HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Etruscan, the language of the Etruscans, is attested between 700 BC and AD 50 in the area of northwest central Italy between the Arno, the Tiber, and the Tyrrhenian Sea. A few Etruscan texts come from other areas of Italy (especially from Campania and Emilia) and from Corsica, and isolated examples are known from Provence, Tunisia, Greece, and Egypt.

The most important source of Etruscan is the c. nine thousand inscriptions. The majority are funerary inscriptions, which often consist of no more than the name of the deceased. The second largest group is formed by the likewise mostly short texts on objects of daily life which indicate the owner or the manufacturer, or the object as a present or a dedication. Readily comprehensible are the labels inscribed next to figures in pictorial representations. The longer inscriptions are legal or ritual in character. The quasi-bilingual from Pyrgi (with a parallel text in Phoenician) reports the dedication of a cult building; the Perugine cippus records a contract about a piece of land; the clay tablet of Capua (which, with 300 preserved words, is the longest Etruscan inscription) preserves a ritual calendar; and the recently published (Agostiniani and Nicosia 2000) bronze tablet of Cortona seems to contain, as I think, a record of the treatment of tenant farmers after the sale of an estate rented by them.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Hittite is a member of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European family, and the earliest attested Indo-European language. Anatolian is generally regarded as the first branch to have separated from the other Indo-European languages. Aside from Hittite it includes Luvian (Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic) and Palaic, all from the second millennium BC, and Hieroglyphic Luvian, Lycian, Lydian, and the scantily attested Carian, Pisidian, and Sidetic in the first millennium BC.

The speakers of Hittite were in place in Central Anatolia by the nineteenth–eighteenth century BC, since a few words of the language (notably išḫiul- “contract”) appear in Old Assyrian documents from the merchant colonies like Kārum Kaneš, Hittite Nešaš, modern Kültepe. As an Old Hittite origin legend shows (Otten 1973), the Hittites regarded this city as their original home; it is the base of their designation of their own language, URUnišili, nešumnili “in Hittite,” literally “in the language of (the inhabitants of) Nešaš.” With the beginning of our documentation of the language proper we distinguish Old Hittite (seventeenth or early sixteenth century–c. 1500), Middle Hittite (c. 1500–c. 1375), and Neo-Hittite (c. 1375–c. 1200). Adherents of the “short chronology” would lower these dates somewhat, particularly at the upper end.

Speakers of what was to be the Anatolian branch of the Indo–European family apparently migrated into Asia Minor, probably from the Balkans across the Bosporus, in the course of the third millennium BC.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Luvian (or Luwian) was arguably the most widely spoken member of the Anatolian sub-group of Indo-European. Evidence for the language is twofold. First, the cuneiform archives of the Hittite capital Hattuša in central Anatolia contain a number of texts with passages in a language designated luwili; that is, of the land Luwiya, which the Old Hittite Laws list as one of three major divisions of the Hittite state.

Starke (1985) has shown in his excellent edition of the Cuneiform Luvian (CLuvian) corpus that the apparently extensive texts actually represent variations on scarcely a dozen distinct compositions (aside from a few fragments). With one or two exceptions, the texts are rituals, some of a private, therapeutic nature, others belonging to the state cult. The CLuvian manuscripts, like the Hittite, date from the sixteenth to thirteenth centuries BC, including a few from the Old Hittite period (see Ch. 2, §1). Beyond this highly restricted material, there are also many isolated Luvianisms scattered throughout the Hittite texts, both as foreign words and as genuine loanwords adapted to Hittite inflection. Starke (1990 and elsewhere) has demonstrated that Luvian influence on Hittite was both earlier (including prehistoric) and more extensive than previously acknowledged. However, the fact that the two languages are very closely related makes it difficult to distinguish with certainty Luvian loanwords into Hittite from native Hittite cognates of Luvian lexemes, and not all of Starke's claims are equally persuasive (see Melchert 1992).

This is a vital section, in which you will meet new tenses of the verb; so far the narrative has been confined to the present tense alone.

In 5A–B the imperfect tense is introduced; and in 5C–D the future.

If you are not happy with the term imperfect, it may be helpful to look at the explanation in GE p. 93, #103.

Note: In Section 6 you will met another past tense called the aorist. The meaning of ‘imperfect’ in this context is ‘incomplete’, ‘unfinished’, while ‘aorist’ means ‘undefined’. For example:

Greek also has a perfect tense: this expresses a completed action in present time, ‘I have just come in’, ‘I have shut the door’. It is much less common than the aorist, and it is not introduced until Section 13E.

Before beginning 5A you may find it helpful to write out the present tense (active and middle) of παύω, and another table for εἰμί, leaving room to the right of the table to enter imperfect endings as they occur.

This is a long section with a lively story which introduces several important items of grammar, the dative case (GE pp. 176–180, #189–190), the aorist infinitive (GE pp. 187–189, #195–197), the aorist imperative (GE pp. 189–191, #198–200), γιγνώσκω (GE p. 201, #209), and the principal parts of common and very irregular verbs (GE p. 202, #211). None of this is difficult, but it pays to learn the new grammar carefully after each section in which it is introduced.

Before you start you may like to look at the table (GE pp. 176–177, #103) where the forms of the dative are set out. Notice the predominance of ι:

The various uses of the dative are well described in GE pp. 179–180, #190.

9A

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10 τί βουλόμενος As before, ‘wanting what, do you …?’ ἀπολεῖς με … ‘you will destroy me’, ‘you will be the death of me’. The future of ἀπόλλυμι.

11 βοῆ χρῶμαι χράομαι (‘I use’) takes the dative (GE p.180, #190 (e)). The meaning is the same as if βοῶ had been written.

17 ἐμπεσεῖται Future of ἐμπίπτω – πίπτωῦμαι ἕπεσον.

18 τυγχάνεις εἰδώς εἰδως -ότος is the participle of οἶ the infinitive is εἰδέναι.

20 οὑτοιί οῦτος αὕτη τοῦτο + ι is even more demonstrative. ‘These spectators here’. (Note that the neuter is τουτί ταυτί.)

How to use this course

You have three books:

1. Reading Greek: Text and Vocabulary (RGT)

2. Reading Greek: Grammar and Exercises (GE)

3. Independent Study Guide to Reading Greek (ISG)

In addition there is a CD Speaking Greek which illustrates pronunciation, and records readings from passages in RGT.

You may also like to have The World of Athens (second edition 2008), which gives you background information about Athenian history and life.

The first two books, RGT and GE, were designed to be used together so that

1. You read the passage in RGT with the aid of the running vocabulary for the section.

2. Then you look at the explanations of the grammar in GE.

3. Then you learn the grammar and the lists of ‘vocabulary to be learnt’ in GE.

4. Then you do the exercises for the section to make sure that you have understood the grammar. You may want to do each section of the exercises as you study the grammar in GE, so that you get immediate practice in a new feature of language. It is not essential to do all the exercises on morphology and syntax, but they will help you to practise the language and to make sure that you understand the grammar. However, you should always do the final ‘Test Exercise’ in each section, as it is an important check on your grasp of the section.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Though in this introductory section, and at certain other points as well, attention is given to the ancient Greek language as a whole, the central topic of this chapter will be that dialect called Attic, the spoken dialect of the region of Attica and the principal written dialect of Classical Greek literature. The many other dialects of Greek attested in antiquity will properly be the focus of Chapter 3.

Greek is a member of the Indo-European family of languages. It resides in that major subdivision of the family called centum (see Appendix), though its closest linguistic affinities are with the Indo-Iranian and Armenian languages, both members of the satem subset. The arrival in the Balkan peninsula of those Indo-Europeans who would in time be called the Greeks is most probably to be dated to c. 2100 or 1900 BC. One of the three earliest attested Indo-European languages, Greek is first documented on clay tablets recovered from the ruins of various Mycenaean palaces found on the Greek mainland and on the island of Crete, dating c. 1400–1200 BC; already during the Mycenaean period, the language displays dialectal variation. Ancient Greek is phonologically and morphologically quite conservative and has been a cornerstone in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European.

The history of the language has been traditionally divided into several chronological phases. Subsequent to the Mycenaean period, the Greeks fell into a prolonged period of illiteracy (though not in Cyprus, see Ch. 3).

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The term Continental Celtic does not refer to a single linguistic entity – it is not a synonym for Gaulish – but to the entirety of the Celtic linguistic documentation from the ancient European continent. At the present time we can distinguish a discrete language called Hispano-Celtic (also known as Celtiberian), spoken in the north central meseta of the Iberian peninsula, from Gaulish, varieties of which were spoken from Asia Minor in the east through central Europe southward into the northern Italian peninsula and extending to the English Channel and eventually, with the Belgic migrations, over it into Britain. The variety of Gaulish spoken around the northern Italian lake district, usually called Lepontic, and that spoken in Asia Minor, usually called Galatian, are viewed by some as separate languages, though this view has weakened in recent years (Eska 1998b; cf. Uhlich, forthcoming). It is now commonly believed that Hispano-Celtic first separated from the Proto-Celtic speech area in central Europe sometime in the early first millennium BC, and developed henceforth on its own. The remainder of the Proto-Celtic speech area then developed as a dialect continuum as speakers spread across Europe and into Asia Minor. The traditional view is that this continuum subsequently divided into a Goidelic branch and a Gallo-Brittonic branch, but an increasing number of scholars have begun to stress the prehistoric unity of Insular Celtic as opposed to Gaulish.

Often rehearsed, sometimes parodied, there remains something hauntingly arresting about John William Burgon's sonnet in praise of Petra, Jordon's “rose-red city,” lying at the threshold of the Arabian Peninsula, on the southeastern fringe of ancient Syria-Palestine (the term is used herein to denote the region encompassing the modern political states of Jordon, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria; on the notion of “Syria-Palestine,” a geographic construct popularized by W. F. Albright, see Dever 1997). Now home to a Bedouin community, Petra was once the thriving capital city of the ancient Nabataeans, whose kingdom flourished in the late centuries BC and the early centuries AD.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The term Canaanite has two primary usages: (i) to designate the dialects of Northwest Semitic spoken in the region called Canaan in the second half of the second millennium BC; and (ii) to differentiate the “Canaanite” dialects of the first millennium, primarily Phoenician and Hebrew, from other Northwest Semitic languages spoken in Canaan after c. 1000 BC, primarily the Aramaic dialects. The principal feature defining Canaanite is the so-called Canaanite shift, that is, Proto-Semitic *ā realized as ō (e.g., Hebrew ṭōb “good” corresponds to Aramaic ṭāb).

For the Canaanite of the second millennium BC, there are two primary sources: (i) the texts written in Akkadian, the lingua franca of the time, by Canaanite scribes and which contain both Canaanitisms and explicit glosses, i.e., words written in cuneiform script as a gloss in the local language on a preceding Akkadian word; (ii) the Proto-Canaanite inscriptions, that is, inscriptions written in archaic linear script and apparently recording the local language.

Some controversy surrounds what “Canaan” meant, both politically and geographically, in the second millennium BC (Na'aman 1994). In the second half of the millennium, the term was used to designate the area of Asia under Egyptian control, including a number of city-states. It comprised an area stretching roughly from what is today northern Lebanon to the border of Egypt, perhaps including some of the arable lands of Transjordan.

In this section you will meet a number of different features of grammar and syntax that are clearly described in GE pp. 315–318, #291–294. Notice particularly μή + aorist subjunctive = ‘don't …’ (GE #292), and φοβοῦμαι μή + subjunctive = ‘I am afraid that something may happen’ (GE #293).

Also there are verbal nouns ending in -τέος which express obligation (‘must’), GE #294–295.

16A

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3 ἀθύμως ἔχοντι Agrees with ʾΑριστάρχῳ. ἔχω + adverb expresses the state that someone is in, e.g. καλῶς ἔχω ‘I am well’, κακῶς ἔχω ‘I am in a bad way.’

10 τοὺς ἐξηγητάς These were state officials who advised what to do in cases of murder. Apollodoros' next question shows two of the procedures which they might advise on.

13 ἐπεποιήκει What tense? see GE p. 315, #291.

ἠδικήκει What tense?

17 διεξελθόντι δέ μοι … οὺκ ἔφασαν ἐξεῖναι … Literally ‘to me having related … they said that it was not possible to …’

ἐπεπόνθη What verb? What tense? Try πάσχω πείσομαι ἔπαθον πεπόνθα.

Translation for 16A

Apollodoros is going straight towards Ilisos, walking along the road outside the wall, beneath the wall itself. When he is at the gate, there he meets Aristarchos the son of Ariston, who is very depressed. Apollodoros, seeing Aristarchos coming towards him, addresses him.