The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

174
THE BRONZE AGE AND THE CELTIC WORLD
the interpolation is but the substitution of a fictitious name for an unnamed son or
daughter, or when tradition states that C is the grandson of A, a name B has been
invented to fill in the missing intermediate ancestor.
I propose, therefore, to examine some of these pedigrees, and will choose those of
undoubted Minoan origin. Ridgeway'' has suggested that the Minoans traced their
descent from Poseidon, as the " Achaeans " did from Zeus or Ares. There are three
well-known famihes that do so, the Neleids of Pylos, the Danaans of the Argolid and
the Cadmeians of Bceotia ; in the two former cases there is ample evidence that those
places received a population from Crete either in the first or early in the second Late
Minoan period.
The Neleid pedigree is meagre and does not help us, but those of the Danaans and
Cadmeians are fuller, and it is claimed by later writers that the families were connected.
The first part of the genealogy is unquestionably fictitious, and designed to show a
connection between the two families, but it is worth looking at.
Danaus= .
Poseidon =Libya.
Behxs=Anchinoe. AgenoT=Telephassa.
. iEgyptus=
. . Csidmus=Harmonia Phoenix Cilix Europa=ZEUS.
49 daus. Hypermnestra—Lynceus 49 sons. Minos. Rhadamanthus. Sarpedon.
Here we find the late genealogist inventing a pedigree to connect the traditional
families of the Argolid, Thebes and Cnossos with the epon3mious heroes of Phcenicia,
CiHcia and Egypt, and tracing them all from Poseidon. This seems to indicate that
popular tradition believed all these famihes and peoples to have been connected, and
that they were worshippers of the sea-god.
Let us now turn to the Danaan pedigree. That the fifty daughters of Danaus
were mythical admits of no doubt, and the same is true of their fifty cousins, but it is
possible that tradition is correct in claiming that one of them, Hypermnestra,
7 Ridgeway (1901).