(part I)
"Beyond the usual archaeological and other data, in this article, I will aim to the explanation of some subsequent Greek myths of the Classical age (myths referring to the Mycenaean period), behind which some historical facts are often hidden. Although the explanation of the ancient myths as mythological performance of historical facts is indeed hypothetical, this proposed interpretation of them is popular in many historians, archaeologists and researchers and it is often (if not usually) verified by the archaeological excavations.
According to legend, the first three successive royal dynasties of Prehistoric Athens (which during the Mycenaean period was identified only with the Acropolis and a small portion of modern Plaka) were those of Aktaeos-Kekrops, Kranaos and Amphictyon which are considered by the local tradition as indigenous of Attica. When Erysichthon (Kekrops' only son) died, the House of Kranaos seized the Athenian throne. The third House which succeeded the Kranaic dynasty bore the name of its leader Amphictyon, Kranaos' son in law. It has been reasonably assumed that king Kekrops represents the tribe of the Kekropes, indigenous of the basin between the mountains of Parnes and Hymettus in Central Attica. Pausanias attributes to Kekrops the replacement of the human sacrifices to the gods with offerings of domestic sweets to them. Erichthonios seized power after a revolution around 1510 BC according to a rather trustworthy modern chronological calculation, establishing the fourth Athenian dynasty which has been considered by Angelos Procopiou and other modern scholars as non-Athenian, considering its genealogy. From the archaeological point of view, the royal tombs excavated on the Acropolis (meaning the "citadel" in Greek) belonging to the period up to around 1500 BC, were attributed by the famous British archaeologist Wace in an earlier dynasty (the "Shaft Grave Dynasty" as he named it). The archaeologist Tsountas called this dynasty as the "House of the Danaans" in order to distinguish it clearly from the later dynastic House that built the domed and vaulted tombs outside the walls of the Acropolis (which House Tsountas mentions as the "House of the Achaeans" and Wace as the "Tholos Tomb Dynasty"). The ethnic terms Danaans and Achaeans are synonymous in the Homeric Epics describing all the Mycenaean Greeks, but originally they were the names of two different Greek tribes which were gradually merged to form the dominant tribe among the Mycenaeans…"
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(part 2)
"Those who do not consider Theseus as an historical figure, at least in Attica, assume that his figure came from the "fusion" of different heroes of the Mycenaean Age. The renowned British philologist R. Graves assumes that there were three heroes with this name: a Lapith from Thessaly, a Troezenian and a Marathonian, thereby agreeing with another scholar, J. Thompson. The latter considers that the fusion of the three heroes called Theseus in one Theseus was completed before the 6th century BC, when the Boutadae, a Lapith clan being the aristocratic leaders in Athens, contrasted the ‘Athenian' Theseus (actually a Lapith hero) to the ‘Dorian' Hercules (actually an Achaean hero of Tiryns whom the Dorians appropriated). Some German scholars consider Theseus as the personification of the Ionic Greek people or of the Athenian state, that is to say a "constructed" political personification in confrontation with the Dorian hero Hercules.
The British scholar J. Ward tried to prove the existence of a historical Theseus who lived in the Bronze Age, and seems to have convinced many scholars on his theory. At the time of the Peisistratids (6th c BC), Theseus is already the "national hero" of the Athenians and until the end of Antiquity he remained the personification of the Athenian reputation and power. But the view of Thompson and Graves for the existence of three heroes called "Theseus" can be no longer considered valid, because the other two, Theseus of Marathon and the one of Troezen are also of Lapith origin, that is to say identical to Theseus of Thessaly (I have mentioned the arguments in favor of this identification in an article of mine on the Lapiths in a Greek journal, unfortunately not available to the English-speaking readers). The original hero Theseus was a sole figure whose myths (adventures) were distributed by the Lapiths in different places of Lapith colonization in mainland Greece. Thus came about the "different" Theseus figures that over the centuries were "fused" again in one Theseus, an Athenian this time…"
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Hope you enjoy!
Amicalement
Armand