Aeolic and Aeolians: Origins of an Ancient Greek Language and its Community of Speakers

By: null Roger D. Woodard

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Synopsis: Aeolic and Aeolians explores the origin of an ancient Greek language and the beginnings and evolution of the community of its speakers – the Aeolians. Roger Woodard argues that the starting point for both is situated in Asia Minor during the period of the Late Bronze Age, and that the ancestral Aeolic speech community can be identified with the Mycenaean peoples of Anatolia called the Ahhiyawans in Hittite records. These Bronze-Age Asian Greeks would intermarry with local Luvian peoples of western Anatolia, and the Aeolian language and identity – an identity encoded in myth-emerged from the intermixing of the two societies. Aeolian myths are central to Woodard's ground-breaking investigations presented in this volume. He demonstrates how assemblages of mythic components, what Lévi-Strauss called bricolage, enabled early Aeolians to give intellectual expression to their distinctive Greek identity. With the collapse of Bronze-Age societies in Mycenaean Greece, some of the early Aeolians of Anatolia would migrate to Europe, introducing their language and myths into Hellas.