Achaeans (Homer)

Other common names used in Homer are Danaans (/ˈdæneɪ.ənz/; Δαναοί Danaoi; used 138 times in the Iliad) and Argives (/ˈɑːrɡaɪvz/; Ἀργεῖοι Argeioi; used 182 times in the Iliad) while Panhellenes (Πανέλληνες Panhellenes, "All of the Greeks") and Hellenes (/ˈhɛliːnz/;[4] Ἕλληνες Hellenes) both appear only once;[5] All of the aforementioned terms were used synonymously to denote a common Greek identity.

According to Pausanias, writing in the 2nd century AD, the term "Achaean" was originally given to those Greeks inhabiting the Argolis and Laconia.

[11] Eduard Meyer, disagreeing with Beloch, instead put forth the suggestion that the real-life Achaeans were mainland pre-Dorian Greeks.

William Prentice disagreed with both, noting archeological evidence suggests the Achaeans instead migrated from "southern Asia Minor to Greece, probably settling first in lower Thessaly" probably prior to 2000 BC.

[14] In the earliest reference to this land, a letter outlining the treaty violations of the Hittite vassal Madduwatta,[15] it is called Ahhiya.

Emil Forrer, a Swiss Hittitologist who worked on the Boghazköy tablets in Berlin, said the Achaeans of pre-Homeric Greece were directly associated with the term "Land of Ahhiyawa" mentioned in the Hittite texts.

[17] His conclusions at the time were challenged by other Hittitologists (i.e. Johannes Friedrich in 1927 and Albrecht Götze in 1930), as well as by Ferdinand Sommer, who published his Die Ahhijava-Urkunden (The Ahhiyawa Documents) in 1932.

[21] During the 5th year of Pharaoh Merneptah, a confederation of Libyan and northern peoples is supposed to have attacked the western delta.

Homer mentions an Achaean attack upon the delta, and Menelaus speaks of the same in Book IV of the Odyssey to Telemachus when he recounts his own return home from the Trojan War.

Cadmus from Phoenicia, Danaus from Egypt, and Pelops from Anatolia each gained a foothold in mainland Greece and were assimilated and Hellenized.