So, here's a bit of Bonze Age puzzle.
I was recently re-reading the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and there's this passage in early Italian history about some "Pelasgians" landing in Italy, setting up colonies in the Po River valley, but then being confronted by some unnamed barbarians and abandoning their colonies and departing forever.
Now you can dismiss this all as mythical hogwash. But it is probably the inchoate memory of something real that happened. So I was curious what.
I don't know much about archaeology. But looking over a few archaeological books, I came across this remarkable "Terramare culture" in the Po valley, emerging c.1600 BCE and flourishing until about 1200 BCE, which seem to fit the bill. It is a bit of mystifying, but the Terramare seem to be the closest real-world equivalent to the "Pelasgians" mentioned by DH.
Now, the Pelasgians, in case you don't know, are a mystery all-purpose pre-Greek people, that seem to pop up everywhere in Greek histories. Acc. to Herodotus, they were an indigenous population in Achaea (Peloponnesus), that moved up to Thessaly, and were then driven out of Thessaly, scattering in various groups over the sea to other places around the Aegean (Cyclades, Crete, Anatolia), and beyond. It is believed the "Pelasgians" is just a catch-all term for any and all primordial peoples driven out of Greece by the Myceneans (c.1600), which makes the timing of the legendary arrival of the "Pelasgians" in Italy and the real emergence of Terramare people somewhat accurately timed.
However, archaeology doesn't connect them. Archaeologists seem to believe the Terramare people came overland from the north. There are two theories I've come across.
The first is that they were either primordial Ligurians or Lake District peoples (non-Indo-Europeans) driven out of the Alpine valleys by Proto-Italo-Celts (Indo-Europeans) who had arrived in southern Germany, and thus they moved south into the Po River valley. The Terramare were particularly concentrated in the central Po area between Cremona, Mantua and Verona. But evidence of Lake ancestry is rather thin. This conjecture is largely because of the similarity of "palafittes" houses of earlier Lake District and later Terramare - both build their houses on pylons. But this could just be coincidence. Terramare don't built on lakesides or riversides (like the Districters did), rather they built their pylon houses on dry land, sometimes even on hills, packed and fortified. The Terramare may have been forced to build their houses on pylons because of frequent flooding of the flatlands from the Po River and its numerous tributaries (Adda, Oglio, Mincio, etc.), none of them yet embanked or controlled.
But materially speaking, the closest culture to the Terramare are actually an obscure tell culture in Hungary, which also disappears around 1600. So this is the second hypothesis - that these Hungarians just picked up and moved to northern Italy and became the Terramare. Indeed, it seems far more probable, as the Terramare people promptly "re-set" the Amber Road to the North. Previously, the Amber Road went through the Carpathians/Hungary up to the Baltic shores, now it is re-set further west, going directly from northern Italy to southern Denmark. So it is was probably the same intermediary people (Hungarians), who left Hungary for some reason, migrated west to northern Italy, and just resumed their old trade connections.
So this Pelasgian story starts wearing thin. Whether Lake Districters or Hungarians, Terramare came by land, and not by sea. So not seaborne proto-Greeks.
But then, well, kinda Greeks. Because apparently the Terramare began trading heavily with the Mycenaeans. There's ample material evidence of heavy trade between Terramare and Mycenaean cities. Indeed, after the Carpathians started thinning, the Po delta is where the Mycenaeans went for amber and other nifty Scandinavian stuff.
It seems the Terramare Italians grew quickly and were very numerous. Some 220 Terramare sites have been found around the central Po, all of them very densely populated settlements and villages. This is great agricultural land, so pop boom is expected. Population estimates run above 150,000, probably quite higher should archaeologists ever get permission to excavate modern urban areas.
But then *poof*. And here's the greatest mystery of all. They all disappeared. Practically overnight.
They didn't get attacked - violence is not indicated. The Terramare just left. All of them. Some 150,000 people just collectively decided one day that Italy just wasn't for them. In the course of a few decades, starting around 1200, they began to disappear. By 1150, all the Terramare villages are abandoned, and all people just gone. Where'd they go?
They didn't go south, we know there was a more backward Apennine culture** there. And they didn't go north - got the brutish Italo-Celts there. It seems like the Terramare left Italy by sea.
So DH may be half-right - they may not have arrived by sea, but it seem the "Pelasgians" left by sea.
This is not a small number. If 150,000 people get on boats and go, then surely they'd show up somewhere. Where'd they go?
Now I know the first thing that comes to mind: the Sea Peoples!
Well, could be. The timing would be perfect - the time the Terramare start to disappear (1200) is exactly the time when Mycenae, Anatolia, Levant, etc. begin to be attacked. Were they the attackers? But I can't find a single work on the Sea Peoples that actually makes the connection, even conjecturally. They talk endlessly about Sardinians and Sicilians**. But the Terramare Italians are completely overlooked and go unmentioned.
[** - There's a second related story in DH, where a group of Pelasgians left the Po valley in its early colony days, and moved to the Apennine highlands, where they got into conflicts with the Umbri. While the first group stayed in the Po valley, this migrant second group of Pelasgians formed an alliance with the "Aborigines" (proto-Latins) in the highlands against the Umbri. This second group of Pelasgians then helped the Aborigines attack and drive out the "Sicels", who DH asserts were living in the lowlands of Latium at the time. After a series of attacks, the Sicels were defeated, picked up and left Latium by ship, and that's how they ended up in Sicily. [The Sicels do have Sea Peoples connections - they are likely the "Shekelesh" reported in Egyptian records; some historians believe the Sicels ended up in Sicily after attacking and failing to conquer Egypt.] Once the Sicels were gone, then this second group of Pelasgians settled the lowlands of Latium and Etruria, and built farms and towns. But then they too disappeared. This time, according to DH, not because of a collective decision or a foreign attack, but because of years of drought, hunger, disease and civil war, dwindling their population. Some of this second group of Pelasgians left by sea (doesn't say where), the remainder assimilated into the Aborigines (who later became the "Latins"). Thus ends the second Pelasgian story. The abandoned Pelasgian homesteads in Etruria were taken over by the "Tyrrheneans" (Etruscans), whom DH assures us were definitely a local indigenous population in Tuscany. But this second group of Pelagians in Latium doesn't interest me so much as the first group of Pelasgians in the Po valley, the Terramare.]
So does anybody know anything more about the Terramare? Where they came from, where they went? They seem rather overlooked everywhere.
I was recently re-reading the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and there's this passage in early Italian history about some "Pelasgians" landing in Italy, setting up colonies in the Po River valley, but then being confronted by some unnamed barbarians and abandoning their colonies and departing forever.
Now you can dismiss this all as mythical hogwash. But it is probably the inchoate memory of something real that happened. So I was curious what.
I don't know much about archaeology. But looking over a few archaeological books, I came across this remarkable "Terramare culture" in the Po valley, emerging c.1600 BCE and flourishing until about 1200 BCE, which seem to fit the bill. It is a bit of mystifying, but the Terramare seem to be the closest real-world equivalent to the "Pelasgians" mentioned by DH.
Now, the Pelasgians, in case you don't know, are a mystery all-purpose pre-Greek people, that seem to pop up everywhere in Greek histories. Acc. to Herodotus, they were an indigenous population in Achaea (Peloponnesus), that moved up to Thessaly, and were then driven out of Thessaly, scattering in various groups over the sea to other places around the Aegean (Cyclades, Crete, Anatolia), and beyond. It is believed the "Pelasgians" is just a catch-all term for any and all primordial peoples driven out of Greece by the Myceneans (c.1600), which makes the timing of the legendary arrival of the "Pelasgians" in Italy and the real emergence of Terramare people somewhat accurately timed.
However, archaeology doesn't connect them. Archaeologists seem to believe the Terramare people came overland from the north. There are two theories I've come across.
The first is that they were either primordial Ligurians or Lake District peoples (non-Indo-Europeans) driven out of the Alpine valleys by Proto-Italo-Celts (Indo-Europeans) who had arrived in southern Germany, and thus they moved south into the Po River valley. The Terramare were particularly concentrated in the central Po area between Cremona, Mantua and Verona. But evidence of Lake ancestry is rather thin. This conjecture is largely because of the similarity of "palafittes" houses of earlier Lake District and later Terramare - both build their houses on pylons. But this could just be coincidence. Terramare don't built on lakesides or riversides (like the Districters did), rather they built their pylon houses on dry land, sometimes even on hills, packed and fortified. The Terramare may have been forced to build their houses on pylons because of frequent flooding of the flatlands from the Po River and its numerous tributaries (Adda, Oglio, Mincio, etc.), none of them yet embanked or controlled.
But materially speaking, the closest culture to the Terramare are actually an obscure tell culture in Hungary, which also disappears around 1600. So this is the second hypothesis - that these Hungarians just picked up and moved to northern Italy and became the Terramare. Indeed, it seems far more probable, as the Terramare people promptly "re-set" the Amber Road to the North. Previously, the Amber Road went through the Carpathians/Hungary up to the Baltic shores, now it is re-set further west, going directly from northern Italy to southern Denmark. So it is was probably the same intermediary people (Hungarians), who left Hungary for some reason, migrated west to northern Italy, and just resumed their old trade connections.
So this Pelasgian story starts wearing thin. Whether Lake Districters or Hungarians, Terramare came by land, and not by sea. So not seaborne proto-Greeks.
But then, well, kinda Greeks. Because apparently the Terramare began trading heavily with the Mycenaeans. There's ample material evidence of heavy trade between Terramare and Mycenaean cities. Indeed, after the Carpathians started thinning, the Po delta is where the Mycenaeans went for amber and other nifty Scandinavian stuff.
It seems the Terramare Italians grew quickly and were very numerous. Some 220 Terramare sites have been found around the central Po, all of them very densely populated settlements and villages. This is great agricultural land, so pop boom is expected. Population estimates run above 150,000, probably quite higher should archaeologists ever get permission to excavate modern urban areas.
But then *poof*. And here's the greatest mystery of all. They all disappeared. Practically overnight.
They didn't get attacked - violence is not indicated. The Terramare just left. All of them. Some 150,000 people just collectively decided one day that Italy just wasn't for them. In the course of a few decades, starting around 1200, they began to disappear. By 1150, all the Terramare villages are abandoned, and all people just gone. Where'd they go?
They didn't go south, we know there was a more backward Apennine culture** there. And they didn't go north - got the brutish Italo-Celts there. It seems like the Terramare left Italy by sea.
So DH may be half-right - they may not have arrived by sea, but it seem the "Pelasgians" left by sea.
This is not a small number. If 150,000 people get on boats and go, then surely they'd show up somewhere. Where'd they go?
Now I know the first thing that comes to mind: the Sea Peoples!
Well, could be. The timing would be perfect - the time the Terramare start to disappear (1200) is exactly the time when Mycenae, Anatolia, Levant, etc. begin to be attacked. Were they the attackers? But I can't find a single work on the Sea Peoples that actually makes the connection, even conjecturally. They talk endlessly about Sardinians and Sicilians**. But the Terramare Italians are completely overlooked and go unmentioned.
[** - There's a second related story in DH, where a group of Pelasgians left the Po valley in its early colony days, and moved to the Apennine highlands, where they got into conflicts with the Umbri. While the first group stayed in the Po valley, this migrant second group of Pelasgians formed an alliance with the "Aborigines" (proto-Latins) in the highlands against the Umbri. This second group of Pelasgians then helped the Aborigines attack and drive out the "Sicels", who DH asserts were living in the lowlands of Latium at the time. After a series of attacks, the Sicels were defeated, picked up and left Latium by ship, and that's how they ended up in Sicily. [The Sicels do have Sea Peoples connections - they are likely the "Shekelesh" reported in Egyptian records; some historians believe the Sicels ended up in Sicily after attacking and failing to conquer Egypt.] Once the Sicels were gone, then this second group of Pelasgians settled the lowlands of Latium and Etruria, and built farms and towns. But then they too disappeared. This time, according to DH, not because of a collective decision or a foreign attack, but because of years of drought, hunger, disease and civil war, dwindling their population. Some of this second group of Pelasgians left by sea (doesn't say where), the remainder assimilated into the Aborigines (who later became the "Latins"). Thus ends the second Pelasgian story. The abandoned Pelasgian homesteads in Etruria were taken over by the "Tyrrheneans" (Etruscans), whom DH assures us were definitely a local indigenous population in Tuscany. But this second group of Pelagians in Latium doesn't interest me so much as the first group of Pelasgians in the Po valley, the Terramare.]
So does anybody know anything more about the Terramare? Where they came from, where they went? They seem rather overlooked everywhere.
Last edited:
- 8
- 1
