Lesbos and Anatolia: Linguistic, Archaeological, and Documentary Evidence for Greek-Anatolian Contact in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages

It has long been clear that the Linear B tablets will not provide us with any evidence for international relations of the Mycenaean kingdoms with other great powers of the period since the tablets preserve records of only the lowest levels of administration of the local centres in which they are found, diplomatic records having evidently been kept on perishable materials which have not survived.

This paper brings to bear the linguistic evidence—focusing primarily on toponyms and personal names—for a hybridized Greco-Anatolian culture on Lesbos and its Anatolian hinterland. It is argued that several toponymic suffixes, such as –ηνη and –υμνα, seen in e.g. Mytilene and Methymna, have solid Luwo-Hittite etymologies, and attest to the prominent presence of Anatolian population groups on Lesbos in the pre-Archaic period (see Dale forthcoming 2013).

This paper presents evidence bearing on the question of how far back reach the contacts between the Greeks and the Lydian-speaking population of western Anatolia, concentrating first of all upon the problem of the earliest history of the Maeonians/Lydians, their original homeland and the date of their arrival into Lydia.

Religion plays a major role in diplomacy in Bronze Age cultures, as we see from treaties between different states, where lists of gods on either side are called on as witnesses. In order for the treaty to have validity, it is essential that the ideas of the deities are understood by both sides, i.e. are "translatable" (see Smith 2008). No such treaty survives for relations between the Hittites and Ahhiyawa or between any Western Anatolian state and Ahhiyawa, although they probably existed.