DISTRICTS

ASKANIA (district): the southern seaboard of Troy; the extension of this district, it could be said, was from the western tip of NERITON (Peljesac Peninsula), to the south, perhaps as far as Boka Kotorska.

II; 862:
And Phorcys and godlike Ascanius led the Phrygians from afar, from Ascania, and were eager to fight in the press of battle.

The name appears to be derived from an Illyrian root ask-, apparently meaning ‘seed’, ‘semen’, and by extension, ‘testicles’, which seems in keeping with the general phallic associations that might be given the Trojan seaboard. From the meaning of this name would be understood an intrinsic sense of fertility and progeny in the name of Ascanius, son of Aeneas, as the seed from which, in later times, Roman patricians could claim a Trojan pedigree.


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DARDANIA (district): the inland country without any definite borders, but may be understood in a more literal sense as the country contained within the Skamandros' (Neretva's) delta-valley.

XX; 215:
At the first Zeus, the cloud-gatherer, begat Dardanus, and he founded Dardania, for not yet was sacred Ilios builded in the plain to be a city of mortal men..


HYPOPLAKIA (district): Jezero Kuti; a subdivision of the district of DARDANIA (Neretva delta-valley).
    VI; 395:
    ..Andromache, daughter of great-hearted Etion, Etion that dwelt beneath wooded Placus, in Thebe Hypoplakia, and was lord over Cilician men; for it was his daughter that bronze-harnessed Hector had to wife.
The sense of the above lines is quite muddled, perhaps on account of an utter misunderstanding of the name Hypoplakia, 'Under Plakos', for it is in fact a compound-type word emphasizing a topographical feature, derived from the Illyrian roots sipo- connoting a very wet and marshy condition, + plak- dennoting 'cake' (and by extension a flattened islet), indeed an apt name for this marshy district.


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PHRYGIA (district): the northern seaboard of Troy; Phrygia extended, it could be said, from the western tip of Neriton (Peljesac), to the north, as far as the Sangarius (Krka).
    III; 184:
    Ere now have I [Priam] journeyed to the land of Phrygia... and there I saw in multitudes the Phrygian warriors... that were then encamped along the banks of Sangarius. For I, too, being their ally, was numbered among them on the day when the Amazones came, the peers of men.
    XXIV; 543:
    "And of thee, old sire, we hear that of old thou wast blest; how of all that toward the sea Lesbos, the seat of Macar, encloseth, and Phrygia in the upland, and the boundless Hellespont, over all these folk, men say, thou, old sire, wast preeminent by reason of thy wealth and thy sons."


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THYMBRA (district): Bacinsko Jezero. A subdivision of the district of Dardania (Neretva’s delta-valley). The name means ‘(place of) cisterns’, an allusion to the cistern-like indentations in the mountainside holding brackish and fresh water pools.

The district was occupied by the Danaan Camp, a fact not altogether unknown to Odysseus who received the following babbling reply from his terrified captive—

X; 430:
Then made answer to him Dolon, son of Eumedes: "...Towards the sea lie the Carians and the Paionians, with curved bows, and the Leleges and the Caucones, and the goodly Pelasgoi. And towards Thymbre fell the lot of the Lycians and lordly Mysians, and the Phrygians that fight from chariots and the Maionians, lord of chariots. ...here apart be the Thracians, newcomers, the outermost of all..."

Thymbre might be thought of as the topographical counterpart to Hypoplakia (Neretva delta's left bank).


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TROIA (TROY), 1 (the country):
Troy, the ‘country’, had no definitive borders,...SANGARIOD, KARDAMYLE, ZELEIA though one could say it extended as far as the Krka river in the north, Boka Kotorska in the south, and perhaps as far inland as Sarajevo in the northeast.

>geographical structure:

>foreigners and autochthonous tribes
Troy, as a cultural entity, was the product of both geographical accident and ethnic movements from the Balkan hinterlands and the world abroad into this area.


A BRIEF HISTORY OF TROY
History of Troy divided into three periods according to the discrete degree of historicity

I. EARLY PERIOD: > early tribes (echo in Pygmies and Cranes... Perhaps also in post Homeric Batrachomyomachia
>origins of name
Troy was named, so later Greek lore says, after Tros, one of the builders of Ilios (Gabela), but if so, this should then make the name 'Trosia', or because the land was 'cut' into 'three' principal districts of Phrygia (the northern seaboard), Askania (the southern seaboard), and Dardania (the hinterland).

II. MIDDLE PERIOD: >allies abroad
>influence in Tyrhenian
> its imprialism abroad, hence:
    I; 152:
    "I [Achilles] came not hither to fight by reason of the spearmen of Troy, seeing they are no whit at fault toward me. Never harried they in any wise my kine or my horses, nor ever in deep-soiled Phthia, nurse of men, did they lay waste the grain, for full many things lie between us—shadowy mountains and sounding sea. But thee, thou shameless one, did we follow hither, that thou mightest be glad, seeking to win recompense for Menelaus and for thee, thou dog-face, at the hands of the Trojans."
III. LATE PERIOD: Troy did not, apparently, enter into a gradual process of political or economic decline. Rather, it plunged suddenly into oblivion.
Troy, at its zenith near 1250 BC., was a mighty empire among other empires: Akhaiis (an Iberian folk?), established along Italy's western and southern coasts; Mykenai, in the southern Balkans; Crete, midway between the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, Hattussas, in north central Anatolia; and Egypt. But Troy was eventually humbled and brought to its knees, not only on the account of Helen, whom Paris took to Ilios (Gabela)1, but also because, one must think, the Trojan Alliance abroad represented something hateful to other neighbouring communities.
Archaeological evidence of the Bronze Age in the West Balkan (Adriatic) Coast suggests that Troy developed more-or-less without great cultural changes through the Early and Middle periods, though the Late period (also thought of as a 'Transmission Phase' from Bronze into the Iron Age) shows marked changes in the cultural continuity between the 12th and 10th centuries B.C., which square with a would-be Trojan War and the settlement of a new way of life, which one might think of as the ethnogenesis of a new Illyrian Order.
>Hattussas <spl>
>Akhaian expansionism
-Argo
-Trojan War
>Illyrian hegemony
THE TROY LEGEND

Troy was never-to-be again, though the pride of ancestry and glory of accomplishments was carried abroad:

Trojans who migrated into the souther Balkans (Hellas) finished plunging the already decadent Mycenaean societies into abysmal poverty. These were known as Dorians (or Dorani), a name, it seems, associated with the Illyrian tribe of Daorisii. It would not be until about the 8th century B.C., when Hellas began to acquire a cultural identity of its own, that the first maritime contacts between Hellenes and Illyrians were made on the once Trojan islands of the Adriatic Archipelago.
>Rome
>England
>France
Displaced Trojans migrated over the face of Europe. Legend has it that the Franks were so called from a certain King Francio, of Trojan stock, who settled on the banks of the Rhine where a duplicate Troy was founded but never completed. And, a certain Brutus, grand-son of Aeneas, is claimed to this day to have been the first British king, and founder of New Troy, now called London2.


1. An overlooked fact about Paris' rape of Helen being the cause of the Trojan War—which the Greek historian Herodotus thought was not truly sufficient cause for mounting a war—is that, Pelasgians, ancestors of the Trojans, founded Argos (Caieta, now Gaeta, in the Lazio) which was subsequently overrun by Achaians, and Helen was an Argive, and hence, of Trojan loyalty. So, it could be put, was not in fact Menelaus, her 'legitimate' husband, the raper?
2. Western-styled classicism makes these Troy-based European folk-legends the product of a centuries-later Roman literary tradition, which, it would seem, utterly disregards the transmission of Troy folk-tales directly from their source. The implication is that the Roman Troy-tradition—from which patricians could claim a Trojan pedigree—is not to be thought of as the direct line of transmission, but, rather, a variation, or an off-shoot, of emminently cthonic Troy-legends ultimately derived from the seed of Assaracus, the only son of Tros who did not emigrate from Troy.

ZELEIA [ZALEIA ?] (district); Jablanica Gorges: a distant hinterland subdivision of the district of DARDANIA (Neretva delta-valley)—

II; 824:
And they that dwelt in Zeleia beneath the nethermost foot of Ida, men of wealth, that drink the dark water of Aesepus, even the Troes, these again were led by the glorious son of Lycaon, Pandarus...
IV; 100:
“Nay, [says Athene] come, shoot thine arrow [Pandarus] at glorious Menelaus, and vow to Apollo, the wolf-born god, famed for his bow, that thou wilt sacrifice a glorious hecatomb of firstling lambs, when thou shalt come to thy home, the sacred heights of Zeleia.”

The name of this sub-district, as Zaleia, would render a Greek understanding as a ‘(place of) very great plunders’, thus suggesting that a tariff or some other duty was summarily exacted by Troes, suitably ensconced in the many crags and ravines of these gorges, on all traffic passing through here to and from the coast and the interior.

-the bow of Pandarus... ibex, recalls the Delmatae of this region, whose name means sheep..
-Pandarus breaks the peace (i.e, represents the internal disention which favoured conflict against Troy) from which the inferrence that he will have bee sympathetic to Odysseus of the many wiles who gave Neriton(peljesac)s to Danaan forces
-an echo of the forgoeng is read in the Hittite document The Crimes of Mudawattas, who allied the Dalawa (*Dala-matai > Delmatae) along with the Hinduwa (Dindaroi?) in favour of man of Ahaia and against Hittite interests (i.e., alliance with Ttroy).

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