Myth or Reality: Gods and Heroes

By Frank Ledwidge
Albanians are fond of fanciful stories linking their language to other ancient tongues. ‘Did you know’ a friend told me “that Illyrian and the language of the old mysterious Etruscans are very closely related? The Tosks, you see, are the ‘Tuscani’?”
I did not know this and doubted it, as most of these stories are demonstrably false. Indeed when I presented to him an Etruscan vocabulary of 1000 words, thanks to Google, and asked him to pick 10 that looked similar to Albanian he was stumped. Besides the Etruscans would not have recognised the Italic word Tuscani to apply to them. They called themselves ‘Rasenna’.
Even without fanciful legends the Albanian language is a fascinating thing. It is a language pared to the bone. Bearing in mind that for most of their recent history abstract concepts and the luxury of extended philosophical speculation have been a luxury that few Albanians could afford this is not surprising. The first written documents in Albanian appear only in the late 15th Century anyway, and there are precious few of them. It was not until recently that the literacy rate rose above 20% in one of the few positive results of the Hoxha regime. Those who were literate would have little to read in their own language in any event.
Spare it may be but look at what this ancient culture of the Illyrians and their language might have produced. We don’t have anything left of their literature, and what history we have was written by a conquering power, Rome. But we do have some distant echoes.
One of the more beautiful Albanian girls names is Aferdita- literally ‘near (afer) to the day (dita)- or dawn. And what appears just before the dawn and indeed at dusk? The ‘Morning Star’ -the one we call the planet Venus? Venus was the Roman name for the ‘Greek’ Aphrodite – Aferdita. I remember discussing this issue with an eminent archaeologist, the former Director of the Hewlett Packard Foundation in Butrint Louise Schofield, the author of the leading text on the Myceneans. She said that it all sounded interesting, but do we know that the ancient Greeks called the morning star after the goddess of love. Was that planet in fact Aphrodite? A very good question, and the answer is yes, she was. The morning and evening ‘star’ was indeed Aphrodite.
How much more beautiful, not to say compelling is ‘Dawn’ than the Greek-contrived myth that Aphrodite is a rough approximation of ‘Born from the foam’. This is not the only thing the Greeks may have purloined from Albanian history and language.
Kathy Imholz is, I hope she will not mind me saying so, one of the legendary foreign scholars who occasionally come to Albania and stay. Her primary field is the law, but when it comes to the Albanian language, she is no slouch -indeed she is something of an authority. A conversation with Kathy is a rare pleasure, rather like reading a well-ordered, fascinating and compelling book.
‘Did you know that in the old Albanian ‘Athana'(phonetic) means “the Word”, or literally “that which is spoken”.’ She says. ‘And we know, do we not, that Athena herself was, born from the head of Zeus. Out she sprung, they say, fully armed. Words too are born from the heads of men. Is it entirely unreasonable to believe that the word which we now pronounce ‘Athena’ is nothing more than a reflection of the sad realisation that words are all that men, even male Gods can give birth to? But more than that does this add meat to the bones of the idea that there may be more to the old Gods than traditional classical scholarship tells us’.
‘One other thing’ she went on ‘I believe that “Odisea” derives from an old Albanian word “wanderer.”‘ And what is just down the coast from Albania but the island of Odysseus, the greatest of ancient wanderers himself, Ithaca.
It is likely that the Illyrians, who transmitted to us the Albanian language, or indeed some of their ancestors were here before even the Greeks, whoever the ‘Greeks’ really were. Was it these progenitors who gave us some of the names of the famous Greek gods and heroes? Were the old gods ever really ‘Greek’ at all?