User:Patrus Philipopolous
ACHILLES, THE ACHAEANS, THE DANITES AND THE BULGARIANS
The story of the Trojan War is familiar to many people. Some are moved by Paris' love for the beautiful Helen, others admire the strength and courage of Achilles Peleus, the bravery of Telamon's son Ajax, the heroic end of Hector.
The description of King Resos, his armour and chariot, the weapons and appearance of the Thracian warriors also makes an undeniable impression. Those who are well acquainted with Homer's work will have noticed several interesting things. The old author never once uses the word barbarians, i.e., speakers of a different language.
This is rather strange because the Trojans and their Thracian allies were by no means relatives of the Greeks, whom today's scholarship regards as descendants of the Achaeans led by the fair-haired Menelaus and his ambitious brother Agamemnon. It is also strange that the burial of Patroclus resembles the burial of Hector, and the common burial rites are an indication of common descent.
At first glance we encounter an unexplained phenomenon, but in fact there is nothing complicated. If we assume that modern scholars are wrong and the Achaeans are not Greeks but relatives of the "Thracians" and Trojans, it becomes clear why Homer does not speak of barbarians at all. The Trojan War was nothing but a conflict between kinsmen. Not only our ancestors, but also the Celts, the Germans, and the Italic peoples fought internal, fratricidal wars.
But how did the Greeks enter the Iliad? And this is no mystery, it is not at all difficult for someone to appropriate the deeds, merits, and even the name of other people who lived long ago. The Germans have nothing in common with the Aryans mentioned in the Vedas who conquered India, but thanks to skillfully organized propaganda, millions of people sincerely believed in the Aryan roots of the German people. So it is with the Greeks, I believe they had nothing to do with the old Achaeans and only appropriated their lands and history.
Let's see how things stand. Of the three names: Achaeans, Hellenes, Greeks, the oldest is Achaeans. According to information in the Encyclopaedia Britanica, it is mentioned in the form Ekwesh in Egyptian documents along with the names of other people of the Sea Peoples coalition: "Tentative identifications of the Sea Peoples listed in Egyptian documents are as follows.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Sea-People
In the Hittite annals, as a country, Achaea, or more accurately Ahhiyawa, was earliest located not in Greece, but in Anatolia (more accurately western Asia Minor), which in antiquity was the home of the "Thracian" peoples Phrygians, Mizos, Vittinians, Teutrians, Bebrikians, Calibians, etc.
"Mycenaeans or not, Ahhiyawa was situated between the western Anatolian coast and the Luwian state of Arzawa, with the Lukka on its south-eastern border. It first became prominent in the fifteenth century BC, but it was in the mid-thirteenth century that it became a serious problem for the Hittites, once Arzawa had become a Hittite vassal. Chronicled by them as the state of Ekmesh or Ekwesh (a name also linked to the Sea Peoples)..."
http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/KingListsMiddEast/AnatoliaAhhiyawa.htm
Achiyava - image based on a map from Wikipedia
With this localization of the home of the Achaeans in Asia Minor, most scholars disagree. The reason is this - if the oldest Achaea is in Asia Minor, then Greek names for cities, places, rivers should abound there, but there are none at all in the period in which the Hittites report Achaea.
Rather than conclude that the Achaeans did not speak Greek on the basis of this evidence, a certain group of scholars simply refuses to accept that the most ancient Achaea bordered the Hittite Empire, and so the problem is "solved."
However, scholars' problems do not end there, there are other things they do not explain thoroughly. There is Strabo's testimony that in ancient times all of Greece was inhabited by barbarians (i.e. people other than Greeks), with the Peloponnese (where the Achaeans Menelaus and Agamemnon ruled) being settled by the Phrygians of Pelops:
"Now Hecataeus of Miletus says of the Peloponnesus that before the time of the Greeks it was inhabited by barbarians. Yet one might say that in the ancient times the whole of Greece was a settlement of barbarians, if one reasons from the traditions themselves: Pelops brought over peoples from Phrygia to the Peloponnesus that received its name from him." - Strab.VII.7.1.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/strabo/7g*.html
Again, if we follow the logic, we must conclude that the Achaeans were not Greeks, but "Thracians" of the Phrygian group. This is therefore acknowledged by Sophocles, who through the words of Teucer not only identifies Atreus (father of the Achaean Agamemnon) as a descendant of Pelops, but also specifies that Pelops is a barbarian Phrygian:
"Are you not aware of the fact that your father's father Pelops long ago was a barbarian, a Phrygian?"- Soph. Aj. 1299
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg,0011,003:1299
Evidence that Greek was not spoken even in the territory of Greece at the time of the Achaean domination is obtained from ancient place-names. Even ardent Hellenophiles like John Chadwick have admitted that the names of the Achaean cities of Mycenae, Athens, etc. have no meaning in Greek and were left by people having a completely different speech, but unfortunately the British researcher did not specify what speech he was referring to - J. Chadwick, "The Mycaean World", 2005, c.1.
Not only are the names of Achaean cities not Greek, the same is true of Achaean personal names. Concerning the non-Greek origin of the names Achilles, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, etc., Arthur Evans spoke long ago: "Many names, also in Greek mithology are not of Greek origin, and others have been Graecized imperfectly - Άχιλ(λ)εύς...Ἀγαμέμνον, Κλυταιμ(ν)ήστρα..." - Scripta Minoa II, 1952, c.67.
Evans is not the only one who thinks that the names of the heroes of the Old Greek legends are not Greek. Quoting his colleagues, Sergei Otkupshikov reports the following: "Greeks of heroic epoch bore almost exclusively non-Greek names (see, for example (Myres 1930, 310). In the classical epoch most of Greek onomastics was also non-Greek (Chadwick 1967, 273). In Greece there were "very few purely Greek names" (Chadwick 1969a, 10). Even those personal names and toponyms that mean something in Greek may turn out to be pre-Greek, reinterpreted to some extent under the influence of folk etymology (Chadwick 1969a, 10; 1969b, 83)...-"The Pre-Greek Substrate, at the Origins of European Civilization," 1988, c.114.
No less important is the fact that the ethnonym Achaeans itself, or more precisely ἈχαιFοί (Achaevoi), has no explanation in Greek; scholars cannot determine what the meaning is at all. Or as the linguist Hjalmar Frisk says: "Da der ursprüngliche Sinn des Names Ἀχαιοί unbekant is, sind alle Etymologien leere Spekulationen."- GEW, p. 199.
If a search be made in the Greek language, an etymology will indeed never be found, for the simple reason that the Achaeans are not Greeks, but natives, having a connection with us, and not with our southern neighbours. Why scholars have ignored the evidence of Strabo, Sophocles, etc. regarding the "Thracian", Phrygian roots of the Achaeans is a mystery to me. However, the claims of the old authors are supported by the non-Greek nature of the toponyms, hydronyms and personal names of the characters of the ancient legends.
In order to understand with certainty the ethnicity of the Achaeans, it would have sufficed to compare the most ancient form of their vernacular name, ἈχαιFοί (Achaevoi), with other similar ones, to check with historical sources, and then the "riddle" would have come to a quick end.
Scholars know of the existence of the Thracian ethnonyms Σκαιβοαί /skaivoi and Περραιβοί /perhivoi (perebi). The particle -voi is common to the most ancient variants of the names Achaeans, Perebi, Skai (Achae-voi, Perchae-voi, Skai-voi).
Since the Achaeans Agamemnon and Menelaus are declared to be descendants of the Phrygian Pelops, and the vernacular name Achae-voi is constructed in an identical way to the "Thracian" Perhai-voi and Skai-voi, it is right to assume that the Achaeans belong to the indigenous Balkan peoples, whose descendants we Bulgarians are. In such a case, it is not strange at all if the Old Bulgarian voi-boytsi turns out to be the best candidate for explaining the particle -voi.
That our ancestors called "Thracians" inhabited the territory of Greece in antiquity is also evident from the place-names Corinth, Tiryns, Provillant, Caminth, Coscintes, Samynthus, etc. The names of the Achaean cities Caminth, Coscintes, and Samynthus, for example, may be explained by the Stbg. kamy-stone, koska-bone, samy-sam. The suffix -int occurs in the "Thracian" gloss volint-wild bull (ox, large animal).
For this suffix Ivan Duridanov mentions that it occurs in the Stblg. as -ente, cf. gen. telѧte-tele - "The Language of the Thracians", 1976, c.21. That the suffix (suffix) -int corresponds to the Slav. -ѧt-, Stblg. telѧ, gen. pat. telѧte-tele was reported earlier by Vladimir Georgiev - "The Thracian Language", 1957, p.55.
Regarding the culture of the Achaeans, it should be mentioned that they built domed tombs for their dead nobles. This tradition was unknown to the Greeks of the Classical period, but was typical of our ancestors known at that time as "Thracians".
During Antiquity, domed tombs were built not only in the lands between the Danube and the White Sea, but also on the Crimean peninsula - a territory that was within the boundaries of the later mentioned by Theophanes the Confessor Old Great Bulgaria. Would this be a coincidence?
Another Achaean custom, the making of a golden funerary mask, was alien to the Greeks, but our ancestors created true masterpieces by immortalizing the faces of their rulers with hammered gold. Gold masks were also made for the rulers of the Bosporan Kingdom (later called Old Great Bulgaria), such as for King Rescuporis II.
http://i2.wp.com/traveltocrimeansea.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/amaz2.jpg
http://2seecrimea.com/2014/09/29/amazon-warriors-in-crimea/
Again, horse sacrifice in the dromos of a tomb is typical of the Achaeans and "Thracians" and again this is something unknown to the Greeks of the Classical period. I find it necessary to point out that this particular rite was practiced by the old Bulgarians until the Middle Ages. A striking example of this is the necropolis of Novi Pazar where horses are laid beside the dead. Information about this can be found in the work of Dimitar Ovcharov, Introduction to Old Bulgarian Culture, 2002, p. 87.
Knowing these things it is right to ask: What gives scholars the right to call the Achaeans ancestors of the Greeks ignoring mountains of information? Why is it so difficult to say that the Achaeans belong to the ancient Balkan peoples of whom we are descendants? Why is it so hard to explain that the ancient Greeks were only influenced linguistically and culturally by the Achaeans, whose original descendants we are?
Once this is admitted, it will become clear why Teucer is a name used by the Thrako-Trojans and also by the Achaeans. Telamon's son Teucer was an Achaean, but there is also a Teucer of Troy, he was actually the first king of the magnificent city, and his name is undoubtedly connected with the "Thracian" tribal name Teucri.
If it is admitted that the Achaeans are not Greeks, but belong to the ancient Balkan peoples, another mystery will be solved. It will become clear why John Malala is confident that the people led by Achilles Peleus in modern times are called Bulgarians.