Balkan Peoples of Anatolia: Migration, Assimilation and Cultural Contact in Anatolia around 1400 BC-300 BC.

The project aims to explore the history of Balkan peoples of Anatolia in the 2nd and 1st millennium BC from a cultural and an ethnolinguistic perspectives.

The term Balkan peoples refers to different ethnic groups which migrated to Anatolia from the Balkan region before ca. 500 BC, spreading eventually in its western, northern and central parts and pushing back the older Indo-European population of the region (the Hittites and different Luwic ethnolinguistic groups).

Linguistically, the Balkan peoples are speakers of Indo-European languages belonging to a group conventionally dubbed Balkan Indo-European, which includes also Greek, Armenian and Albanian.

The project will focus on four principal topics: 1) chronology and extent of the Phrygian migration and settlement in Anatolia; 2) Balkan component in the language and culture of the Lydians; 3) the question of an early (before ca. 1200 BC) presence of the Balkan ethnic element in Anatolia; 4) Thracian migration to Anatolia and the question of ethnolinguistic identity of northern Anatolia in the 1st millennium BC.

The project has an emphatically interdisciplinary character combining apparatus and methods of Classics, Ancient Near Eastern studies, comparative and areal linguistics, epigraphy and, to an extent, archaeology.

It aims to recreate an integral picture of ethnocultural Balkanization of Anatolia, a phenomenon whose extent and significance is largely underestimated in the modern literature.

Besides direct evidence concerning the migration and spread of Balkan peoples in Anatolia, such as reports of Greek authors or epigraphic material in epichoric languages, much weight will be put on the analysis of indirect evidence presented by personal onomastics and toponymy, a rich but hardly exploited material bearing on the question of distribution of different ethnic groups in the region.