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

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

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.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union