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Chapter II The Illyrians
The Historical Context. The written ancient sources tell us the Illyrians, which were one of the biggest people of the peninsula, inhabited the western part of the Balkans in olden times. The northern border of the Illyrians extended up to the branches of the Danube, the Sava and the Drava. To the south, including the territory of pre-historical Epirus, it ran up to the Bay of Ambrakia (Preveza). The Morava and the Vardar rivers were its natural borders to the east and the coasts of the Adriatic and Ionian Seas were its western boundaries.
The geographical closeness of Illyria to the two greatest ancient civilisations, the Hellenic and the Roman, and its later inclusion in the early Byzantine culture played a primary role in the economic and social development and, consequently, the political growth as well.
During the V-IV Centuries of our era, the Illyrian state, which was a monarchy ruled by the representatives of the slave-owning aristocracy, was completely formed. We know only fragments of the political history of the Illyrian state from the ancient written sources, which speak of the relations and wars with the neighbouring countries (Macedonia, the State of Epirus) and the wars against Rome.
The Illyrians’ Origin. The question of the origin of the Illyrians and the historical process of their formation continues to be one of the fundamental problems of the ancient history of the Albanians and at the same time a problem for the Balkan prehistory because its solution is related to the origin of the other ancient peoples of the Balkans. Linguists, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists and ethnographers have been treating this subjects in their research and studies from one period to the other, bringing its solution ever more closer.
Two fundamental theses have been crystallized in the course of the solution of Illyrian ethno-genesis issue. According to the first thesis, the older thesis, the Illyrians were a population, which came from the north at a relatively later time. The other thesis holds that the Illyrians and their culture are a product of an internal autochthonous development, which happened in the course of the second and first millennium B.C. in the western part of the Balkan Peninsula.
Historians, archaeologists, linguists and others scholars have expressed their opinions on the origin of the Illyrians. They say that the Illyrians were known as new arrivals in the territory when they were identified in the historical time. The ideas of the supporters of the northern thesis contradict each or offer very little collectively when it comes to pinpointing the earliest territories which they came from as well as the time of their arrival.
The scholars who have backed the view of the autochthonous formation of the Illyrians are numerous. Since the middle of the XX Century, J. G. Hahn has laid out the thesis that the Albanians are the successors of the Illyrians and the latter descended from the Pellasgians. The thesis expressed the autochthony and antiquity of the Illyrian population was also embraced and supported by the studies of numerous foreign Albanologists during the second half of the XX Century.
Albania’s historiography following World War Two devoted special attention to the study of the origin of the Illyrians. Archaeology led the way thanks to important discoveries of the culture of the Bronze and Iron Ages. The archaeological material found in the tombs of Mat (Middle Albania), Pazhok (Central Abania), Vajza (South-Western Albania), Dropulli (Southern Albania) proved that the Illyrians were not only the carriers of the Iron Age culture in the territory of Albania but also they had lived in the same territory even in the Bronze Age.
The Archaeological Basis of the Illyrians Autochthony. To solve problems as complex as this one, it is necessary to coordinate the conclusions of the archaeological, anthropological, linguistic, ethnographic and historical data. This feat is difficult to achieve either because of the insufficiency of the factual material from one field of study or the other or the various concepts existing between the scholars of those fields about the importance or the value of the sources of this or that field. Some foreign linguists think that archaeological data can in no way provide sufficient historical data to study the ethno-genesis process of a people and that allegedly they cannot bear testimony to their ethnic community. On the other hand, the archaeologists come to the defence of their own sources and would dismiss as unfounded all the theses the linguists have been building for the prehistory epoch without written sources.
In the current status of scholarly study, archaeology has shown and continues to show its priority in examining the ethnic issues of the prehistory epoch both in comparison to linguistics, which we can say has lagged behind due to its poor and limited data, as well as anthropology, which has not yet developed sufficiently, partly due to the lack of skeletons from the pre-history period.
When one takes up the issue of the origin of the Illyrians, the first problem, which needs solving, is the cultural continuity from the early bronze period to the middle and later to the late bronze and iron epoch.
Let us consider as solved (and to a certain extent it is) the problem of the cultural continuity during the Bronze and Iron Age in the western territory of the Balkan Peninsula in the lands where the proper Illyrians had spread. But is this fact sufficient, or this preliminary conclusion on this problem? Is it necessary to prove the cultural continuity since the beginnings of the Bronze Age and say that the process of the creation of the Illyrian ethnos starts there?
The continuity of living in a definite territory constitutes one of the basic premises for the formation and consolidation of a culture, an ethnos or a language. As a consequence, the study of the cultural continuity constitutes the first condition and the key support in treating the problem of the ethno-genesis of the Illyrians. However, we think that concentrating only on the proof supplied in the favour of the cultural continuity means to be looking in a narrow and insufficient manner at the long and complicated process of the formation of the Illyrian ethnos.
In the Albanian archaeological literature, enough data has been offered to prove the uninterrupted cultural continuity in the land of our country since the early Bronze Age. This has served to back up the view that the Illyrian ethno-genesis starts here. According to this view, the beginnings of the autochthony coincide with the beginning of the ethnos. Closely related to this conclusion, the link between autochthony and the formation of the ethnos is the first issue that comes up for discussion.
The formation of the Illyrian ethnos could not be understood without autochthony and the fact that they develop parallel to each other but their starting points do not coincide in time. Autochthony has been in existence for a longer stretch of time whereas the true Illyrian ethnos was formed on the basis of autochthony only after it has been existing for a long time.
In addition to the study of the cultural continuity, a special attention should be devoted to the knowledge and study of the socio-economic premises that led to the birth and development of the Illyrian ethnos.
Interpreting the data we have accumulated for the bronze period, we have expressed the idea that in the middle Bronze Age we notice a visible economic and social development, a qualitative new epoch that objectively led to the birth of the Illyrian ethnos.
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Treating the Illyrian ethno-genesis as well as the Albanian genesis as a very long historical process of about 1,000 years is a question that has a principled importance in solving these issues. The Illyrian ethno-genesis has developed in the course of various developmental stages, which, despite being different from each other, are part of a single process.
The features of the formation of the Illyrian ethnic individuality in a definite epoch have been conditioned first of all by the scale of economic and social development and have grown on the basis of the three main already known principles of differentiation, integration and assimilation. The differentiation process characterized the early period of the flourishing of the gender community when the development scale was low while the processes of integration, conception, assimilation and converging were especially characteristic of the period of the disintegration of the clan community and birth of the slave-owning society. In the territory of the Western Balkans, the process of differentiation has predominated the early bronze period. The cultures of this period, created as a consequence of the intertwining of the anase eneolith with the cultures brought by the concentrations of the Indo-European peoples, have in this phase of their formation a more general Balkan character and we cannot be looking for distinctive ethnic features in them. During the middle Bronze Age, the process of differentiation continued to deepen but at the same time the integration process kicked in. These processes, which were conditioned by the relative autochthony and a series of progressive steps in some areas of the economy, as we have stated above, led to the birth of the Illyrian ethnos.
In the late Bronze Age, the process of the union of smaller communities into bigger communities and, as a consequence, a broader Illyrian community with common cultural, cult and linguistic features was formed at the end of the Bronze Age.
The process of assimilation started to play a bigger role and assume priority during the Iron Age in the XI-V Centuries B.C. as a result of the higher economic and social development of the Illyrian territory. Thus, during the Iron Age, on the basis of autochthony, the Illyrians developed and consolidated their culture and language, which were finally getting crystallized. This epoch marks the stage of the biggest and most general cultural and ethnic flourishing of the Illyrians in the Iron Age when they occupied the whole western part of the Balkan peninsula, having the Greeks to the south, the Thracians to the east. They became one of the greatest peoples of the Balkans.
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