Danaus - Another Son?
Digging into the Secret Origins for Javan's 'Lost Son' and Mythological Hero Founder
There is a Greek legend that tells the story of a King of Libya, named Danaus. Danaus was forced by the King of Aegyptus (Egypt) to betroth his fifty daughters to Aegyptus’s fifty sons. Opting instead to flee from Egypt, in quite a chivalrous and daring act, Danaus builds the world’s very first ship in order to flee to none other than Argos, located in Greece. The supposed reason for this choice of Argos was that Danaus himself was descended from “Io”, wife of Zeus. Choosing to find safety with his brethren in Argos, under the protection of King Pelasgus - yet again certifying this Pelasgus/Pelasgian to Japheth connection. Despite doing so, Aegyptus arrives to take Danaus’s daughters and in order to spare the Argives - the collective term for the Greeks of Argos - battle, Danaus opts to hand over his fifty daughters. Not one to lose a negotiation, and clearly valuing his daughter's choice of groom at a time when doing so was frowned upon, Danaus ‘orders’ his daughters to kill all of their husbands. Only one daughter, Hypermnestra, refuses to slay her husband Lynceus since he honored her wish to remain a virgin. Danaus, furious with his daughter, has the Argive courts deal with the matter, and after what I’m sure was a stellar oratory performance by the God Aphrodite herself, Hypermnestra was spared. Afterword, Hypermnestra and Lynceus begin what would be called the “Danaid” dynasty, and Aegyptus and Danaus fumble about romping around the Mediterranean (in some accounts, Danaus lands for a period in Rhodes).
This epic clearly provides evidence that in the Greek canon the name “Danaus'' is given to at least one of the founders of a tribe of Greeks around what we would presume to be Argos, and quite a prolific one whose daughters marry and spread throughout the ancient world. It cannot be a coincidence that the Doric Greeks both inhabited Argos and Rhodes - a stop over spot for Danaus, but also occupy Crete which is the closest Greek land nearing to Danaus’s supposed kingdom of Libya. If these ‘Danaans’ - one of three primary names in Homer’s Iliad given to the combined collective of Greek tribes that formed their military during the Trojan War - did indeed come from Libya, or Egypt, they would have easily stopped over at Crete and Rhodes before arriving in Argos.
One interesting detail within the epic of Danaus is associating him with the first ever built ship, and presumably founding seafaring as a result. Danaus was the son of Belus, King of Egypt and the daughter of the river god Nilus, where the name for the river Nile finds etymological link. We believe the earliest ships come from the Nile based on archeological finds in Egypt called the Abydos Boats dated to between 3000 BCE during Egypt’s First Dynasty, correlating with a pre-Flood period. Among the finds was the Khufu ship, a fully intact 142 foot long “Solar barque” - a type of Egyptian funerary barge used during the transport of the dead. These boats were used as transport for the Egyptian pharaohs, and elite during their transition to the afterlife, and were sparingly used in other contexts during the early period.
By the Eighteenth dynasty around 1500 BCE, Egyptian boats became much larger, with more developed sails capable of carrying cargo by sea long distances. Attached is a relief in the mortuary complex of Hatshepsut depicting her “Expedition to Punt” down the red sea. These ships were often built out of Lebanese cedar, traded to the Egyptians from the proto-Phoenicians of Sidon and Tyre, themselves often credited as inventors of seafaring technologies. The ships of Phoenicia mirror the Egyptian design, either owing to a gradual co-development, or a shared common ancestor in the form of the possible Nilus. What is clear is that Egypt and the Nile are central to the very first ships created to make long distance journeys across the Mediterranean. The increasing complexity of these ships would have made it possible for a figure like Danaus to flee across the sea, since for Aegyptus to catch Danaus he would need enough ships to capture the entirety of Danaus' massive group. This is precisely what we see in the story, as eventually Aegyptus catches up to Danaus, presumably after having built new ships following Danaus’s seizure of the only ships in Egypt.
Danaus making his way from Libya to Crete then Argos is an unlikely path due to the trade winds in the area, and the ships deep water capabilities. What is more probable is that Danaus made his way around the eastern Mediterranean, starting in Egypt and not Libya, hence him having taken Aegyptus’s ships in the parable. We can assume that Danaus might have taken refuge with his father-in-law Agenor, King of Tyre, but being a military campaign away from Egypt would have made it unsafe to stay long. Danaus could have either gone north along the coast to Cilicia in Anatolia, or skipped over to Cyprus then reached Anatolia’s southern coast of Pamphylia where he would have found a group of Greeks.1 Interior Anatolia was a fairly populated region of Luwians, with a language and culture to foreign from his own, but much of the coast was being settled by related Greek peoples.
On the border between Cilicia and Pamphylia, we find a small island currently of the name “Dana”. This island contains what is the oldest ship harbor dated to the year 1200 BCE, that recent archeological analysis has asserted is the largest pre-classical harbor capable of building over 274 simultaneous ships.2 Plenty of ships for Danaus and his kin. In classical antiquity they called this island “Pithyussa” meaning Isle of Pines, but we know this is a later name since the Babylonian King Neriglissar describes it as ‘Pitusu’, attacking it and being resisted by over six thousand soldiers. Such a large number of people on a tiny island is quite strange, and implies the harbor was more important than current scholarly analysis has explored. The island has gone through so many name changes, with locals in the 1800s calling it Manavat, a completely unrelated word to either of the previous two. Unable to find any discussions of the etymological origins of the modern name for the isle, ‘Dana’, I will have to leave this as slightly unresolved.
What we can know for certain is the name “Adana”, one of the largest major cities in Cilicia dating back over five thousand year's to the year 3000 BCE, with a well-attested history stretching all the way through the modern era. Luwians, Hittites, Kizzuwatnians, Neo-Hittites, Assyrians, Greeks and even Persians all left their mark on Cilicia and Adana. Needless to say, like the region continues to be today, Cilicia was a major point of geopolitical disputes. Inhabitants of Adana were called “Danuna” and scholars such as leading Egyptologist I. E. S. Edwards posited a Greek connection to the city of Adana through the name ‘Danaoi’, a name for Greeks during the Trojan War.3 It is extremely likely, almost certain, that the Turk’s applied the name Adana to the island of Dana at some point in time, or they share a similar etymological origin in Indo-European root ‘a danu’ meaning ‘on the river’.4 There is no water on Dana island. Therefore it is likely Adana morphed into being applied to the closest island to Adana, or the “Island OF (a)Dana”. Helpfully the Assyrian term for Cyprus was "Iadana" showing the region generally was referred to as some cognate with "Dana".
At first there might be a presumption that the Trojan War is a mythological event recorded in the Iliad, however modern archeologists have confirmed the existence of a “Troia” roughly where Troy is supposed to have existed. This leads credence to any historic accounts in the Iliad. While most readers would know the city by its common name “Troy” or “Troia”, an alternative name for this city in Greek is “Ilion”, alternatively “Illios”, helping clarify the origin of the term Iliad. The name “Ilion” is likely a corruption of the earlier Hittite name “Wilusa” or “Truwisa”, an extremely well attested city in Hittite archeological records. In these fragments the name of the city is rendered as “Wilusiya”, part of a broader coalition of cities that attempted to oppose the dominant Hittite empire in 1400 BCE.5
In Hittite records this coalition is termed the Assuwa league getting its name from the major kingdom leading the coalition, Arzawa from where we get the term “Asia”. In addition to Troy and Arzawa among the league are Kispuwa, Adadura, Lugga, Taruisa which is separate from “Troy”, or Wilusiya in Hittite. Kispuwan interestingly sounds awfully similar to the previously mentioned Kizzuwatna, and Adadura is claimed by Aristotle to have been settled by Thracians and Cimmerians, close Indo-European relatives of Javan. Lugga is a well attested polity, or region called the “Lukka Lands”, and we will discuss in later chapters these Lukka in conjunction with their Bronze Age diplomacy. Taruisa is likely the city of Tarhuntassa, possibly linked with the Tauri who assimilated with the Scythians in the 3rd century BCE. These are the same people who went on to rule over a Greek speaking Pontic Kingdom.
Circling back to Wilusa, the city was known to be dominated by two royal branches, that of the Trojans and Dardanoi. The Dardanoi give their name to the well known Dardanelles, and predated the Trojan branch, with Kings such as Priam being reportedly Dardanides. Much of the mythological knowledge of the story comes to us from perhaps the most famous roman poet Virgil and his Aeneid, written about a man named Aeneas who flees the fall of Troy and makes his way to Italy. It is through this story that Caesar, as well as his successor Augustus, founder of the Roman Empire, claim royal descent from the houses of Troy. While it is only Caesar, and not the Latins, who claim descent from Troy this story provides us an example of the ever complex ethnic identity in the ancient world.
At this point a perceptive etymologist might have picked up on the name “Dardanoi”, removed the vowels to get DRDN, and then recognized there was likely some rhotacization occurring between the R-D, which happens when consonants are placed together in certain dialects. After erasing the medial R we are left with D-D-N, a clear reference to Javan’s youngest son Dodanim. Since Dodanim is the fourth, and youngest son, we will leave him for last, and next discuss Tarshish.
Danaus is not a traditional son of Javan, but there is no reason such a figure wouldn’t “fit” somewhere on the generations of Noah, even if coming further down the line as a great-great grandchild of sorts. We must keep in mind how many of these figures may have had more children than those specifically listed, especially female children completely unmentioned. These members would produce their own lineages, with an untold number of descendants that would emerge with their own unique identities throughout history. Like the later Macedonians who merge into ethnic Greeks around the year 337 BCE - well after the finalization of the Table of Nations, and the second variant of the Table found in Chronicles finished sometime between 600-500 BCE - Danaus may have been a later child that merges into the Greek population, after the timeframe of the Table.
This weeks post is a deviation from the “expected” schedule on the Table of Nations and is one of the rare times we will “add” any member to the Table. I would find it interesting to create a prospective list of members, and there are groups, and ethnicities included in later events of the Torah that ground themselves in descendants that have splintered off to form their own tribes, and nations. Previously, the example of Madai including most of the references to Persia, but also the later populations such as Kurds, and wider Iranian groups is an example of a theoretically “child” that could be added onto the Table. Danaus uniquely offers an important look at the way Greeks natively viewed their own ethnicity, even if he had little political relevancy to the Hebrews of the era.
Thank you again for reading, and I hope you gained a deeper understanding of Torah through reading this weeks post. Please like, comment, and subscribe if you enjoyed, and share with anyone you may think would also enjoy.
Colvin, Stephen (2013). A Brief History of Ancient Greek. John Wiley & Sons. p. 84. ISBN 978-1-118-61072-5.
Edwards, Iorwerth Eiddon Stephen (15 November 1977). The Cambridge Ancient History. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521086912
This root being the same root shared by three of Europe's major rivers, the Don, Dnieper, and famously the Danube, all three being Indo-European tribal settlement areas.
Coalitions of city-states being a persistent theme of Greek culture.