pelasgians as a warrior-people spreading (like "Aryans") from a "Pelasgian home," and annexing and colonizing all the parts of Greece where earlier writers had found allusions to them, from Dodona to Crete and the Troad, and even as far as Italy, where again their settlements had been recognized as early as the time of Hellanicur, in close connection once more with “Tyrrhenians.”
The copious additional information given by later writers is all by way either of interpretation of local legends in the light of Ephorus's theory, or of explanation of the name "Pelasgoi"; as when Philochorus expands a popular etymology "stork-folk" into a theory of their seasonal migrations; or Apollodorus says that Homer calls Zeus Pelasgian "because he is not far from every one of us,". The connection with Tyrrhenians which began with Hellanicus, Herodotus and Sophocles becomes confusion with them in the 3rd century, when the Lemnian pirates and their Attic kinsmen are plainly styled Tyrrhenians, and early fortress-walls in Italy (like those on the Palatine in Rome) are quoted as "Arcadian" colonies.
The results of archaeological excavations of Asia Minor (very important investigations of well-known archaeologists J. Mellaart (1962, 1964, 1975) and F. Schachermeyr (1955, 1979)) confirmed that part of the Proto-Iberian tribe of Pelasgians inhabited Asia Minor since the end of the 4th millennium BC.
Well-known Georgian scientist, author of important works in the field of history of the Iberian-Caucasian culture and the Proto-Iberian tribes, Dr. Zviad Gamsakhurdia wrote, that "...Wilhelm von Humboldt's research into the Basque language and the ancient population of the Iberian peninsula led him to the conclusion that the primary, autochtonous population of Southern Europe, viz. the Iberian peninsula, Italy and Mediterranean islands, was Iberian. This population was called proto-Iberian, the later European population stemming from it. The term Mediterranean race (or people) is also used in scholarship. In order to refer to the people of the Caucasian race use is also made of the terms paleo-Caucasian or ancient Caucasian race and ancient Mediterranean race, the terms being interchangeable. I am referring to the population diffused from the Iberian peninsula, into the Mediterranean and Aegean basins, the Balkans, into modern Greece, the Caucasus, and the territory of modern India as well as into Asia Minor and Palestine. This is the area of diffusion of the proto-Iberian people which, according to Humboldt, had many offshoots. These people had a single basic language with many dialectal branches, and even if these dialects assumed the character of separate languages, they remained kindred and developed as mutually related languages. That is why the term proto-Iberian gained currency, to which - as I have said - the ancient population of the Iberian peninsula and Italy, in particular, Basque, Lusitanian, Etruscan, Pelasgian, etc. is linked... The Pelasgians formed a branch of the proto-Iberians, similarly to the Etruscan, the Colchians and other peoples. The Colchian, Pelasgian, Trojan, and Minoan were closely related worlds, and for practical purposes of study can be considered as constituting one single world, a world reflected in the great epic of Homer" [1].
Homer was well aware not only the myth of the Argonauts, he knew about the existence of Aea-Colchis and Colchian tribes (west-Georgian tribes). In the Iliad (II, 856), Halyzones, a Pelasgo-Colchian tribe is mentioned for the first time. "Halysones came from the eastern silver-making town of Halyb". Halib (or Khalib/Khaldi) was the ancient west-Georgian tribe. Strabo identifies the tribe of Halysones with the ancient Georgian (Colchian) tribe of Khalibs (Halyb), who were famous for iron making.
Essay about the history of Pelasgians
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