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Updated: June 14, 2025
The migration of nations in the ancient world was from east to west; the Basques or Iberians, the Celts, the Germans and the Pelasgi, appeared in succession. In the New World similar migrations flowed from north to south.
They were not a petty horde, but a vast race, doubtless divided, like every migratory people, into numerous tribes, differing in rank, in civilization , and in many peculiarities of character. The Pelasgi in one country might appear as herdsmen or as savages; in another, in the same age, they might appear collected into cities and cultivating the arts.
All about the coast of Asia Minor they lived, while that Hittite power was ruling the interior; and, intermixed with Phoenician trading-posts, they held the great islands of Crete and Cyprus and the shores of Sicily and Italy. What shall we call them? Were they Dorians, or Heraclidae, Achaeans or Pelasgi?
They are purely and simply Mycenaean, or rather Minoan, Greeks of the pre-Hellenic period Pelasgi, that is to say.
Such was my memory, and this has been confirmed by a reference to my notebooks which I have made in consequence of your note. I think his estimate of character did not always agree with that of Tacitus. Other subjects which I recollect as having been expounded were the relation of Latin to the Celtic group of languages, and that everlasting question, the relation of the Etruscans and the Pelasgi.
I have already expressed my belief that the Pelasgi were not a barbarous race, speaking a barbarous tongue, but that they were akin to the Hellenes, who spoke the Grecian language, and are considered the proper Grecian family. Deucalion, the founder of the Hellenes, was of Pelasgic origin son of Prometheus, and nephew of Atlas, king of the Pelasgic Arcadia.
To the primitive ages, to the reign of the Pelasgi, correspond the subterraneous excavations of Macri, and the Phrygian monuments of Seïdï Gazi; to the Babylonian power, the ruins of Bagdad, and the artificial mountains of Van; to the Hellenic period, the baths, the amphitheatres, and the ruins which strew the coast of the Archipelago; to the Roman empire, the military roads which traverse in every direction the whole Peninsula; to the Greeks of the middle ages, the church of Iznik.
There is no reason to suppose the Hellenes more enlightened and civilized than the Pelasgi; but they seem, if only by the record of their conquests, to have been a more stern, warlike, and adventurous branch of the Grecian family.
In the great migrations of races, the Itali bad separated themselves from their brethren the Pelasgi, who had remained in Epirus, and, continuing their march, they peopled Switzerland and crossed the Alps, settling down in the fertile plains watered by the Po, where it is easy even now to prove their presence.
So Perseus sailed away with his Phoenicians, round Hydrea and Sunium, past Marathon and the Attic shore, and through Euripus, and up the long Euboean sea, till he came to the town of Larissa, where the wild Pelasgi dwelt.
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