Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition by Margalit Finkelberg

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition. By MARGALIT FINKELBERG. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xv + 203. Cloth, $85.00. ISBN 0-521 85216-1. In this fascinating book, Margalit Finkelberg (F.) sets out to re construct the prehistory of archaic Greece, primarily through the interpretation ofmythological traditions, the consideration of dialect geography and the use of comparative evidence drawn from the cul ture of the Bronze Age Anatolian Hittites. To begin with mythological narrative, F. reminds her reader that there are in principle two ways to interpret its statements about the past: inhowever distorted form, thesemay be "telling us something" about the time and place they claim to describe, or theymay rather be more relevant for a reconstruction of the events and social conditions of the period inwhich theywere composed or crystallized (p. 10). For example, early modern students of theHomeric poems tended to accept the tales at face value and even as accurately conveying par ticular information about very ancient times; one thinks, of course, of Heinrich Schliemann. More recently, particularly under the influence of thework ofM.I. Finley, themajority of scholars have denied the relevance of the epics forwriting the history of the Late Bronze Age inGreece and theAegean, holding that they at best reflect conditions earlier in the first millennium BCE. F., reluctant to abandon entirely one of the few potential sources of knowledge about Greek prehistory, proposes "a more nuanced approach to the issue of the historicity of Greek tradition" (p. 4). Although cross-cultural study of oral tradition reveals that in each generation the custodians of tradition shape their inherited body of purported information about the past to fitcontemporary needs, the tradition is hardly created anew in every age. F/s chosen method is to seek the "residue of past meaning" (p. 11) maintained across time. This core, she insists, consists not of facts so much as of "patterns of behaviour which men and women of the past ... were expected to follow under certain circumstances" (p. 14). The "pattern of behaviour" embedded in Greek mythological tradition thatmost captures F/s attention is that by which kingship in early times is said to have passed inmany instances not to the ruler's son but to the husband of his daughter. In Chapter 4 F. dis cusses numerous reported instances of this mode of succession in Greece and compares it towhat she understands to have been the practice of royal inheritance in theHittite kingdom of the Late Bronze 176 BOOK REVIEWS Age. She then proceeds inChapter 5 topresent a theoretical interpre tation in anthropological terms of the intergenerational functioning of this system. But why isAnatolian evidence relevant to the situation in early Greece? In Chapter 3, F. has already demonstrated that the pre Hellenic substratum in theAegean, on theGreek mainland, and pos sibly even on Crete was likely made up of speakers of a language or languages belonging, like Hittite, to the Anatolian sub-family of Indo-European. That is, the Pelasgians whom the Greek newcomers displaced and /or subsumed plausibly shared beliefs and customs familiar to us from earlier Hittite civilization. For me as a Hittitolo gist, themajor difficulty in accepting F/s argument is that her under standing of themechanisms of the transmission of Hittite kingship, although similar to thatheld by some specialists in ancient Anatolian studies, appears flawed. As I have set out at length elsewhere,1 Hittite royal succession was strictly patrilineal and involved thema ternal side only to the extent that themother of the successor was ideally a first-rankwife of the reigning monarch (i.e., the Tawananna or Queen). Briefly put, the intriguing epithet "brother's son of Tawa nanna" borne by theOld Kingdom Hittite monarch Hattusili I?and adduced by F. as a key piece of evidence forher interpretation?is hardly a "dynastic title" (p. 75); otherwise we would expect to find it employed at least once elsewhere. Rather, the phrase simply ex presses the particular genealogical situation of this individual. It is also important to remember that Tawananna and itsmasculine coun terpart T/Labarna, "King," were employed as personal names as well as titles in early times, complicating the...