Archaeologists have recently unearthed a massive structure in Jerusalem that is referenced in two books of the Bible. The discovery includes the ruins of an ancient moat, constructed over 3,000 years ago in the City of David, one of history's oldest cities.
Wednesday, November 6, 2024
Old Europe and Albanian Civilisation
Old Europe and Albanian Civilisation
(with a Special Note on Dodona by Kathleen Imholz)
Harald Haarmann & Kathleen Imholz
Introduction
Before Marija Gimbutas engaged in archaeological excavation projects starting in the 1960s, the prehistoric cultures of ancient Europe had already been studied for a long time, since the 19th century. But this scholar had vision and gained a grasp on the organic whole of the various regional cultures for which she coined the overarching name “Old Europe”. The cultures of Old Europe have a great many features in common that characterise their fabric as an ancient civilisation. The findings of Marija Gimbutas have been duly recognised and further elaborated, resulting in the identification of Old Europe as the oldest model of an ancient civilisation (Haarmann 2011).
Obviously, the territories where Albanians now live were included geographically in Old Europe (or the Danube Civilisation, as it is now also called), on its western side, but very little attention has been paid to the role of the Albanians, or rather, of their ancestors, in this civilisation. Even as Gimbutas did field work all over the region, giving a solid background to her theoretical ideas about Old Europe, Albania was left aside. She herself wrote, “unfortunately, the isolation of Albania for half a century created a visible gap in archaeological research; the information available is insufficient” (Gimbutas 1991:55).
Since 1991, Albania has opened up completely. Now it is possible for archaeologists and others to scour every inch of a territory that is quite rich in ancient remains from different eras, going back as far as the Palaeolithic and becoming especially intense for the Neolithic and later periods. Even before 1991, although limited by a lack of resources and to a certain extent by communist ideology, some exploration and excavation had been undertaken in Albania itself and in Kosova, then part of Yugoslavia, and in the Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (now the independent country of North Macedonia) (See Ceka 2014; Prendi 2019; Stipčević 1977; Wilkes 1992).
Marija Gimbutas had no chance to do field work in Albania and to highlight the internal cultural-historical connection of that area with the Old European complex. We, the authors of this contribution, follow in the footsteps of Gimbutas and her scholarly work, with the intention of clarifying the origins of the Albanians from a mingling of two cultural mainstreams, that of Old Europe and another whose bearers were Indo-European migrants to the region.
Principles of interdisciplinary research in light of the political zeitgeist
Archaeology is at the centre of the study of the past, with its material finds that give us the perhaps somewhat illusory feeling that we are in the presence of ancient truth when we have in our hands concrete remnants of a prior culture. But there are other tools as well available to those who choose to tackle that study. Comparative linguistics is an important one, especially for ancient cultures whose languages were part of historically attested and still existing linguistic families. In Adam Nicolson’s phrase, words can be “verbal tumuli”. (Nicolson 2014:152).
Ancient history, mythology, literature and oral legends can also be useful (indeed, literature and history, even that of Herodotus, the “father of history”, are often mixed with mythology). To a rapidly increasing degree, genetics is providing important and sometimes unexpected information. In short, while much of older material culture has been lost, destroyed or reused, and even those cultures that had writing systems have left us only fragments at best – with spoken language entirely absent – still, a combination of these tools can give us a base line leading to tentative conclusions or identify areas for further study.
Before describing our project to bring Albania (and the other parts of Southeast Europe where Albanians live) into the discussion of Old Europe using a multi-disciplinary approach based on those elements, it is worth mentioning some of the unique or rare aspects that make Albania an outlier in the Balkans and probably Europe’s least known country.
Another important feature distinguishing the Albanians is the nature of their language and its preservation in the face of myriad challenges. Like all of the languages of Southeast Europe today, it is an Indo-European language, without any doubt, but it is the sole survivor of its branch of that large language grouping. Most of the languages of the Balkans are Slavic; two are of Latin origin (Romanian and Vlach); and finally, there is Greek, also a separate branch of the Indo-European family, but which has been a better known one for millennia, as the carrier of a great culture.
As is known, the Greek alphabet was the first in the world to combine consonants and vowels in a phonetic system. Based in large part on the Phoenician model, it was also influenced by the writing system of Old Europe (See Haarmann 2011:247-251) The alphabet was not the first system used to write Greek; when the “Linear B” symbols were credibly deciphered in the 1950s by Michael Ventris (with the help of others), it turned out that they recorded an early form of Greek, extending our knowledge of some aspects of that language back into the second millennium BCE.
The Greek alphabet, which first appears around 800 BCE although it was standardised much later, spread like wildfire; from the Greek colonies in southern Italy (“Magna Graecia”) to the Etruscans and the Romans farther north in Italy, where it was adapted to become the alphabet we use today in writing English and many other languages. It seems to have been eagerly adopted as well by many of the other cultures of Italy of that time Even the Messapians, who lived along the coast of southeast Italy and are believed to have been an Illyrian tribe that crossed the Adriatic around 1200 BCE, used it for a time before their language was absorbed by Latin.
For this reason, it is all the more odd that the Illyrians on the other side of the Adriatic, in the area made up approximately of today’s Albania and the former Yugoslavia, seem to have shown no interest in adapting the Greek alphabet to their own language. Many ancient alphabetic inscriptions have been found in that territory but all are in Greek or Latin. Albanian as a language is occasionally evidenced in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE but the first published book in the language is a short missal from the mid-sixteenth century.
By the way, we do not cast doubt on Albanian being the descendant of the Illyrian language and the Albanians thus, to an extent, the descendants of the Illyrians. The absence of written evidence has had many consequences, among them the difficulty of proving Illyrian-Albanian continuity. In the highly charged nationalistic-ethnic atmosphere of the region, and not only, this has permitted speculation of many kinds. Without doubt many Illyrians became Greco-fied or Romano-fied, including numerous Roman Emperors such as Constantine the Great, but there is no evidence of a wholesale replacement of the original community that lived in the region and a massive influx of another population from elsewhere. The evidence of toponyms is also persuasive.
Concluding our preview of some of Albania’s most striking peculiarities, we mention the survival of an “unwritten” or “customary law” in many parts of the country, known as the “Kanun”. (See below for a discussion of the etymology of this word). First written down in the late 19th-early 20th century by a Franciscan priest from Kosova, as he recorded it from the people in the northern Dukagjin area of Albania, it was published in 1933 after his death and then in an Italian translation before World War II (and in a bilingual English version in 1989).
The communist regime made strong efforts to suppress this “primitive survival” and replace it with socialist law. Among other things, the Kanun provided strict rules for carrying out blood feuds (gjakmarrje in Albanian), requiring male members of a family to avenge by death the murder of a family member. After communism ended, the Kanun showed renewed vigour. Several other versions of the customary law from different regions of Albania have been collected and published in the last 25 years (the Kanun of Skandërbeg, the Kanun of Dibra, the Kanun of Labëria). When a post-communist Constitution proposed in 1994 was unexpectedly defeated, a triumphant voter from the northern city of Shkodër told an Albanian-American journalist from New York that “we don’t need the Constitution, we have the Kanun!”
Another unique Albanian feature is the burrnesha phenomenon, women who are also called “Albanian virgins” or “sworn virgins”. These are women who have foresworn marriage and are permitted to live like men. (Young 2001). Although the priest who collected the Kanun of Dukagjin a century ago could not bring himself to mention the phenomenon, it appears to have existed for a long time in the north of Albania.
In short, when attention is directed to Albanian culture and civilisation, an attention that can now be materialised in actually visiting and exploring the country of Albania, many unusual features appear. We are far from the only people who have wondered: What accounts for this? What is hidden here?
Roots of different kinds
Our project started with a consideration of the effect that Old Europe had on the development of Classical Greece, extensively detailed by Harald Haarmann in “Roots of Ancient Greek Civilization: The Influence of Old Europe” (Haarmann 2014). A linguistic analysis was made possible because of the vast amount of early Greek writing available and the substantial work that has been done on the etymology of Greek words. (See, e.g., Beekes 2010)
It was concluded that the glorious civilization of Classical Greece had been deeply influenced by the people who lived in that area when the Indo-Europeans arrived several millennia BCE. They were called “Pelasgians” (Πελασγοί) by the arriving IE tribes, a word that merely meant something like “those who were there already”. These were the last representatives of Old Europe in that region. For a long time, it was debated whether the language of the Pelasgians might have been an early variety of Indo-European, but in recent years it has been conclusively determined that it was not (Beekes 2010:xlii, 2014:1). In order to avoid confusion because of the old theory, Beekes preferred not to use the term “Pelasgian” for the language, but the confusion persists with other scholars and authors.
The linguistic review in “Roots of Ancient Greek Civilization” offers persuasive evidence that a large number of words in ancient Greek in diverse fields including trade and the economy, seafaring, social and kinship relations, urbanisation, mythology, rituals and festivals, gastronomy, wine and olive cultivation, metallurgy, pottery, dance, music, law giving, writing technology, and even democracy itself, are not of Indo-European origin. Long distance vocabulary borrowings, while not unknown, are relatively rare; so most of these words must have come from the substratum language, that is, from Pelasgian, and the civilisation that spoke it, although the people and their language were eventually absorbed by the Indo-Europeans who came to that area in the early Bronze Age.
A similar linguistic analysis shows the outsized effect of the Etruscan language on the Indo-European dialect that became Latin. (Haarmann 2019) As with Pelasgian, the origin of Etruscan as a civilization and a language has been much debated, but like Pelasgian, it is now clearly established that the language was not Indo- European. Thucydides and others claimed that the two peoples (that is, Pelasgians and Etruscans) were related and this is likely the case.
The Albanian Mosaic
The third major Indo-European grouping that came to this region of Southeast Europe in the Bronze Age and has survived to the present, at least in terms of the survival of a unique language and customs, was that which is called Illyrian. It immediately springs to mind that these people must have interacted with the Old Europeans in at least some of the ways that the people who became the Greeks and the Romans did. Can we find traces of Old Europe in Albanian culture and civilisation?
Since the Illyrians chose not to write in their own language, the important tool of comparative linguistics is almost completely unavailable to us in this study. But as we noted above, it is a combination of tools, each with its own advantages and limitations, that makes it possible to uncover traces of the distant past. Even if we have very few early Illyrian words whose etymology (proto-Indo-European or otherwise) we can trace, a picture still emerges from the truncated information that we do have.
While Greek and Roman mosaics, literally and figuratively, are better known, the civilisation that became Albanian has its own mosaic, also literally and figuratively. When we seek its echoes of Old Europe, some of the unusual aspects of that civilisation described above may be tentatively explained, and we have a triptych of how three different parts of Southeast Europe and Italy combined the incoming Indo-Europeans with the indigenous Old Europeans, the last heirs of the Danube Civilisation in those regions.
The Archaeological Remains
The material finds of archaeologists are a core tool, and this is also true for our work in progress on Albania, Kosova and adjoining areas now inhabited primarily by Albanian speakers. As we have said, these lands are as rich in archaeological remains as any in the region.
We have already noted that even during Albania’s communist years, its archaeologists managed to do a substantial amount of work despite limited resources. Since the opening of the country in 1991, there have been numerous joint ventures with teams from world universities in Italy, Austria, England, the United States, Greece and elsewhere, but their coverage has been spotty. A great deal remains unexplored, some of which will be mentioned below.
Even before World War II, showing the link of archaeology with classical literature and mythology, the Italian archaeologist Luigi Ugolini headed an expedition that explored Butrint and Phoenice (Finiqi) in southern Albania. It was 1924, and the Mussolini regime then in power in Italy wanted to underline the millennia-long connection of the Romans with that area, memorialised in Virgil’s Aeneid. (The connection was made painfully concrete in 1939 with Italy’s invasion and conquest of Albania, which remained a “captive nation” of the Axis powers throughout World War II).
In the Aeneid, Aeneas, a refugee from the Trojan war on his way to found Rome, stops in Butrint (Buthrotum) where, according to legend, other refugees from Troy had recreated a miniature replica of the city. He visits Andromache, the widow of the Trojan leader Hector, and continues on across the Adriatic Sea. Butrint, in fact, is not as old as the Trojan war; which is tentatively dated to the 13th century BCE or earlier; Butrint’s earliest remains have been dated to the 7th century BCE (Ceka 2002:7).
But there are many other archaeological sites in Albania, Kosova and neighbouring regions that do go back long before the Iron Age (See Bunguri/Prendi 2019). It is quite possible that some of them will give us clues about the civilisation that existed in these lands before the Indo-European influence appears around the beginning of the Bronze Age.
In this connection, the region of Maliq, a small city in southeast Albania, deserves special mention. Works to enlarge the Devoll River drainage canal in the late 1940s uncovered interesting remains of a prehistoric settlement with a palafitte. Fortunately, work on the drainage canal stopped to permit archaeologists to begin to explore the ruins. Over decades, especially under the leadership of Professor Frano Prendi, work proceeded on the multi-layered remains of a settlement that flourished in the Late Neolithic and the Copper Age, into the Iron Age when it was apparently abandoned. On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of Professor Prendi’s birth, his detailed monograph about Maliq, edited and supplemented by his student and co-worker Professor Adem Bunguri, was published in both Albanian and English (Prendi 2018).
Although neither Prendi nor any other Albanian archaeologist has to our knowledge specifically referred to Copper Age (Eneolithic) Maliq as part of “Old Europe”, numerous findings from the pre-Bronze Age layers of Maliq and surroundings show the characteristic features of that culture: fine pottery, religious artefacts, copper tools, even some that were apparently locally produced. At Maliq, an example of the characteristic Old European writing (Danube script) was found. Moreover, objects with signs from the Danube script have been found at other sites in Albania, at Blaz, Dunavec and Kolsh (Merlini 2009: 414, 478, 751-755). There are also sites with script finds in Kosova (Fafos, Karagac, Prishtina, Runik and Vallac).
Around the beginning of the Bronze Age, one sees phenomena in Maliq that suggest the arrival of people of a different culture: cruder pottery, the disappearance of prior religious artefacts, tumulus burials in the “kurgan” style. This, of course, would correspond to one of the major waves of Indo-European expansion into Europe as hypothesised by Marija Gimbutas. The position of the Albanian lands on the extreme west side of the lower Balkan peninsula doubtless meant that the Indo-European influence came later, and perhaps to a slightly weaker degree, than in the central parts of the Danube Civilisation; but the influence is clear.
Although Maliq has been the most thoroughly explored settlement of the time before the Indo-Europeans arrived in the Balkans, it is far from the only one that exists, and the future holds exciting possibilities. Two rock inscriptions recently uncovered in the north central Albanian region of Mirdita show some intriguing similarities to Old European writing. A team from the University of Vienna is working on them, along with local archaeologists, and the eventual publication of their findings will be an important event for those who, like us, seek to understand how people in the Albanian lands interacted with the rest of Old Europe.
It cannot be denied that not only in Albania is there constant tension between the needs of the present and the discovery of the past. As farmers prepare the soil for new crops or builders dig into earth for making the foundations of new buildings and roads, the remnants from past ages that they come upon are often just tossed aside. What survives is often random.
An example of this comes from the small village of Vrap in central Albania, not far from the capital of Tirana, although it relates to an event many centuries after the civilisation of Old Europe had ceased to exist. A farmer sowing his fields there in1901 found by chance a fabulous gold Avar treasure from the 7th century CE buried in a cauldron. He did not throw it away, but fortunately (for the world, if not for him) sold it to his cousin for a modest sum, and the cousin resold it to others outside Albania. Now most of it can be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York Coty. (Garam 2000). There is no historical evidence of what the Avars might have been doing in central Albania of that time.
A Few Words about Words
It seems as if almost every day something new (or old) is discovered from antiquity in the soil of Albanian lands, but archaeology can only take us so far. To find traces of Old Europe, we have to return to the hints – often subject to many and conflicting interpretations – from mythology, history, literature, genetics and even linguistics, despite the limitations of the latter when we study a non-literate culture.
In addition to the absence of old written documents, Albanian territory has been under foreign domination for so many of the past centuries and a very large part of Albanian vocabulary derives from their languages – that is, from Latin, South Slavic and Ottoman Turkish. Indeed, one of Harald Haarmann’s early works, in German, deals entirely with the great number of Latin-derived words in the Albanian vocabulary (Haarmann 1972). This comes from more than six centuries under Roman rule (from 168 BCE), which was followed by several centuries of South Slavic domination starting in the 6th century CE and then, from the 15th century until independence was declared on November 28, 1912, the Ottoman Turks.
Thus, looking at the language today, or that of a few centuries ago which is as far back as we can go with written sources, if each word is a “verbal tumulus”, there is such over-layering in each tumulus that the origin of a particular word is very often impossible to determine. We have tentatively identified a few words in Albanian that appear to go back to a pre-Indo-European source (Imholz 2018), but the following examples illustrate the problems encountered.
Plutarch, in his Life of Pyrrhus, mentions casually that Achilles was called “Aspetos” in the local language of Epirus, immediately bringing to mind the Albanian i shpejti or “the fast one”, an attribute frequently associated with the legendary Achilles. (The evolution of <s + consonant> to a later form <sh + consonant> is a normal sound change in historical Albanian).
Some Albanians have argued that this is evidence that the language of the area was proto-Albanian or Pelasgian with the word aspetos borrowed into proto-Albanian. But there are a number of other possibilities. Albania’s greatest linguist, Eqrem Çabej, laid them out in his Etymological Studies in the Field of Albanian (Vol. VI), calling the etymology of shpejt “debatable” (Alb. “diskutuar”). Miklosic and Jokl posit a derivation from Latin expeditus, he points out, but this is opposed by Gustav Meyer, the great German linguist who was the first to do major work on Albanian etymology. Meyer suggests a relation to Old Slavic spêhъ, meaning “hurry”, without clarifying whether he considers it a borrowing from South Slavic or a derivation from proto-Indo-European (PIE). There are also other PIE possibilities or, as Çabej concludes, it may be “simply Albanian”. (Çabej 2006).
Another example is the word kanun. As noted above, the word is generally used for the unwritten law codes that still exist in various parts of Albania, one of the country’s unusual and archaic features. Since similar sounding words with a similar meaning are common in Greek, Latin, English and other IE languages, and even in the non-Indo-European Arabic qanun (from which it passed into Ottoman Turkish), it is often assumed to be a late borrowing in Albanian. Even according to Çabej, it is merely a Turkish borrowing that came from Greek, as Gustav Meyer postulated in the 19th century (Çabej 2006: Vol. V, 36).
Maybe so. But there are other possibilities. Without old written records, how long the word has been used for the unwritten law cannot be determined. It is the widespread belief among Albanians from northern areas where the kanun has been best preserved that the word precedes the Ottoman conquest of the 15th century, but this is impossible to verify (and oral time estimates into the distant past are notoriously inaccurate). However, we may note two intriguing hints. One is the suggestion by Beekes that the Greek word may be from the substrate language (Beekes 2010:637), with a possible early borrowing by Arabic during the early middle ages when Greek literature was being preserved and translated by the Abbasids or other Arabs.
The second hint comes from a completely different field: that of the weaving of cloth, certainly one of humanity’s earliest technologies. The vocabulary of this craft is little known these days, except by specialists of the field and those few remaining practitioners, usually in remote areas. Hardly any English speakers today know what a heddle or heddle bar is, but it was an early technological innovation that “seems to have been invented sometime in the Neolithic (6000 BC or so?)…It was not obvious and may have been invented only once; but it was what made weaving efficient” (Barber 1994:41).
Essentially, a “heddle” or “heddle bar” is a part of the loom apparatus that creates openings between alternating vertical warp threads, significantly speeding up the weaving process by separating and guiding the warp threads, making a path for the shuttle. In early Greek, a number of words involving weaving technology come from pre-Greek sources – and among them is kanon, or “heddle bar” (Haarmann 2014: 59, citing Barber 1991: 278f).
Occam’s Razor would lead us to the simpler explanation of kanun as a late borrowing in Albanian, especially since there is so little sound change. But the important concept of the heddle bar goes back to the time of Old Europe, and just as the heddle bar guides the threads in a loom, the kanun guides the action of society; and the direction of meaning shift is often from the concrete to the abstract. It is not inconceivable that the word, and the concept, have been retained in Albanian and proto-Albanian for a long time.
The Puzzle of Epirus
The Illyrians appear in written history relatively late compared to various Greek and Italic tribes. We first hear of them from Pseudo-Scylax (4th century BCE) in the Periplus, a kind of geographical description of the Adriatic Sea area. By that time Old European and PIE elements must have been well mixed in the people called Illyrian. In fact, it is sometimes far from clear whether groups belong under the Illyrian umbrella, such as the Liburnians in the upper Adriatic area, who show rather striking Old European features.
In any event, the earliest mentions of the Illyrians usually define their territory as covering the former Yugoslavia, some lands to the north and east and most of Albania, ending where Epirus starts, and this leads us to a key question for all who study the ancient history of this region, still debated today: who were the Epirotes?
The name Epirus is said to come from Greek Ἤπειρος” (Epeiros), meaning simply "mainland"; it is the area that is now southern Albania and northwest Greece as seen from the Ionian Sea and the island of Corfu. In the present day, it is divided between the countries of Albania and Greece, and it has been a bone of contention for over a century, ever since Albania became independent and its southern border was set in the middle of the territory. The dispute has somewhat died down in recent decades and we do not wish or intend to raise it again.
However, any study of the prehistory of the region of the Pelasgians has to pay attention to Epirus and attempt to untangle the stories and histories of the shadowy different cultures that coexisted there. Its three major tribes were the Chaonians, Molossians and Thesprotians, in the north, southwest and southeast of the territory, respectively. In the words of a recent study, “the evidence for the history of Epirus is fragmentary…The ethnic identity of…all Epirotes was an ambiguous matter for people of the ancient world…Thucydides explicitly states that the Chaones, Thesprotians and Molossians were barbarians…However, Thucydides’ criteria in ethnic questions are far from consistent…” (Kittela 2013: 31, 34).
There are three things to be noted here in connection with our story: While we do not know the precise locations and extent of the Old European cultures that remained in this area when the Indo-Europeans came, directly to the east of Epirus are areas with strong Pelasgian associations. Secondly, Epirus was the place where Illyrians coming from the north (doubtless already blended with some Old European elements) came into contact with the evolving culture that would become classical Greek, with its own heavy influence from the Pelasgians.
Third, while Epirus is absent from the Iliad and would apparently did not participate in the Trojan War, its three major tribes have strong legends of descent from the heroes of that war, the Chaonians from the Trojan side (see the discussion of Butrint above), the Molossians and Thesprotians from Achilles and Odysseus. Here mythology and classical literature incorporating it, such as Euripides’ Andromache, give us tantalising hints that call out for at least some thought and discussion. Just as people in remote mountainous terrain all over the world, such as the Basque area of the Pyrenees or even the people of northern Albania and Montenegro, retain old traces longer than those in more travelled areas, it might be suspected that mountainous Epirus held, and holds, some secrets worth exploring.
The image of Epirus as a “borderland” recurs throughout the literature. A recent history of Northern Epirus is called Badlands – Borderlands (Winnifrith 2002). Another recent journal article bears the title “Pelasgic Encounters in the Greek-Albanian Borderland: Border Dynamics and Reversion to the Ancient Past in Southern Albania” (De Rapper, 2009). As both titles suggest, there is a slightly negative connotation of Epirus as a rather wild place where cultures clash.
Exaggerations, speculations and unscientific conclusions have put the whole discussion in a rather bad light. It is time for clear thinking and scientific rigor not only about Epirus but about how the interaction of the indigenous Old Europeans and the Indo-Europeans, themselves latecomers to southeast Europe, created so many important civilisations, including the Albanian one.
A Magnificent Vindication
We conclude this brief discussion of our work-in-process about the Old European influences on Albanian civilisation by repeating that to find those requires deep searching in a multiplicity of disciplines, none of which provides anything like a full picture. However, it is notable that extraordinary strides are being made in the field of genetics, in particular the analysis of ancient DNA, constantly modifying and enriching our views about prehistoric population movements. That they will eventually clarify some of the currently unsettled questions, perhaps even the pre-history of Epirus, seems certain.
The work of Marija Gimbutas argues that the Indo-Europeans came in several waves to Europe from the steppes north of the Black Sea and that they encountered a different kind of civilisation, the “civilisation of the Goddess”, with which they blended over time. While her arguments were backed by substantial field work, they have been disputed in various quarters.
Sir Colin Renfrew, the esteemed British archaeologist, has been a leading opponent, arguing for the spread of the Indo-Europeans and their languages into Europe from Anatolia along with farming. He is well-known in Albania and well-respected there and worldwide, so his ideas about the Anatolian origin of the Indo-Europeans (which of course goes beyond Albanian territories) have garnered strong support.
In recent years, the DNA studies have given compelling evidence against the “out-of Anatolia” hypothesis. Sir Renfrew himself acknowledged this, in an important speech given in November 2017 at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, at the first Marija Gimbutas Memorial Lecture, where he called her steppe hypothesis “magnificently vindicated”. The speech can be found on many sites, including the website of the Institute of Archaeomythology (www.archaeomythology.org)
Sir Renfrew does express the modest hope in this speech that further genetic research might modify the current findings slightly, to permit some kind of Anatolian connection for the Indo-Europeans. And perhaps it will, or perhaps it will produce even stronger evidence for their pure steppe origin. One thing, however, is certain: further genetic research will continue to enrich our knowledge and understanding of the past, including the past of the Albanian people, about which history is so silent.
Genetic data are now available to document the changes in the population structure, in particular the consequences of the third out-migration (Kurgan III) that can be identified by genetic data for the period around 2500 BCE. The magnitude of those changes that occurred is confirmed in the category of “massive migration” from the steppe by geneticists (e.g. Haak et al. 2015, Lazaridis et al. 2017, Mathieson et al. 2018).
To sum it all up, our work on the influence of Old Europe on Albanian culture and civilisation will have to integrate information from many different relevant fields. Only thus may it become possible to sketch, on a more solid footing, the organic whole that has created the multi-faceted, and mostly hidden, mosaic that is Albanian culture today. Even so, it will often be impossible to draw conclusions, much will remain debatable and much will remain unknown. But on the other hand, new information will be coming to light in all these fields, especially from genetics, and future scholars will doubtless fill in more pieces of the mosaic. This makes the challenge of integrating all the data, while not a small one, worth undertaking. Our results will speak for themselves.
A Special Note on Dodona (by Kathleen Imholz)
A statement from Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is occasionally cited with reference to Albania, namely that it is “a country in sight of Italy…less known than the wilds of America” (see e.g. Gilkes 2004). The statement does indeed occur in the Decline and Fall, somewhat hidden as footnote 25 of chapter 43 in volume IV of this work, which was originally published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788.
Of course, there was no “Albania” at that time; the whole territory was still part of the Ottoman Empire. Gibbon’s footnote actually refers to the fact that history records that in the time of Justinian, the Goths under Totila landed at Corfu and went as far as Dodona, but the location of the latter was not known at that time, that is, the late eighteenth century. Read carefully, the footnote actually refers to an area that is in Epirus, that is, now at least partly in northwest Greece, but the point is still valid: the area was little known, and in particular, ancient Dodona with its oracle, famed in classical literature, had literally been wiped off the map.
Belief in oracles has been widespread in human history; the desire to know the future, and to obtain supernatural advice about how to act in the face of what is to come, is deeply rooted in human nature. In Greek antiquity, the two best-known oracles were those at Delphi and Dodona, although there were many, many others and there is considerable literature about them. (See, e.g., Eidinow 2013). Delphi, the most famous oracle of Apollo, is in central Greece, not far from the gulf of Corinth and nestled near Mount Parnassus. It appears to have been founded as such around the seventh century BCE, but its mythical foundations go back to the Earth Goddess Gaia (Scott 2014:64 ff.; Haarmann 2014:147 ff.).
Herodotus affirms that “Dodona was “the most ancient place of divination in Hellas” (Htd. 2.252). It gets mentions both in the Iliad and in the Odyssey. Unlike Delphi, knowledge of its geographical location had disappeared long before Gibbon wrote. Almost all references to Dodona in classical literature suggest a location in Epirus, in an area that was first under Thesprotian rule and then Molossian. There is some evidence, in particular in the Iliad, which we will discuss below, pointing to an earlier location in Thessaly.
A century after Gibbon, specifically, in 1875, ruins were discovered near Ioannina that are almost universally considered to be the location of Epirote Dodona. There are many thousands of articles and books on the subject; Parke (1967) and Piccinini (2017) may be mentioned as particularly thorough.
When I began to study the archaeology and pre-history of the region, I had no reason to doubt the attribution of the site of Dodona as above. Albanian archaeologists concur, so far as I know. I write this “note” in my individual capacity, because it is based on my personal observation and exploration – I have lived in Albania for over 20 years – and we almost surely will not address it in our work on the Albanian mosaic. Too little is known. But I think it is worth setting out a few things that involve “Chaonia”, the northernmost region of ancient Epirus, which is in southern Albania today, a neglected part of it but one with great natural beauty and with largely unexplored but suggestive archaeological remains.
It did not take me long to learn that many Albanians contested the location of Dodona, thinking it more appropriate for the oracle Homer called “harsh wintered” to be in those mountains of south-central Albania rather than the relatively flatter and milder lands near Ioannina. Added to this is the fact that the ruins do not have a “smoking gun” identifying them as the location of the oracle of Dodona and are not on any old maps as such.
However, in addition to the absence of any other appropriate ruins found in Epirus, the many lead sheets or tablets found in the site near Ioannina containing what appear to be questions for an oracle of the gods are compelling evidence. It bears mention that when identified in the tablets, however, the gods prayed to are “Zeus Naios and Dione”, and the word Dodona or its derivatives do not appear.
Labova
As I said, this evidence and the near-universal belief of archaeologists and others that the site near Ioannina was the location of the ancient oracle convinced me too. But then a chance visit to some villages in the mountains near Gjirokastër led me on a journey that made me think twice.
Gjirokastër, often called the “city of stone”, is a picturesque small city in southern Albania, steeply rising from a modest plain. Looking across the plain from the city, one sees two adjoining mountains: “Lunxhëria” and “Bureto”, with the Suha river running between them and one of Albania’s highest mountain peaks, in the Nëmërçka range, visible in the distance.
Labova e Kryqit (“Labova of the Cross”) nestles in the lower part of Bureto mountain and attracts many tourists because of its ancient Church of St. Mary in the centre of the village. For many centuries, a large gold cross allegedly from the time of Justinian, said to have been given by him to one of his advisers who was from the village, was kept in the church. During the years when religion was “illegal” in Albania, the villagers hid it in their houses, moving it frequently. It gave the town its name. Unfortunately, the cross disappeared in the time of the transition from communism.
A friend whose family came from the village invited me to see the church when we were in Gjirokastër one day, and as we explored it, the village historian, a retired schoolteacher, showed up to tell me some of the legends of the village. Most striking to me, even more than the church, was a fortress, or a ruin of a fortress, overhanging the village. I had just translated a comprehensive book about the archaeology of Albania, but this had not even been mentioned in it.
Fascinated by this village, I returned many times, and began the arduous process of unwinding the many local legends from what pieces of fact I could find. It turned out that a local (from Gjirokastër) archaeologist, Vladimir Qiriaqi, was virtually the only one who had done a professional exploration of the fortress and its surroundings, although only for a short time in the late 1980s. He found a coin there from the reign of Pyrrhus the Great (297-272 BCE), giving us a terminus ante quem for its construction. The village historian claims it is “Pelasgian”, going back to the second millennium BCE, but this remains in the realm of legend.
I have not explored the interior of the fortress myself – it is quite precariously situated – but it has been reported that it contains two chapels. One is named after “Dione”, the pagan goddess who was the consort of Zeus at Dodona as noted above, and the other bears the name of the sun, that is, “e diellit” – both unusual names for religious buildings of Christian times, if they can be dated to Christian times; but equally interesting if they precede Christianity. This whole subject needs exploration too.
Labova is more than the Church of St. Mary and the mysterious fortress. There is an upper village, known as Labova e Sipërme (“Upper Labova”), like an eyebrow to the lower lid of Labova e Kryqit, and the “eyeball” in the middle, while overgrown now, is full of ruins. Upper Labova has a church of St. Demetrios possibly as old as the church of St. Mary in the lower village. There are ruins of dozens of other churches and mini-churches and several monasteries in a dense area. Vlad Qiriaqi told me, and local residents have confirmed, that the plateau in back of the fortress, parallel to the upper village, also contains many ruins, which they call ‘arqifole’, the ‘old cradle’. Mr. Qiriaqi, with his professional eye, saw them as proto-urban Illyrian; but I am not qualified to confirm that. Yet it is clear that Labova was once a very large city. Not only that, but all along the back of Bureto mountain, ruins of ancient walls can be seen, which so far as I know, no professional has ever looked at. Why is there so little information about all of this in the ancient sources that we do have?
So I began to look into ancient maps. Labova, of course, was not its ancient name. A brief digression is in order here: In the 3rd century BCE, Pyrrhus the Great, whom we mentioned above, had a regional kingdom in Epirus as well as the temerity to cross the Adriatic and march on Rome. He won a Pyrrhic victory or two in southern Italy, without taking Rome.
When Consul Aemilius Paullus defeated the Macedonians in Pydna (now Greece) in 168 BCE, on the way back to Rome he gave his troops leave to sack and burn Epirus, either in revenge for Pyrrhus or because the Epirotes had been sympathetic to the Macedonians, or both. A century and a half later, when Strabo wrote his Geography, he noted that Epirus had once been densely populated, but was now a wilderness with only a few villages (Strabo, Book VII, 7:9). And some centuries after that, Slavs moved into the area, leaving many toponyms; not only Labova, the river Suha but even the mountain Bureto (which means, and looks like, a “wine keg”).
Hekatompedon
My first clue was a map in the extremely thorough book about Epirus by the scholar Nicholas Hammond, showing Roman roads in Epirus (Hammond 1967:700, Map 18). In the region I was interested in, the northernmost city shown is Antigoneia, a city reportedly founded by Pyrrhus in honour of his first wife. It had been destroyed by the troops of Aemilius Paulus and its exact location was not known for a long time; ruins verified to be those of Antogoneia have been identified in recent years (Ceka 2014:151).
The most surprising thing about this map was that approximately where Upper and Lower Labova are today, two unusual names are found: “Hecatompedum” and “Omphalium” is how Hammond spells them, with Latin endings although as will be explained below, they come from the Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, where they are written in Greek. I will use Greek endings in most cases below.
It is odd to call a city or town “Hekatompedon”, since a little research reveals that it is a rather rare Greek word for “temple”, which was used in particular for the temple on the Acropolis in Athens that was destroyed by the Persians in the 5th century BCE and where the Parthenon later rose. Literally, it is Greek for “hundred-footer”, that is, a description of the size of the building. It is tempting to think that it might have been a bilingual pun involving the goddess “Hekate”, worshipped by the Old Europeans, but there is no known evidence for this. I do note that Athens had close connections to the Pelasgians (Haarmann 2014: 83 ff.) – and that one of the two inscriptions found on the Aegean island of Lemnos in the Greek alphabet, but not the Greek language, was apparently a temple dedication to Hecate. (The language may be a variety of Etruscan and is certainly related to it, but the inscriptions are too short for a credible translation).
Hammond identifies “Hecatompedon” with a small village in the foothills of Lunxhëria mountain, Saraqinisht (Hammond 1967:659), which is very near the actual location of Antigoneia. However, he says nothing more about it, including nothing about the strange use of a rather arcane word for “temple” as a town name. Omphalion is an unusual name, too, as I will discuss below. A little more research revealed that Hammond had obtained most of the information in his map from the Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, so I thought to go to the original, or what was left of it, and see what it said.
Claudius Ptolemy, who lived in Alexandria in the second century AD, was a many-sided man of science, and among his best-known works is the Geography, which includes his system of geographical coordinates (his own calculations of latitude and longitude). No original survives, but there are about 40 copies or partial copies of his work in the original Greek and in Latin translation (even one in Arabic), none earlier than the 11th century.
I was happy to find that the first English translation of the Geography, by the geographer Edward Luther Stevenson in 1932, had recently been reprinted and I was able to obtain it, although I had to go to the US to do so. I eagerly turned to the relevant list of cities. (The Geography was actually an “atlas”, but none of the original maps have survived, although they have been recreated over the centuries, as by Hammond, using the lists of names and such changes as the mapmaker chose).
To my great surprise, I found the following in Book Three, Chapter XIII, where Ptolemy lists the towns in Chaonia as follows:
Antigonia
Phoenice
Hecatompedon Dodonaeorum
Omphalium
Elaeus
I omit his longitude/latitude “coordinates”, which while impressive for the time are not exactly correct. I note, however, that they give relative locations that are quite close to the actual ones. For example, the coordinates for Antigoneia (Stevenson spells it slightly differently) show it to be very close to Hecatompedon Dodonaeorum and Omphalium, whereas Hammond has moved it north on his map, to the location where it was thought to be at the time he wrote (1967).
Phoenice is slightly out of place in this list; it is a well-known ruin closer to the coast, which as noted above was studied on site by the Italian Ugolini in 1924. Ptolemy’s coordinates reflect that it is not in a straight line with the other Chaonian towns/cities. Hammond identifies Elaeus with the site of Melani, a very small village in a straight line south from Antigoneia and Labova, that is, in line with Ptolemy’s list. Melani contains ruins of ancient walls which Neritan Ceka has identified as Illyrian (personal communication).
Of course, the most astonishing part of Ptolemy’s list was the word “Dodonaeorum”, the Latin genitive plural of the adjective “Dodonaeus”, after “Hecatompedon, thus presumably meaning something like “the temple of the people of Dodona”. This obviously fits well with what is otherwise a strange free-standing word. It turns out that Stevenson did his translation from Karl Müller’s 1883 Latin translation of what is a very difficult Greek text, which is also shown by Stevenson’s use of Latin endings on most of the words.
I did as much additional research as I reasonably could from my base in Albania. I was able to get into contact with two of the leading professors of the history of ancient science, Alexander Jones at New York University and Gerd Grasshoff at Humboldt University in Berlin. Both have published translations of the Geography; in the case of Professor Jones it is a partial one, without the lists of cities, but the Grasshoff version with Alfred Stückelberger (bilingual German/Greek) is complete and, in the words of Professor Jones himself, “the most reliable edition” (personal communication).
Professor Jones was kind enough to check that edition for me, and he reported that the word “Dodoneon” (the Greek for “Dodoneaorum”) “is found only in one manuscript (an important one, though: Vat. gr. 191)”. He pointed out that in that document from the Vatican, the word is “not appended to Hekatompedon but precedes Omphalion”. He speculates that since the names of peoples appear in Ptolemy’s lists preceding the cities within their territory, “Hekatompedon” might be a city in the region of the Chaonians and Omphalion in the region of the Dodonians” (personal communication).
This seems unlikely to me. It ignores the fact that a “Hekatompedon” is an individual construction. The name “Omphalion” is mysterious too. There is evidence of a Greek tribe in the area known as the Omphales; Hammond considers the town to be the centre of that tribe, and he identifies Omphalion with Labova (Hammond 1967:529, 680). On the other hand, I know of no evidence of a tribe called “Dodonian”; the word seems always to be used only for the priests/priestesses of Dodona or those in the immediate vicinity of the oracle. It is also to be recalled that the Greek words ομφαλός and ομφαλιόν with the meaning of “navel of the earth” are associated with the oracle of Delphi. If, as Professor Jones told me, “[f]or some reason Karl Muller…adopted this word but moved it to the position immediately following the name of Hekatompedon” (personal communication), Muller might have been thinking of the oracle and the Hekatompedon as its temple. But was Ptolemy?
I also note that Professor Grasshoff told me that the word “hekatompedon” is not limited to temples but can also be used for other architectural constructions, such as a platform (personal communication). This is natural enough considering the literal meaning of the word as “hundred-footer”. Whatever the hekatompedon was, and whether the word “Dodoneon” was attached to it or to Omphalion in Ptolemy’s list, these two sites in Chaonia are closely and intriguingly linked. (By Ptolemy’s coordinates, their longitudes are the same and their latitudes almost the same; Omphalion is just slightly south of Hekatompedon).
Professor Jones also said that “[r]ather to my surprise, Dodona itself does not appear in the Geography” (personal communication). I am glad to have his confirmation, but that is one thing that does not surprise me. Dodona does not appear in the Peutinger Table of Roman roads either or on any of the other ancient maps. The fact that the word “Dodoneon” has been excised from all extant copies of Ptolemy’s Geography except one in which it slipped by speaks for itself. Hammond, who knew Greek well, probably relied on a Greek text, which is why his map does not include the word.
There seems to have been a deliberate and concentrated effort to wipe out the memory of the oldest oracle of the goddess. That is why its location so mystified Edward Gibbon and many others.
It may also be mentioned that the Roman poet Lucan refers to a Chaonian Dodona in his epic poem about the civil war between Caesar and Pompey and the battle of Pharsalia, in which Caesar conclusively defeated Pompey. The epic, written around 60 CE, almost a century after the civil war, does not use the word “Dodona” but says, when Lucan lists various groups that went to fight for Pompey, “Quercus que silentis Chaonio veteres liquerunt vertice Selloe” (“And the ancient Sellae forsake the silent oaks on the Chaonian heights”, in the 1853 translation of H. T. Riley).
Wherever it may have been, Dodona and its famous oak, and the Selli/Sellae who read the oracles from the rustling leaves, were indeed silent by then, as much of it had been destroyed by the Aetolians in 219 BCE. Probably not that much can be drawn from Lucan’s reference, however, for by the time he wrote, the Romans tended to use the term Chaonia for all of Epirus (Kittela 2013:46). On the other hand, Lucan does distinguish the Thesprotians, to whom he refers in the previous line of his poem as also rushing off to help Pompey. One more mystery! Coincidentally, the battle of Pharsalia that ended the war between Caesar and Pompey took place in Thessaly, to which we now turn.
Thessaly
As I hope I have made clear above, I am not trying to deny the accepted location of ancient Dodona farther south in Epirus, near Ioannina, in what was ancient Molossia (earlier under Thesprotian rule). A location farther north in Epirus, in Chaonia, can hardly be asserted based on a single word in a single manuscript, copied from an ancient geography. or a poet’s casual placement of the oracle in that region. But it remains a nagging possibility that something was happening there in antiquity.
Dodona, the oldest oracle in Greek antiquity, doubtless going back to Old Europe, continues to shimmer in layers of mystery and conjecture. It is part of the larger mystery of Epirus itself, which we have highlighted above as a key to unveiling the Albanian mosaic. I conclude this note with a brief discussion of another layer of that mystery, namely, the treatment of Dodona in the works of Homer.
Here I can barely scratch the surface, and I write with utmost humility, because the centuries of scholarship and the thousands of scholars who have devoted their attention to Homer have produced a body of work so immense and specialised that it would take a lifetime of work to explore the question of Dodona in Homer fully. Quite a few have done so, often disagreeing or contradicting one another. But I at least can make some simple observations about the mentions of Dodona in the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Dodona is mentioned twice in the Iliad. The better-known mention is in the prayer of Achilles before sending his friend Patroclus off to fight the Trojans wearing the former’s armour, as Achilles is still refusing to fight (Iliad, Book XVI:233-235):
Ζεῦ ἄνα Δωδωναῖε Πελασγικὲ τηλόθι ναίων
Δωδώνης μεδέων δυσχειμέρου, ἀμφὶ δὲ Σελλοὶ
σοὶ ναίουσ' ὑποφῆται ἀνιπτόποδες χαμαιεῦναι, …
(“O Lord Zeus, Dodonian, Pelasgian, you who live far away, you who rule over Dodona with its harsh winters, where the Selloi dwell around you and lie on the ground with their unwashed feet …“).
The other mention is more interesting, since it gives a hint about the location of Dodona, although not in so many words. It is in the Catalogue of Ships, where Homer spends many hundreds of lines listing all those who went to fight on the Greek side in Troy, saying (Iliad, Book II:748-752):
Γουνεὺς δ' ἐκ Κύφου ἦγε δύω καὶ εἴκοσι νῆας:
τῷ δ' Ἐνιῆνες ἕποντο μενεπτόλεμοί τε Περαιβοὶ
οἳ περὶ Δωδώνην δυσχείμερον οἰκί' ἔθεντο,
οἵ τ' ἀμφ' ἱμερτὸν Τιταρησσὸν ἔργα νέμοντο
ὅς ῥ' ἐς Πηνειὸν προί̈ει καλλίρροον ὕδωρ, …
(“And Gouneus from Cyphos brought two and twenty ships; and there followed the Enienes and the dauntless Perrhaebians, who had made their homes around Dodona with its harsh winters and cultivated their plough lands around the lovely Titaresius …”).
So far as I can tell, Cyphos is not otherwise known; but the Enienes and the Perrhaebians are known, and they are Thessalian tribes, not Epirote ones. Furthermore, Achilles is identified in the Iliad as coming from Thessaly although many Albanians believe he was from Epirus and as noted above, Plutarch referred to a “local language” of Epirus in which Achilles was called “Aspetos”. There are a few other ancient references suggesting that the first oracle of Dodona was in Thessaly, and it is almost amusing to see how the commentators, both ancient and modern, try to rationalise these references with the “certain” location of Dodona in Epirus. Referring to a historian who said that “the temple [of Dodona] was transferred from Thessaly, from the part of Pelasgia which is around Scotussa”. Strabo even accuses him of a “desire to gratify the Thessalians with mythical stories” (Book VII, 7.12).
Dodona is also mentioned twice in the Odyssey, but here the context is different. The two mentions, which are almost identical, come from the mouth of Odysseus, back in Ithaca but in disguise, not yet wishing to reveal himself. First, he assures his loyal servant, the swineherd Eumaeus, that Odysseus is not dead; (Odyssey XIV 327-330):
τὸν δ' ἐς Δωδώνην φάτο βήμεναι, ὄφρα θεοῖο
ἐκ δρυὸς ὑψικόμοιο Διὸς βουλὴν ἐπακούσαι,
ὅππως νοστήσει' Ἰθάκης ἐς πίονα δῆμον
ἤδη δὴν ἀπεών, ἢ ἀμφαδὸν ἦε κρυφηδόν.
(“But Odysseus, he said, had gone to Dodona, that he might learn the will of Zeus from the sacred high-created oak, as to how he might approach his rich home of Ithaca”).
Five books later, still in disguise, he tells his wife and queen Penelope the same lie in the same words, except that he substitutes “beloved fatherland” for “rich home” (Odyssey XIX 296-299).
In both cases, the disguised Odysseus explains that he has obtained this information from King Pheidon of the Thesprotians, whose court the other Odysseus had supposedly passed through on his way to Dodona. This implies that Dodona was nearby; but it is never so stated. It is interesting that the oldest material remains at the Dodona site near Ioannina (ancient Thesprotia/Molossia) go back to around the time the Odyssey is believed to have been written down, and of course, the poem would have been circulating orally before that.
In summary, when we look for the location of the oracle of Dodona, neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey gives us a satisfactory answer. Nor do the other references in classical literature, and the ancient maps are silent. But it is good to add Thessaly to our area of consideration. It is ironic that Thessaly, where farming apparently came to Europe at an early date (see, e.g., Bintliff 2012:50), became a backwater in the constellation of the Greek poleis, perhaps almost as much as Epirus, even if it did participate in the Trojan war. I do note that Thessaly is divided from Epirus by the Pindus Mountains, which though formidable to some, were freely wandered over by the early pastoralists of Epirus and Thessaly.
Where, and how, might a Chaonian location of the oracle fit into all this?
In lieu of a conclusion
I like to think that if Marija Gimbutas had been able to do field work in Albania, she would have been drawn to the area around Bureto mountain that I have described above and she would have devoted archaeological attention there. Exploration and excavation would likely reveal much and might even help us better understand the broader Danube Civilization.
Oscar Wilde famously quipped “Where there is no Illyria, there is no illusion” (Wilde 1886), although he was referring to Shakespeare’s imaginary Illyria and not to the area inhabited by the mix of Pelasgians and Indo-Europeans who reached Greek and Roman recorded history as the Illyrians. I would add that “Where there is Chaonia, there is chaos” – but I express the hope that future archaeologists, historians and pre-historians, linguists, geneticists and scholars of all kinds – a chaotic group indeed – will make some sense of ancient Chaonia, whether or not an oracle of the Great Goddess, and later of Zeus, in reality once existed there.
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