Pelasgians

The name Pelasgians (Ancient Greek: Πελασγοί, romanized: Pelasgoí, singular: Πελασγός, Pelasgós) was used by Classical Greek writers to refer either to the predecessors of the Greeks, or to all the inhabitants of Greece before the emergence of the Greeks. In general, "Pelasgian" has come to mean more broadly all the indigenous inhabitants of the Aegean Sea region and their cultures, and British historian Peter Green comments on it as "a hold-all term for any ancient, primitive and presumably indigenous people in the Greek world".

In the Classic period, enclaves under that name survived in several locations of mainland Greece, Crete, and other regions of the Aegean. Populations identified as "Pelasgian" spoke a language or languages that at the time Greeks ambivalently identified as "barbarian", though some ancient writers nonetheless described the Pelasgians as Greeks. A tradition also survived that large parts of Greece had once been Pelasgian before being Hellenized. These parts fell largely, though far from exclusively, within the territory which by the 5th century BC was inhabited by those speakers of ancient Greek who were identified as Ionians and Aeolians.

Much like all other aspects of the "Pelasgians", their ethnonym (Pelasgoi) is of extremely uncertain provenance and etymology. Michael Sakellariou collects fifteen different etymologies proposed for it by philologists and linguists during the last two hundred years, though he admits that "most [...] are fanciful".

An ancient etymology based on mere similarity of sounds links pelasgos to pelargos 'stork', postulating that the Pelasgians were migrants like storks, possibly from Arcadia, where they nest. Aristophanes deals effectively with this etymology in his comedy The Birds. One of the laws of "the storks" in the satirical Cloud Cuckoo Land (Ancient Greek: Νεφελοκοκκυγία, romanized: Nephelokokkugía), playing upon the Athenian belief that they were originally Pelasgians, is that grown-up storks must support their parents by migrating elsewhere and conducting warfare.

Gilbert Murray summarized the derivation from pelas gē 'neighboring land', current at his time: "If Pelasgoi is connected with πέλας", 'near', the word would mean 'neighbor' and would denote the nearest strange people to the invading Greeks.

Julius Pokorny derived Pelasgoi from *pelag-skoi 'flatland-inhabitants'; specifically, "inhabitants of the Thessalian plain". He details a previous derivation, which appears in English at least as early as William Ewart Gladstone's Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age; if the Pelasgians were not Indo-Europeans, the name in this derivation must have been assigned by the Hellenes. Ernest Klein argued that the ancient Greek word for 'sea', pelagos, and the Doric word plagos 'side' (which is flat), shared the same root, *plāk-, and that *pelag-skoi therefore meant 'the sea men', where the sea is flat.

Literary analysis has been ongoing since classical Greece, when the writers of those times read previous works on the subject. No definitive answers were ever forthcoming by this method; it rather served to better define the problems. The method perhaps reached a peak in the Victorian era when new methods of systematic comparison began to be applied in philology. Typical of the era is the study by William Ewart Gladstone, who was a trained classicist. Unless further ancient texts come to light, advances on the subject cannot be made. Therefore the most likely source of progress regarding the Pelasgians continues to be archaeology and related sciences.

The definition of the term Pelasgians in ancient sources was fluid. The Pelasgians were variously described by ancient authors as Greek, semi-Greek, non-Greek and pre-Greek. There are no emic perspectives of Pelasgian identity. According to an analysis by historian Tristn Lambright of Jacksonville State University: