Many ancient authors mention the Pelasgian people, who inhabited different regions of ancient Greece before the arrival of the Greeks themselves. It is still unknown what kind of people they were.
Pelasgian Mentions
Pelasgians as allies of Troy were first mentioned in Homer's Iliad (8th century BC), which tells about the events of the supposedly 12th century BC. They lived, presumably, in Thessaly. In the "Odyssey" Homer named another habitat of the Pelasgians - the island of Crete.
In Hesiod, Hecateus of Miletus, Aeschylus, Pausanias and many other authors, Pelasgians are repeatedly mentioned in various aspects, including in a legendary way. According to one of the literary versions, given by Pausanias in the "Description of Hellas" (II century AD), Pelasgus was the name of the most ancient ancestor of the population of Greece. Earlier, in the 5th century BC, the playwright Aeschylus called the ancient king Pelasgus in Argos in the Peloponnese.
When comparing different reports of ancient writers, several coinciding places are revealed where, apparently, the presence of Pelasgians in ancient times was indisputable. It is confirmed by two or more authors. These are Argolis and Arcadia in the Peloponnese, Lemnos and several more islands in the Aegean Sea, Thessaly, Epirus. In Epirus, in Dodona, from ancient times there was a sanctuary of Zeus of Pelasgia, revered in Hellas, with an oracle comparable in authority to the oracle of Apollo in Delphi. According to Herodotus, Pelasgians also lived in Attica, and the ancestors of the Athenians, before they began to speak Greek, were Pelasgians.
At the same time, in those times, about which the ancient authors have preserved information, the Pelasgians did not constitute a large ethnic massif anywhere, but lived in enclaves interspersed with other peoples, including the tribes of the Greeks themselves.
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What the Pelasgians gave the Greeks
The fact that the Pelasgians were once more widespread can be judged by the statement of Herodotus (mid-5th century BC) that earlier Hellas was called Pelasgia. Thucydides (end of the 5th century BC) also says that before a certain Elin, the son of Deucalion, gave the name to the whole of Hellas, “certain tribes, mainly the Pelasgians, gave its names to it by their names”. From these indications, however, it does not follow that the Pelasgians once inhabited all of Greece or were the dominant people in it.
From the instructions of Herodotus, it follows that the Pelasgians constituted the ethnic substrate of one of the ancient Greek tribes - the Ionian, of which the Athenians were also a branch: "The Ionian were originally of Pelasgian origin." Herodotus cited a legend that once the Athenians, who already belonged to the Hellenic tribe, envying the hard work and prosperity of the Pelasgians who still lived in Attica, expelled them to the island of Lemnos. He also says that "before their union with the Pelasgians, the Hellenes were few in number." All this evidence can be interpreted to mean that most of the Hellenes in the time of Herodotus were none other than the Hellenized Pelasgians.
The role of the Pelasgians in the culture of ancient Greece can be judged by the evidence of the "father of history" that almost all of their gods, with a few exceptions, were borrowed by the Greeks either from the Pelasgians or from the Egyptians, but through the Pelasgians. The role of the main center for the transmission of sacred knowledge from the Pelasgians to the Greeks was played, according to Herodotus, by the same temple of Zeus in Dodona.
Remains of the walls of the Athenian Acropolis, bordering later buildings, erected already in classical Athens, serve as a monument to the high urban planning skill of the Pelasgians to this day. If we accept the version of Herodotus that the Athenians are the Hellenized descendants of the Pelasgians, then there are no other candidates for the construction of these walls and foundations. With a high degree of probability, the heritage of the Pelasgians should include the monuments of megalithic architecture of Mycenae, as well as, possibly, some structures of the most ancient civilization of Crete.
The riddle of the Pelasgian language
According to Herodotus, the Pelasgians spoke a "barbarian" language, that is, very far from Greek. It is very difficult to identify this language with any known one, since only one supposed monument of the Pelasgian language has survived - a stele on the island of Lemnos with the image of a warrior (VI century BC). The Pelasgians lived on Lemnos at the end of the 6th century BC. and were expelled from there as a result of the Athens naval expedition. The inscription was made in one of the variants of the early Greek writing, but in a language close to Etruscan. The inscription is easy to read, but what it means is completely incomprehensible, because, with rare exceptions, the meanings of the words of the Etruscan language itself are unknown!
Thucydides also called the Pelasgians Tyrrhenians, a word that a number of other later authors call the Etruscans who lived in ancient Italy and gave a lot to the culture of ancient Rome. Thus, we can assume that the Pelasgians and the Etruscans are one and the same people or two closely related peoples. However, this does not give us anything, because the origin and genetic ties of the Etruscans are no less mysterious than the Pelasgians!
The mystery of the origin of the Pelasgians
There are several more or less reasoned hypotheses about the origin of the Pelasgians. One of them claims that the Pelasgians-Tyrrhenians were descendants of the most ancient population of both Greece and Italy. The invasions of the waves of the Indo-Europeans on the Balkan and Apennine peninsulas pushed this people into separate enclaves. At the same time, some scholars believe that the Pelasgians were the descendants of the population of the ancient Vinca civilization in the Balkans, which existed in the 5th-4th millennia BC.
Another hypothesis associates the settlement of the Tyrrhenian Pelasgians with sea migration. According to one version, its source was Asia Minor. On the way from there, the Pelasgians settled Crete and the Aegean islands. Some scholars identify the Pelasgians with one of the "peoples of the sea" who ravaged ancient Egypt, and those mentioned in the Bible - the Philistines who gave the name to Palestine. There is also an interesting version, according to which the ancestors of the Pelasgians could have arrived from North Africa.
In Greece, the monuments of the Pelasgian language may include the Cretan hieroglyphic writing and the linear syllabic writing A, also inherent in the most ancient Cretan civilization (1st half of the 2nd millennium BC). However, both scripts have not yet been deciphered. Linear A served as the prototype for the syllabic Linear B used by the Mycenaean civilization, which is considered already belonging to the ethnic Hellenes. Most scholars, however, agree that this letter was also not created by the Greeks themselves, since it is poorly adapted to the transmission of Greek phonemes, and therefore originally belonged to another people.
The question that the Pelasgians belonged to the Pelasgians from the heritage of the civilization that preceded Greece in Greece by the Greeks themselves, can be better solved, obviously, only after reading these inscriptions. At the same time, it is possible that the Pelasgians were not a single ethnic group in our usual sense, but represented the same collective term as the "peoples of the sea."
Yaroslav Butakov