Balkan Peoples of Anatolia: Migration, Assimilation and Cultural Contact in Anatolia around 1400 BC-300 BC.

Project Information

Balkan Peoples

Grant agreement ID: 101033019

DOI

10.3030/101033019

Project closed

EC signature date 22 April 2021

Start date 1 September 2021

End date 31 August 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 196 707,84

EU contribution

€ 196 707,84

Coordinated by

CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE CNRS
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Balkan Peoples (Balkan Peoples of Anatolia: Migration, Assimilation and Cultural Contact in Anatolia around 1400 BC-300 BC.)

Reporting period: 2021-09-01 to 2023-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The general aim of the project is to shed light on the ethnolinguistic history of ancient Anatolia (modern Türkiye) in the period spanning Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (ca. 1400-300 BC). It is commonly assumed that in the second millennium BC Anatolia was inhabited mainly by Indo-European peoples which spoke languages of the so-called Anatolian branch, as Hittite or Luwian. Their history is documented by cuneiform archives coming from the Hittite capital Hattusa and other urban centres of Central Anatolia, as well as by a small number of inscriptions written in Hieroglyphic Luwian. Due to uneven geographical distribution of the written evidence, and to mainly religious or political focus of Hittite texts, the identity of the peoples inhabiting the peripheral regions of Anatolia – the West or the North – remains not quite clear. The Hittite Empire collapsed around 1180 BC, and in the following period Anatolia, as many other regions of Eastern Mediterranean, saw major changes in the ethnic composition caused by migrations of new peoples. The principal migratory wave to Anatolia went from the Balkans and is commonly associated with the name of the Phrygians. Different indications, ranging from literary sources to archaeological and epigraphical evidence, suggest that the Phrygians settled in the vast regions of western and central Anatolia – from Hellespont in the North-West to Cappadocia in the East and the Milyas in the South – in part assimilating the older Anatolian population, in part pushing it into the southern and south-eastern mountainous regions. It is clear that the 'Phrygian migration' to Anatolia was a major phenomenon, comparable for instance with the migrations of the Germanic peoples at the end of Antiquity, which has completely redrawn the ethnolinguistic map of Anatolia. Unfortunately, due to highly fragmentary nature of written evidence covering the crucial period between ca. 1200 and 800 BC, often called the ‘Dark Age’, reconstruction of details of this process is a tricky task.
The goals of the project were thus to collect all the scattered evidence bearing on the phenomenon of the Balkan migration to Anatolia, to understand its geographical and chronological scope, and to explore its effects in different regions of Anatolia, with the special attention directed to the problem of linguistic and cultural contact. The four particular focal points of the project were: 1) the Phrygian migration proper; 2) the problem of the ethnolinguistic identity of the Lydians; 3) the question of presence of Balkan peoples in Anatolia already in the 2nd millennium BC; 4) the Thracian migration to the north-western parts of Anatolia (Mysia and Bithynia). The principal sources were the corpus of Phrygian and Lydian inscriptions for the first two thematic parts, Hittite cuneiform and Hieroglyphic Luwian texts connected with Western Anatolia for the third, and diverse epigraphic and literary sources for the fourth. An important role in the investigation played onomastic material scattered in Greek inscriptions from Anatolia.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The principal focus of the project was analysis of two epigraphic corpora, the Phrygian and the Lydian one. For the eastern part of the Phrygian zone, also Luwian inscriptions of Cappadocia played an important part. Given the historical and sociolinguistic approach of the project, the main attention was directed to exploring historical and cultural context of a given text, and to revealing elements bearing on the question of cultural and linguistic contact. In addition to philological and historical analysis of published texts, an important aspect of the work was epigraphical study of inscriptions ‘in the field’, that is in museums and excavation depots. As a member of Sardis Excavation project, during summer campaigns 2022 and 2023 I systematically collated Lydian inscriptions preserved in the Sardis depot, and in the museums of Izmir, Ödemiş and Hierapolis. During one of the visits of the Izmir museum, I discovered a new Lydian inscription whose analysis has become the basis of a monograph dedicated to the Lydian language and culture during the Achaemenid period (in preparation). On the other hand, in collaboration with the Gordion project, I worked on the Phrygian graffiti found during excavations at Gordion. By a happy coincidence, in 2022 there has been discovered at Gordion a highly significant new Phrygian stone inscription with whose publication I have been charged.
Realisation of the project has lead to a more nuanced understanding of many aspects of culture of the Phrygians and the Lydians, as well as to a more precise ethnolinguistics map of the 1st millennium Anatolia. Especially interesting results were obtained concerning the population and language Mysia whose exact ethnolinguistics identity remained hitherto quite uncertain. The discovery of the new inscription at Gordion combined with other epigraphic evidence, has allowed the ‘Mysian language’ to be defined as a dialect of Phrygian featuring some Lydian influence. Moreover, the analysis of toponymy of Lydia and the neighbouring regions revealed a significant Mysian presence in Lydia possibly as early as 700-600 BC. This brought one more piece of evidence for the mixed character of Lydian population. Inter alia, this has important consequences for the question of definition of the nature of the Lydian language. Although it might originally have been an Anatolian language, as it is usually perceived, Lydian has a number of unique and highly peculiar linguistic features strikingly different from those found in Luwian or Hittite. The mixed character of the Lydian population, which possibly goes as far back as the 2nd millennium BC, allows one to explain this unusual character of the Lydian language as a result of intensive influence of a non-Anatolian language. A different aspect of the work concerned the toponymy of Mysia and the problem of the relationship between the Thracians and the Mysians. Although the material is scarce, it seems that the Thracians migrated to north-western Anatolia already in the first half of the 1st millennium BC, intermixing with the Phygian-Mysian population of the region. Another important direction was early Phrygian culture. in this domain, I elaborated the question of formation of the Phrygian alphabet, and continued to explore the problem of Phrygian-Luwian contact.
The results of the project were disseminated in numerous international conferences and workshops, both in France and in other countries (Italy, Switzerland, Spain), as well as in a row of seminars given for general audience.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Realization of the goals of the project has important implications for the historical and cultural paradigm associated with this period in Eastern Mediterranean, hitherto largely caught between two poles, the ‘Greeks’ and the ‘Anatolians’ (who are thought to make part of the Near Eastern circle of cultures). The present study virtually introduces a third major ethnocultural element which arguably played an important mediatory role in the cultural transmission between the Ancient Near East and the Aegean. Moreover, as the Balkan migration concerns as much the history of Europe as that of Asia Minor, the project contributes to more general understanding of the ancient migratory phenomena between these two continents and the centuries-long interaction between the Europe and the Ancient Near East.