title: Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition
author:  Margalit Finkelberg 
description: '... fascinating and rewarding ... This is a very informative, carefully up to date, and stimulating book, clearly written, helpful with difficult concepts, and provided with supporting maps, plans, and diagrams.' Cosmos<br /><br />'This book is a work of substantial scholarly attainment. The argument ranges widely, but without superficiality, into ethnography, comparative philology, archaeology, myth and into other domains. We have here an original study of the kind that compels critical thinking without, however, provoking protest. ... This is a praiseworthy study, and it deserves many attentive readers who should be capable not only of leaping over barriers between subjects but also of thinking laterally.' G. L. Huxley, Trinity College Dublin
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  GREEKS AND PRE-GREEKS
  By systematically confronting Greek tradition of the Heroic Age
  with the evidence of both linguistics and archaeology, Margalit
  Finkelberg proposes a multi-disciplinary assessment of the ethnic,
  linguistic and cultural situation in Greece in the second millennium
  BC. The main thesis of this book is that the Greeks started their
  history as a multi-ethnic population group consisting of both Greek-
  speaking newcomers and the indigenous population of the land, and
  that the body of ‘Hellenes’ as known to us from the historic period
  was a deliberate self-creation. The book addresses such issues as the
  structure of heroic genealogy, the linguistic and cultural identity of
  the indigenous population of Greece, the patterns of marriage be-
  tween heterogeneous groups as they emerge in literary and historical
  sources, the dialect map of Bronze Age Greece, the factors respon-
  sible for the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation and, ﬁnally, 