The term Pelasgians has been used variously in myths of the ancient Greeks, sometimes associated with specific places, including Thessaly, Arcadia, and Argos (in which case it may refer to an actual group). In Homer’s work of the ninth or eight century C. E. Danaos, founding ancestor of the Danaans (Danaoi in Greek, a name used interchangeably for a specific people and for Greeks in general), displaced the Pelasgians of Argos, taking the land for his own people. In a myth collected by Greek geographer Pausanias of the second century c. E. (perhaps adopted from the possibly mythical Asios of Samos who may have lived in the seventh century B. C.E.), the hero Pelasgos was the founder of the Pelasgians, who lived in Arcadia. Elsewhere Pelasgos figures as the founder of the human race itself, the first man. Pelasgos, who was born directly from the Earth, sprouting up like a plant, was said to have invented the making of huts, wearing of sheepskin clothing, and eating oak acorns. In another story, he also invented bread making while in Argos. Greek historian Herodotus of the fifth century b. c.e. says that the Pelasgians did not know that gods have names.
In both of these accounts the Pelasgians are depicted as primitive, rustic, and uncivilized. Pelasgos’s birth from the Earth, without a father, and his connection in myth with Demeter (his wife Chrysanthis informed Demeter of the place where her daughter Persephone had been taken down into the underworld by Hades) and Argive Hera (he is said to have built temples to Hera) show that he and his people had worshipped goddesses as at least coequal with gods (as had been the case in Minoan-Mycenaean times during the See Komi.
Bronze Age; see Minoans and Mycenaeans) and that their mythology informed the chthonic rituals performed mostly by women well into classical Greek times when the male-dominated Olympian religion held sway. Herodotus also draws on Greek historian Hecataeus of the sixth-fifth centuries b. c.e. in saying that all pre-Doric Peloponnesians, including Ionians, Aeolians, and Arcadians, were Pelasgians. Eventually, Pelasgians came to be used as a general term for “foreign tribe.” Thus it seems to have been a catch all term for “others,” either earlier more primitive people, non-Greeks, non-DoRiANS, and finally foreigners.
Another similar term is Leleges, which possibly originated as an onomatopoeic word to describe those who speak unintelligibly. As in the case of the term Pelasgians, Greeks used the name Leleges to describe previous, non-Greek speaking inhabitants of Greece, the islands, and Asia Minor. The Leleges, too, had an eponymous founding ancestor, Lelex, whose son Myles (“mill”) was said to have invented the mill to grind grain. Many of the tribes mentioned by Homer and other early writers fall into this category.
In general, however, Pelasgians have been conceived of as the aboriginal, pre-Hellenic people of Greece. since the Hellenic people spoke indo-European languages, some scholars have assumed that the peoples lumped under the name Pelasgians must have been non-indo-European-speaking. The use of the name Pelasgians for pre-Dorian Greeks casts some doubt on this usage. According to a theory of the spread of indo-European languages that is currently in favor, an indo-European language came to Greece sometime in the fourth millennium b. c.e. It seems unlikely that Greeks 2,000 years later can have known much about pre-indo-European Greece. it may well be, however, that non-indo-European languages continued to be spoken in Greece for a long time, possibly in more remote, backward places (since it was the Greek-speaking Mycenaeans who came into dominance by at least the early second millennium b. c.e. and built the cities). Possibly these peoples were swept away in the dislocations of the Dark Ages, embodied in Greek myth as the “Dorian invasions.”
World History
