The Black Greeks?

The earliest inhabitants of Greece and the Aegean Islands were Blacks from ancient Libya, Palestine, and Asia Minor. These Blacks founded Athens, Thebes Thera and Attica. They occupied much of the mainland and all the Aegean Islands. These Blacks are frequently depicted in the art associated with the so-called Dark Ages (1200-600 BC).

Although these people of the Heroic age came from diverse origins, the Aryan-Greeks called them Pelasgians. According to the Greeks, the first man was Pelasgus--ancestor of the Pelasgians. The Pelasgians were a combination of different Black tribes called Achaeans, Cadmeans, Leleges, Carians or Garamantes.

According to tradition, the Pelasgians inhabited Arcadia and many Aegean Islands. These Blacks took their own writing to Greece which was later used by the Aryan-Greeks. According to Herodotus quadrigas or four-horse chariots were introduced to Greeks by the Libyans .

The Aryan-Greeks adopted the language of the Pelasgians and Egyptians. The linguistic evidence shows that there was a differentiation of Greece into East Greek and West Greek. The Black Greeks spoke East Greek (Achaioi or Achaean). West Greek was spoken by the Dorian or Aryan Greeks. The earliest Aryan tribe called Ionians spoke a dialect of East Greek called Aeolic.

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It seems like blacks/Africans had a lot of influence on the world even though mainstrean His story dosen't talk about it. We need to read more and stop accepting the bullsh*t that they tell us in school

Uh I don't see how this is true at all.

There is never a record of a "Migration" of peoples to Greece before the Doric Invasion.

There is however records of "Sea Peoples" (Greeks) by the Egyptians during 2000 BC and these peoples were ... white.

Or as white as your skin can get under the hot Mediterranean sun. So let's call them Caucasians.

I think what is being mistook for black here, is the black and orange vessles often painted by greeks. But this was for a color balance with what dies they could make. Not because they were black.

Achilles was quite white with blonde hair if I am correct. And Agamemnon was white as well as Odysseus.

And even if they didn't really live at the time of 1100 BC the story was written in 700s BC. Which is close enough to depict any actually black peoples.

Furthermore, does Lybia or wherever even have enough trees to support a migration by sea, to greece?

And the Winds there I should think favor Itally, not Greece.

Also this kinda wrecks a few things. Achaeans were OLD....the Athenians and such became "Ionic" Greeks, sooo what is this a theory?

Interesting debate going on here and i have to admit that all of you may be correct!

The truth is we will never know unless we can go back in time and find out?

My opinion, they would have come from a range of ethnic backgrounds and come in all colours, shapes and sizes...we just don't have the proof to put a solid claim down!

Good researching though...kept me busy!

Raven

Interesting stuff, Deep-W but very much speculation: the most speculative part being finding any mention anywhere, in any Classical source, of the "fact" that the Pelasgians - or anyone else in pre-Hellenic Greece - were "black".
Also, it is worth noting that the Greeks carefully distinguished "Libyans" from "Aethiopians": the latter may have been black: the former certainly not, and much more likely to have been Semitic/Arab types.
One recalls that - although Carthage was in N. Africa -the Romans referred to the wars as the Punic (i.e. Phoenician) Wars to note the origin (assumed, at any rate) of the Carthaginians.
Herodotus is a marvellous read; but he's no modern historian or ethnographer and he has, in fact, very little to say on the topic.
www.shsu.edu...
Pelasgians are numbered among the allies of the Achaeans at Troy (Iliad, ii. 840�843,)
And, in more recent Classical times certain inhabitants were still called Pelasgians.
But the truth is that this is just a sort of vague blanket word for whoever built anything or left any relics in pre-Hellenic times and about as informative as "Red Indians" or "Ancient Britons". Similarly, anything big wasa called Cycolopean and attributed to a race of gians: Cyclopes, whose name (probably on a false etymology) was interpreted as "round-eye": hence, one-eyed giants.
The Greeks never let the absence of knowledge deter them from explaining things.
You find a different set of tales about them as you progress through Greek literarture: Homer, Hesiod up to the Classics; but nothing at all certain beyond the fact that they didn't speak a dialect of Greek.
You won't find anything resembling history to support the notions here (doesn't mean they're wrong, of course) and the source is rather woefully astray when it comes to the Ancient Greek language. There is no doubt that certain place names are manifestly not Indo-European (Athens and Corinth are 2 well-known ones); but place names often reflect previous languages and little else: Celtic names abound in Britain (e.g. River Avon) as do numerous Roman names(every "caster/chester for example): however, we can rest assured ( or as assured as we can ever be) that the Greeks brought Greek with them and did not take anything other than items of vocabulary/place names from previous inhabitants).
My hunch is that the Pelasgians were largely the ancestors of modern Albanians; but - as I say -there is little if anything solid.
"Black Greeks" is a non-starter, I fear; but I'd be interested in any precise links that posters might forward.

This discussion reminds me of the one we had about Hercales being black. By looking further into the origins of the Pelasgians, I am finding many theories. Most believe them to be a Semitic group of seafarer people. Some other theories include: Aboriginal people, descendants of the Biblical Peleg, Indo-Eurasians, Euro-Africans, Palestinian, Syrian, Canaanite and fore-runners of the Etruscan people of Northern Italy. Below, I�ve provided information and links for further consideration and discussion:

Pelasgians, or Sea Peoples of Lemnos, the evidence is that the Pelasgians were a mixture of various peoples including some of the biblical Canaanites who later became the Phoenicians.

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Modern writers restate or amplify the view, ascribed to Ephorus, that �Pelasgian� simply means �prehistoric Greek,� or have used the name Pelasgian at their pleasure to denote some one element in the mixed population of the Aegean�Thracian, Illyrian (Albanian) or Semitic. followed by many anthropologists, describes as � Pelasgian� one branch of the Mediterranean or Eur-African race of mankind, and one group of types of skull within that race.

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PELASGIANS: The name Pelasgi which almost certainly stands for Pelak-skoi or Pelag-Skoi has been connected with pelagos, 'the sea,' and the people consequently regarded as sea-faring. Various traditions were current among the Greeks with regard to the pre-Greek inhabitants of their country. They were inclined to call all
these by the general name of Pelasgians, although they recognized Carians and Leleges as distinct. The Dorians claimed that the Ionians were Pelasgian or at least
mainly so, and that they themselves were true Greeks. The inhabitants of Attica, who were regarded as Ionian, boasted that they were autochthonous, the original inhabitants of the land.

The people inhabiting the Lemnos island at and before 600 B.C. were called PELASGIANS, although according to the Lemnos island inscription, they called themselves as SAKA. The Pelasgians were a non Indo-European people and were speaking a non Indo-European language. Turkic speaking Pelasgians must have been direct kins of Central Asiatic Saka people who arrived in the Balkans and then onto some of the Aegean Sea islands in waves of migrations from Central Asia long before the 6th century B. C. and adapted themselves to the environment conditions of the area.

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"Pelasgians" is the name generally given by ancient writers to the peoples before the Hellenes. According to both Herodotus and Thucyclides, Pelasgians formed the
largest element of the early population of Greece and the Aegean, and most of them were gradually assimilated by the Hellenes. Herodotus saw this transformation as following the invasion by Danaos (the Egyptian), which he took to be around the middle of the second millennium B.C. Herodotus stated that the Egyptian Danaids taught the Pelasgians (not the Hellenes) the worship of the gods." The idea that the
Pelasgians were the native population, converted to something more "Greek" by the invading Egyptians, also occurs in the plays of Aischylos and Euripides, written around the same time as Herodotus' Histories.

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The Pelasgians: The pre-Hellenic population of Greece, the Pelasgians, arrived from Palestine around 3,500 B.C., seven hundred years before the Hellads came to Greece from Asia Minor. Their story of origin claimed that they had sprung from the teeth of the original chaos dragon, the serpent Ophion. According to the Pelasgians, Athena was born by Lake Tritonis in Lybia. As a maiden, she accidentally killed her playmate Pallas ("Youth") in a friendly game of warfare. Athena took the name of her playmate, henceforth calling herself Pallas Athena. She left Lybia for Crete and came finally to Greece around 4,000 B.C. where she lived in the city of Athenae by the Boeotian River Triton.

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Offspring of Peleg?

Recently, it has begun to appear that the Pelasgians of antiquity, who were great sea-going merchants and sometimes pirates, in earliest times may have received their name from Peleg. Surviving in a multitude of forms is a determinative appended to many words that has the effect of converting the word into a patronymic. This appears, for example, as -icus in the word Germanicus, also -ic in the word Britannic, ski in many familiar Russian names, possibly -scans in the word Etruscans, and scion in English. Another one, which is the important point in this context, is skoi, placed after the more ancient name Peleg, giving the compound form Pelegskoi. These are the Pelasgians.

The Pelasgians are very much of a mystery, for although they appear to have been quite powerful, it is not clear where they came from or what happened to them. When the Thracians descended to the Aegean from the north in the 14th century B.C., they displaced the Pelasgians from the territory which they held between the Hebrus and the Strymon. It is curious to find the Pelasgians occupying a territory adjacent to a river, the Hebrus, bearing a name so much reminiscent of Eber who, according to Genesis 10:25, was their father. After they were displaced, these people seem to have been swallowed up by the Greek population with whom they were subsequently confused, Munro says: "The Pelasgic nation ceased to exist as such and the Ionian name was adopted, probably among the mixed communities on the Asiatic side."

Perhaps because the Pelasgians were not Greek-speaking people, they were the more readily equated by the Greeks, who tended to lump all foreigners together, with the Etruscans who were also non-Greeks. Yet they appear not to have been, in fact, the
same people. We have, therefore, possibly a group of "Eberites" achieving some notoriety for a time in the early world, only to disappear by being displaced from their primary settlement and swallowed up in the melee of people who populated the Aegean area.

Their ancestor, Peleg, received his name because of an event which has been variously interpreted. In the Book of Jasher (2:11), which is ascribed to Alcuin and is very likely spurious, there is an interesting observation with respect to this man: "It was Peleg who first invented the hedge and the ditch, the wall and bulwark: and who by lot divided the lands among his brethren." Jamieson, in his Commentary, suggests that the event in view was a formal division of the earth made by Noah, acting under divine impulse, between his three sons. It is proposed that further reference to this event is to be found in Deuteronomy 32:8 and Acts 17:24-26. Peter Lange refers to a work by Fabri entitled, Origin of Heathenism, dated 1859, in which the author interprets the expression as having reference to a catastrophe which violently split up the earth into its present continental masses. This was, of course, long before Wegener, Taylor, and Du Toit published their ideas on the subject of Continental Drift, a subject currently very much alive.

The word Peleg seems somehow to have come down to us also through Greek in the form pelagos, meaning sea. If there is a real connection, this might suggest a further idea, namely, that "division" took place when men began to migrate for the first time by water. The phrase the earth was divided would be interpreted to mean the peoples of the earth were divided, i.e., by water.

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In the view of Anticlides (apud Strab. V, 2, 4) the Etruscans who arrived in Italy under the leadership of Thyrrenos were Pelasgians and they belonged to the same strain that colonized the Aegean isles of Lemnos and Imbros as well as several sites on the Anatolic seaside. This thesis is reported also in some Rhodian documents going back to the third century BC, thus partially supporting the assumption that the Etruscans might have been one of the Peoples of the Sea (the TRSH) mentioned in the Egyptian sources.

As a matter of fact, the Egyptian inscriptions of Ramses III (1197-1165 BC) relate of the so-called "Peoples of the Sea", i.e. a set of peoples who came from land and sea to invade Egypt. Some of these peoples were known under the same name a couple of centuries before, since they were mentioned among the peoples that supplied mercenary troops to the Pharaoh during the rule of Amenophis III and Merneptah (1413-1220 BC). Some of the "Peoples of the Sea" can be easily identified, as in the case of the Achaei, called Jqjwsh.w in the inscriptions, or the Philistines called Prst.w.

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I respect everyone's opinion but the truth is this. In 7000bc there was a civlization known as Vinca en.wikipedia.org...ča_culture. They lived in peace and harmony with the Earth worshiped as a female godess known as Gaya or Gaia. But around 4500bc according to Paul Deveroux tribes from today Russia which had male god as principle, they used iron for weaponery came down to the balkans and slaughtered & raped this peaceful Vinca civilization. After few centuries a huge migration happened. So the pure part of Vinca people who didnt mix with the tribes from todays modern Russia went far to the island of Crete and formed the Minoan civilization. After the apocalypse which in Crete was manifested through volcanic eruption they colonized the near land todays Greece and mixed with all kinds of races which lived near. Because Turkey is near that region they probably mixed with Anatolians and Hittians.

Originally posted by HKoT
Uh I don't see how this is true at all.

There is never a record of a "Migration" of peoples to Greece before the Doric Invasion.

There is however records of "Sea Peoples" (Greeks) by the Egyptians during 2000 BC and these peoples were ... white.

Or as white as your skin can get under the hot Mediterranean sun. So let's call them Caucasians.

I think what is being mistook for black here, is the black and orange vessles often painted by greeks. But this was for a color balance with what dies they could make. Not because they were black.

Achilles was quite white with blonde hair if I am correct. And Agamemnon was white as well as Odysseus.

And even if they didn't really live at the time of 1100 BC the story was written in 700s BC. Which is close enough to depict any actually black peoples.

Furthermore, does Lybia or wherever even have enough trees to support a migration by sea, to greece?

And the Winds there I should think favor Itally, not Greece.

Also this kinda wrecks a few things. Achaeans were OLD....the Athenians and such became "Ionic" Greeks, sooo what is this a theory?

according to Jurgen Spanuth the sea people were in fact Atlanteans

atlantipedia.ie...