| ASKANIA
(district): the southern seaboard of Troy; the extension of this district,
it could be said, was from the western tip of NERITON (Peljesac Peninsula),
to the south, perhaps as far as Boka Kotorska. |
II; 862:
And Phorcys and godlike Ascanius led the Phrygians from afar,
from Ascania, and were eager to fight in the press of battle.
The name appears
to be derived from an Illyrian root ask-, apparently meaning
‘seed’, ‘semen’, and by extension, ‘testicles’,
which seems in keeping with the general phallic associations that
might be given the Trojan seaboard. From the meaning of this name
would be understood an intrinsic sense of fertility and progeny
in the name of Ascanius, son of Aeneas, as the seed from which,
in later times, Roman patricians could claim a Trojan pedigree.
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| DARDANIA
(district): the inland country without any definite borders, but may
be understood in a more literal sense as the country contained within
the Skamandros' (Neretva's) delta-valley. |
XX; 215:
At the first Zeus, the cloud-gatherer, begat Dardanus, and he
founded Dardania, for not yet was sacred Ilios builded in the
plain to be a city of mortal men..
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| HYPOPLAKIA
(district): Jezero Kuti; a subdivision of the district of DARDANIA
(Neretva delta-valley). |
VI; 395:
..Andromache, daughter of great-hearted Etion, Etion that dwelt
beneath wooded Placus, in Thebe Hypoplakia, and was lord over
Cilician men; for it was his daughter that bronze-harnessed Hector
had to wife.
The sense of the above lines is quite muddled, perhaps
on account of an utter misunderstanding of the name Hypoplakia,
'Under Plakos', for it is in fact a compound-type word emphasizing
a topographical feature, derived from the Illyrian roots sipo- connoting
a very wet and marshy condition, + plak- dennoting 'cake' (and by
extension a flattened islet), indeed an apt name for this marshy
district.
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| PHRYGIA
(district): the northern seaboard of Troy; Phrygia extended, it could
be said, from the western tip of Neriton (Peljesac), to the north,
as far as the Sangarius (Krka). |
III; 184:
Ere now have I [Priam] journeyed to the land of Phrygia... and there
I saw in multitudes the Phrygian warriors... that were then encamped
along the banks of Sangarius. For I, too, being their ally, was
numbered among them on the day when the Amazones came, the peers
of men.
XXIV; 543:
"And of thee, old sire, we hear that of old thou wast blest;
how of all that toward the sea Lesbos, the seat of Macar, encloseth,
and Phrygia in the upland, and the boundless Hellespont, over all
these folk, men say, thou, old sire, wast preeminent by reason of
thy wealth and thy sons."
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| THYMBRA
(district): Bacinsko Jezero. A subdivision of the district of Dardania
(Neretva’s delta-valley). The name means ‘(place of) cisterns’,
an allusion to the cistern-like indentations in the mountainside holding
brackish and fresh water pools. |
The district
was occupied by the Danaan Camp, a fact not altogether unknown
to Odysseus who received the following babbling reply from his
terrified captive
X; 430:
Then made answer to him Dolon, son of Eumedes: "...Towards
the sea lie the Carians and the Paionians, with curved bows,
and the Leleges and the Caucones, and the goodly Pelasgoi. And
towards Thymbre fell the lot of the Lycians and lordly Mysians,
and the Phrygians that fight from chariots and the Maionians,
lord of chariots. ...here apart be the Thracians, newcomers,
the outermost of all..."
Thymbre might
be thought of as the topographical counterpart to Hypoplakia (Neretva
delta's left bank).
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TROIA
(TROY), 1 (the country):
Troy, the ‘country’, had no definitive borders,...SANGARIOD,
KARDAMYLE, ZELEIA though one could say it extended as far as the Krka
river in the north, Boka Kotorska in the south, and perhaps as far
inland as Sarajevo in the northeast. |
>geographical
structure:
>foreigners and autochthonous tribes
Troy, as a cultural entity, was the product of both geographical
accident and ethnic movements from the Balkan hinterlands and
the world abroad into this area.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF TROY
History of Troy
divided into three periods according to the discrete degree of historicity
I. EARLY PERIOD: > early tribes (echo in Pygmies and Cranes...
Perhaps also in post Homeric Batrachomyomachia
>origins of name
Troy was named, so later Greek lore says, after Tros, one of the
builders of Ilios (Gabela), but if so, this should then make the
name 'Trosia', or because the land was 'cut' into 'three' principal
districts of Phrygia (the northern seaboard), Askania (the southern
seaboard), and Dardania (the hinterland).
II. MIDDLE PERIOD: >allies abroad
>influence in Tyrhenian
> its imprialism abroad, hence:
I; 152:
"I [Achilles] came not hither to fight by reason of the spearmen
of Troy, seeing they are no whit at fault toward me. Never harried
they in any wise my kine or my horses, nor ever in deep-soiled
Phthia, nurse of men, did they lay waste the grain, for full many
things lie between usshadowy mountains and sounding sea.
But thee, thou shameless one, did we follow hither, that thou
mightest be glad, seeking to win recompense for Menelaus and for
thee, thou dog-face, at the hands of the Trojans."
III. LATE PERIOD:
Troy did not, apparently, enter into a gradual process of political
or economic decline. Rather, it plunged suddenly into oblivion.
Troy, at its zenith near 1250 BC., was a mighty empire among other
empires: Akhaiis (an Iberian folk?), established along Italy's western
and southern coasts; Mykenai, in the southern Balkans; Crete, midway
between the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, Hattussas, in north central
Anatolia; and Egypt. But Troy was eventually humbled and brought
to its knees, not only on the account of Helen, whom Paris took
to Ilios (Gabela)1, but also because, one must think, the Trojan
Alliance abroad represented something hateful to other neighbouring
communities.
Archaeological evidence of the Bronze Age in the West Balkan (Adriatic)
Coast suggests that Troy developed more-or-less without great cultural
changes through the Early and Middle periods, though the Late period
(also thought of as a 'Transmission Phase' from Bronze into the
Iron Age) shows marked changes in the cultural continuity between
the 12th and 10th centuries B.C., which square with a would-be Trojan
War and the settlement of a new way of life, which one might think
of as the ethnogenesis of a new Illyrian Order.
>Hattussas <spl>
- >Akhaian
expansionism
- -Argo
- -Trojan
War
>Illyrian
hegemony
THE
TROY LEGEND
Troy was never-to-be again, though the pride of ancestry and glory
of accomplishments was carried abroad:
Trojans who migrated into the souther Balkans (Hellas) finished
plunging the already decadent Mycenaean societies into abysmal poverty.
These were known as Dorians (or Dorani), a name, it seems, associated
with the Illyrian tribe of Daorisii. It would not be until about
the 8th century B.C., when Hellas began to acquire a cultural identity
of its own, that the first maritime contacts between Hellenes and
Illyrians were made on the once Trojan islands of the Adriatic Archipelago.
>Rome
>England
>France
Displaced Trojans migrated over the face of Europe. Legend has it
that the Franks were so called from a certain King Francio, of Trojan
stock, who settled on the banks of the Rhine where a duplicate Troy
was founded but never completed. And, a certain Brutus, grand-son
of Aeneas, is claimed to this day to have been the first British
king, and founder of New Troy, now called London2.
1. An overlooked fact about Paris' rape of Helen being the cause
of the Trojan Warwhich the Greek historian Herodotus thought
was not truly sufficient cause for mounting a waris that,
Pelasgians, ancestors of the Trojans, founded Argos (Caieta, now
Gaeta, in the Lazio) which was subsequently overrun by Achaians,
and Helen was an Argive, and hence, of Trojan loyalty. So, it could
be put, was not in fact Menelaus, her 'legitimate' husband, the
raper?
2. Western-styled classicism makes these Troy-based European folk-legends
the product of a centuries-later Roman literary tradition, which,
it would seem, utterly disregards the transmission of Troy folk-tales
directly from their source. The implication is that the Roman Troy-traditionfrom
which patricians could claim a Trojan pedigreeis not to be
thought of as the direct line of transmission, but, rather, a variation,
or an off-shoot, of emminently cthonic Troy-legends ultimately derived
from the seed of Assaracus, the only son of Tros who did not emigrate
from Troy. |
| ZELEIA
[ZALEIA ?] (district); Jablanica Gorges: a distant hinterland subdivision
of the district of DARDANIA (Neretva delta-valley)— |
II; 824:
And they that dwelt in Zeleia beneath the nethermost foot of
Ida, men of wealth, that drink the dark water of Aesepus, even
the Troes, these again were led by the glorious son of Lycaon,
Pandarus...
IV; 100:
“Nay, [says Athene] come, shoot thine arrow [Pandarus]
at glorious Menelaus, and vow to Apollo, the wolf-born god,
famed for his bow, that thou wilt sacrifice a glorious hecatomb
of firstling lambs, when thou shalt come to thy home, the sacred
heights of Zeleia.”
The name of
this sub-district, as Zaleia, would render a Greek understanding
as a ‘(place of) very great plunders’, thus suggesting
that a tariff or some other duty was summarily exacted by Troes,
suitably ensconced in the many crags and ravines of these gorges,
on all traffic passing through here to and from the coast and
the interior.
-the bow of Pandarus... ibex, recalls the Delmatae of this region,
whose name means sheep..
-Pandarus breaks the peace (i.e, represents the internal disention
which favoured conflict against Troy) from which the inferrence
that he will have bee sympathetic to Odysseus of the many wiles
who gave Neriton(peljesac)s to Danaan forces
-an echo of the forgoeng is read in the Hittite document The Crimes
of Mudawattas, who allied the Dalawa (*Dala-matai > Delmatae)
along with the Hinduwa (Dindaroi?) in favour of man of Ahaia and
against Hittite interests (i.e., alliance with Ttroy).
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