21st Century Classical Greek -- ergative 2

Book I section 12.3 may have another ergative structure; it’s worth examining.

Βοιωτοί τε γὰρ οἱ νῦν ἑξηκοστῷ ἔτει μετὰ Ἰλίου ἅλωσιν ἐξ Ἄρνης ἀναστάντες ὑπὸ Θεσσαλῶν τὴν νῦν μὲν Βοιωτίαν, πρότερον δὲ Καδμηίδα γῆν καλουμένην ᾤκισαν (ἦν δὲ αὐτῶν καὶ ἀποδασμὸς πρότερον ἐν τῇ γῇ ταύτῃ, ἀφ᾽ ὧν καὶ ἐς Ἴλιον ἐστράτευσαν), Δωριῆς τε ὀγδοηκοστῷ ἔτει ξὺν Ἡρακλείδαις Πελοπόννησον ἔσχον.

Anastantes is executive voice. It comes from histimi. The verb has a second aorist, which is used here in a personal gerundive. And it has the hupo plus -on case of an animate agent.

So an ergative structure doesn’t need a conjugated verb. It’s very possible to use a less-definite personal gerundive with a middle-transitive structure. It just makes the action doubly descriptive, since an intransitive has descriptive nuances.

Notice the last sentence in this subsection. If the “Dorian invasion” represents the spread of Indo-European Greek over the Peloponnese, the event that Thucydides is talking about happened about 1100 BCE. About this same time, turmoil drove the Israelites to build settlements on bare ground (instead of clearing and rebuilding on an old tell) in the highlands of the Holy Land. The turmoil included the raid by Merneptah for grain that is recorded on his stele, naming the ethnic group Israel as living in the Holy Land alongside the Canaanites. The Midianite attack recorded in Judges in the story of Gideon is another example. Finally, the Peleshet/Ahiyyawa attack that took the Ark of the Covenant captive was a backwash from the attacks that destroyed Troy VIIb, Hattusas, and Ugarit.

The hilltop settlements have two common features. They have locally made pottery; the Israelites did not trade with the lowlands for this necessary item. They stayed on their hilltops so long that differing pottery styles developed in the north and south extremities.

The other feature is that not one of these settlements has pig bones anywhere. Wild pigs were a staple (2%) of the diet the entire length of the Mediterranean coast from Neanderthal times to 900 BCE, when their bones were found in an abbatoir in Dor. They still exist; in 2010 CE, in the 7^th year of a drought, wild pigs started attacking crops.

But in the 1100s BCE, the hilltop settlements not only didn’t eat wild pig, they didn’t use it for anything else – if they had taken off and sold the skins the bones would have gone into the trash along with the meat. By isolating themselves from normal commerce, they had no opportunity to sell the pigs to lowlanders. If their dogs dragged bones in from the fields, those were trashed somewhere – but not in the middens.

The Israelites are the only population of that time known to prohibit pigs. That is, if Torah was in force at the time. My blog lays out the evidence that it was, and my book Narrating the Torah goes into more detail.