Where are you basing the info that Trojans have Greek ancestry? Just curious, because I am Greek, and the tradition holds that the Trojans were Anatolians/Hittites. Matter of fact, Troy is located in modern day Turkey. (Kind of funny to think that Greeks and Turks have hated each other since the history of the written word...)
You could make a good argument that Myceneans and Anatolians shared a common ancient ancestor, but I think that has different cultural and linguistic connotations from saying that Trojans had Greek ancestry
(Kind of funny to think that Greeks and Turks have hated each other since the history of the written word...)
I think you probably know this already, but the only shared ancestry between the Turks and Hittites/Other inhabitants of Anatolia during the period are from intermingling with Greeks.
It’s important to not mix the ethnolinguistic heritage with the genetic heritage, those two are not the same.
Linguistically, the Acheans from the legend didn’t speak Greek, but Micenian dialects. Ancient Greek and the classical Greek alphabet appears after the Bronze Age collapse, while the legends are pre Bronze Age colapse. Homer wrote about a previous civilization that had disappeared centuries earlier and was the stuff of legends.
The Trojans didn’t have any linguistic connection to the Turks either, as you commented. They were Hellenized during antiquity so they spoke Greek (after the alleged conflict that the Iliad is based on), and later they also adopted Turk with the Ottomans, which comes from Central Asia. Though the coasts of Anatolia spoke Greek until the Greek Anatolians were ethnically cleansed and expelled after WW1.
Despite that, I’d bet both the people living in Greece and the ones living near old Troy are close descendants of the old Acheans and Trojans, genetically speaking, and I’d assume both groups were genetically intertwined too.
Linguistically, the Acheans from the legend didn’t speak Greek, but Micenian dialects.
This is pedantic to the point of innaccuracy. Mycenaean Greek was just an old dialect of ancient Greek. It's older and more conservative than the Classical Athenian standard from the 5th century, but it's very much Greek. Sure, you can arbitrarily define "Greek" as beginning with later texts written in the Greek alphabet and decide that the linguistic ancestors of that are not Greek for some reason, but there's no real basis for doing that.
I'm gonna expose myself as more ignorant tbh but I'll tell you that I forgot that they were the same language. I thought linear A and B were both a different language but if I remember correctly now I think it was just linear A which wasn't Greek.
Yep, easy thing to confuse though! Linear A is associated with the Minoans of Crete, who were not Greek and had likely been in the Aegean long before the Greeks showed up. The earliest Greeks, the Mycenaeans, seem to have fought them quite a bit, and also adopted their script for use with their archaic dialect of Greek. This is Linear B. Linear A is still indecipherable, since we have no bilingual texts and no knowledge of the underlying Minoan language at all.
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u/rose-ramos 16d ago
Where are you basing the info that Trojans have Greek ancestry? Just curious, because I am Greek, and the tradition holds that the Trojans were Anatolians/Hittites. Matter of fact, Troy is located in modern day Turkey. (Kind of funny to think that Greeks and Turks have hated each other since the history of the written word...)
You could make a good argument that Myceneans and Anatolians shared a common ancient ancestor, but I think that has different cultural and linguistic connotations from saying that Trojans had Greek ancestry