by Aleksander Hasanas
The oldest people of the Balkans can today be identified with the Albanian people. They occupied a territory in ancient times that stretched from the Adriatic to the Danube, including western Hungary. Their ancestors were called Illyrians. They were among the early Aryans who arrived in Europe. Their land was known as Illyria. There is no exact date for their arrival, although the earliest data dates back to around 2000 BCE.
Professor Kelmendi, perhaps the most important scholar of these peoples, cites Herodotus, calling them barbarians and arguing that they resembled the Thracians; Roman Illyria bordered Thrace. Ancient Greek writers shared this opinion. The Illyrians were apparently tall, with a lean musculature, great intelligence, and they were great warriors. Their hair and eyes were dark; they worshipped many gods, including Medaurus, Binaus, Latra, and Seutona.
In Illyrian society, high-status relations were reserved for women. Women also exercised political power and, as in Egypt, could be queens. Like other Indo-European peoples, the Illyrians offered sacrifices to the gods and lived primarily by hunting.
The Epirotes shared the same blood and language. Strabo says that the Illyrians, Epirotes, and Macedonians spoke the same language, supporting Kelmendi’s claim that Greek culture was adopted only superficially by these people. The warriors of Philip and Alexander the Great traveled to India and to the pyramids of Egypt, speaking a language ancestral to today’s Albanian.
The Illyrians were divided into tribes: the Ardiani, the Labeates, the Liburnians, the Autariatae, the Dalmatians, the Dardanians, the Veneti, as well as the Messapi and Japigi, who perhaps centuries before Christ had emigrated to colonize southern Italy. In addition to these, there were other tribes. This phenomenon of such diversity of populations can be explained only by the composition and nature of the land where they lived.
Herodotus affirmed that the Illyrians / Albanians were also recorded in the temple of Delphi. Their presence in the heart of the Athenian Acropolis (the old district of the city) dates back to ancient times, and support is found in a passage of Thucydides, who speaks of a people whose roots reached the Acropolis, where it was possible to hear a language similar to ancient Albanian.
Pelasgians, Illyrians, Arbers, Alban, Arvanites, Arnauts, Shqiptar… strange names: do they designate a single people or different peoples in the same area? Over centuries, however, the name has referred to the mysterious people who have “always” been in the middle, between East and West. Whether they were only Albanians, within the borders we know today, is impossible.
In fact, it seems almost certain that the Illyrians came from the north and were pushed south, incorporating what is today Albania. On the other hand — and this is confirmed — the Illyrians were the first to enter the Iron Age, around 1100 BCE, and were therefore undoubtedly an advanced civilization. Their achievements and power must therefore also include the use of a metal revolutionary for the time.
Thus, it was easy for them to penetrate northern Italy before the Celts settled in Veneto and along the Adriatic coast. It was also easy to cross the narrow stretches of sea to Puglia and colonize the Brindisi area, which they called Brention or “deer” because of the typical estuary of its natural port. The term or prefix “Bre” (plural Bront) is found in many directions, not only in northern Italy and in place names such as Bre-prag, Bre-Bre-NTA, Ssanone, etc., where “dre” was widespread. This confirms the spread of Illyrian culture in Europe and Italy in those ancient times.
Illyrians, Northern Epirotes, Macedonians: these were certainly “ethnic impressions” of an ancient people living in mountains and by the sea. Tribes lived side by side, perhaps warring, as in ancient times. And in times of peace, they exchanged goods and influenced each other’s customs and language, before the world was dominated by Greek and then Roman culture.
Some claim that before Athens and Rome, there was a Pelasgian-Etruscan culture, later absorbed by Hellenization and Romanization. The Pelasgians and Etruscans lived in Anatolia, the Balkans, and Italy before the Greeks arrived, trailing the final tail of a millennia-old phenomenon from the Middle East. As Herodotus says, the Greeks adopted the culture and inhabitants they found beforehand: they had a myth, observed by the Pelasgians, that they were born from the earth. This fact resonates with the Bible, the Old Testament, and creation history.
A complex and unclear evolution, considering many sources, allows grouping all these peoples under the definition of “Illyrians,” with a permanent and economically developed population. Apparently, the early Romans began minting coins and their lands stretched from the Danube to Athens. At that time, Slavic peoples had not yet reached the Balkans, which they would do only around 5th–6th century CE.
Even southern Italy was inhabited by Illyrian tribes, such as the Iapigi, who gave their name to Puglia. But not only the Veneti were Illyrians, meaning relatives of the Macedonians and Albanians. Later came the Romans, then barbarians, then waves of Slavs, and the Illyrians either withdrew or were largely incorporated.
Today, they are called Arber, or Arben in Gheg (one of the two main dialects spoken in Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia; the other is Tosk, which forms the basis of standard Albanian. Gheg also refers to an ethnic/linguistic group), while another variant is Arberi, the land of the Arbers, today Albania, which means “land of eagles.”
Illyrians and freedom: even today in Albania, Ilir means free. Perhaps because the Illyrians were free people navigating a sea they named the Ionian (Jon in Albanian means “ours”), the same sea later called the Aegean by the Greeks (Aegean = minae in Greek), and by the Romans “Mare Nostrum.”
Later, the Ottomans, during their conquest of the Balkans, called them Arnaut, roughly meaning “those who consider it shameful to retreat.” Yes, because in its ruthless expansion, the Ottoman Empire was stopped only twice: at the gates of Vienna and in the mountains of Albania.
From the Balkans came famous people in history, such as Emperor Justinian, the lawgiver, born in Taor (formerly Tauresium) in Macedonia; Constantine I, the first Christian emperor, born in Nishi (Naissus) in Serbia; Roman Emperor Diocletian, born in Salona, Croatia, in December 244 and died in Split; and many others, such as Pope John IV, born in Dalmatia.
Language Analysis
The Albanian language is the oldest in Europe. Scholars trace it to Illyrian and Thracian-Phrygian (related to the Etruscan language family), the inherited language of the “ancient Pelasgian tongue,” from which the Greeks built their language: ancient Greek. From this language they derived the Ionic and Cypriot dialects.
Albanian is a completely distinct branch of what are called Indo-European languages, and does not descend from any other known language. Today there are traces of the language of the ancient Illyrians, if not only in some rare inscriptions (phonetic transcriptions of the Illyrian language using Greek and later Latin letters), consisting of proper names and place names typical of Illyrians. In fact, the Illyrians used Greek and Latin in relations with the outside world, but spoke their own language. This alone is a “valuable Pelasgian-Illyrian heritage left to their descendants.”
A well-known philologist, Z. Majani, wrote:
“The Albanian language is a wonderful language, in which one sometimes only needs to bend slightly to pick up the fragments of gold… philologically. In this language, sometimes with very little effort, we discover antichissime words that are contemporary with the Iliad or the second king of Rome, Numa Pompilius.”
The Illyrians, as the native population, continued to develop the culture and customs given by the ancient Pelasgians.
Although written data of the Albanian language do not appear before the 14th century, it is indisputable that today’s Albanians speak the same language as their great-grandparents, despite the natural evolution that a language undergoes. Early 19th-century philologists demonstrated that Albanian is clearly an Indo-European language, yet it has no clear affinities with any other known language. Its inclusion in the Indo-European group is justified by its structural development.
In Northern European Indo-European languages, the letter “o” changes to “a”; however, in the Southern European Indo-European group, the letter “o” is retained. This is why scholars place This is why scholars place the Albanian language in the Northern group. An example: the word natë (“night”) in Albanian corresponds to Nacht (German), naktus (Lithuanian) for the Northern European language group, and still nox, noctis (Latin), nuktos (Greek) for the Southern European Indo-European group.
The relationships of the Albanian language with the languages of the Northern European group have been the subject of study by many linguists, among them Holger Pedersen and the famous albanologist Norbert Jokl. The relationships of Albanian with the Northern group appear normal, because it is known that the upper and middle regions of the Danube were the cradle of the Pelasgians–Illyrians, or at least one of the stages of their migration from the Atlantic to the Black Sea.
John Geipel, an anthropologist, writes:
“Despite invasions, the Albanians remained isolated in their mountains and hardly felt the influence of conquerors, although a number of Greek, Latin, Slavic and Turkish words entered their language. The Slavic conquest in the Balkans during the 6th century AD led to the disappearance of Albanian dialects in the regions of Bosnia and Montenegro, but the Slavic language was not able to take root in Albania. In the Albanian language we find the structure of a number of Thracian-Phrygian words, a language which has disappeared in the Balkans.”
And Norbert Jokl:
“In every aspect it is observed that the languages of linguistic heritage, close to the ancient languages of the Balkans, such as the Illyrian language and the Thracian language, are closely connected with the Albanian language.”
The linguist Meillet, in his book Indo-European Languages, could not determine the true origin of the Pelasgians or even their language. Thus, he could not establish a connection between the Pelasgian language and the Illyrian language, much less with the Albanians, but he made surprising statements:
“The Illyrians played a very important, but still poorly defined role, in central Europe and acted in several directions: toward the Germanic world, with which relations and exchanges were intense; in Italy, where there were many Illyrian tribes (it has even been speculated that the Umbrians were an Illyrian branch); these Illyrian tribes must also have moved toward the south of the Balkans where many place names show a blanket Illyrian colonization followed by Hellenic colonization. The Philistines, who founded Palestine, require consideration of an Illyrian origin. The root of many words and some names are Illyrian.”
However, the question of the Pelasgian language remains unclear:
It must be said that the first linguists of the period between the mid-19th century and the beginning of the 20th century based their studies on only three languages of affinity: Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin.
It would therefore seem that the fact was not taken into account that the Pelasgian language is older than Greek and even Sanskrit. Nor was the influence of the Pelasgian language on the formation of later languages taken into account. Furthermore, the influence that the Illyrian language had on the Balkan languages must also be considered.
“…that the Greeks conquered regions that were inhabited before their arrival by a population of unknown race, who spoke a strange language, and we know them only from Pelasgian names, Leleges, etc. These place names come down to us; these people spoke a language that was not Indo-European.
According to ancient writers, the Pelasgian language (the name is not very clear, as it seems to have been used for various pre-Hellenic languages) was still in use in the 5th century BCE on the coast of Thrace, in southern Propontis, and on some islands such as Imbros, Lemnos, Samothrace and in Crete.”
Finally, here is another paragraph from a study proposed by the scholar and philologist Zaharia Majani on the Etruscans and the Thracian-Illyrian tribes:
“Herodotus, according to a widespread tradition, considered Anatolia as the point of departure of the Etruscans toward Italy. Around 1300 BCE, this region of Anatolia was populated by Illyrians and Veneti from Thrace and from the Balkans. Thus, the Macedonians were Phrygians in Anatolia. The Dardanians of the Balkans moved into the Troas. They spoke Illyrian dialects, an Indo-European language, neither Greek nor Latin.
This is why Latin and Greek scholars have so far been unable to interpret the Etruscan language. They searched for the interpretative key in these two classical languages—Greek and Latin with references to Sanskrit—but this key lies elsewhere. Only the Illyrian language allows access to the interpretation of the Etruscan language, which remains the primary source of our Albanian language, the only still-living Balkan language whose foundation revives the Illyrian language.”
