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The "Proto-Ionians" are a Bronze Age people postulated by Jean Faucounau.

Mainstream Greek linguistics separates the Greek dialects into two large genetic groups, one including Doric Greek and the other including both Arcadocypriot and Ionic Greek. But alternative approaches proposing three groups are not uncommon. Thumb and Kieckers (1932) propose three groups, classifying Ionic as genetically just as separate from Arcadocypriot as from Doric.

Faucounau refers to the bipartite classification as "Risch-Chadwick theory", after two famous proponents of it, Ernst Risch and John Chadwick. Faucounau himself favours the tripartite classification, and attributes the latter to three consecutive "waves" of Hellenic immigration into Greece. In Faucounau's view, then, the first Greek settlers in their historical territory were the "Proto-Ionians", which were separated around 3000 BC from both the proto-Dorians and the proto-Mycenaeans. The following two waves are the generally accepted arrival of the Mycenaean Greeks (the linguistic predecessors of the Arcadocypriot speakers) in around 1700 BC and the Dorian invasion around 1100 BC. Faucounau traces this three-waves model to similar views forwarded by Paul Kretschmer in the 1890s and the 1900s (viz., before the decipherment of Linear B).

Faucounau's main arguments in favour of this model set out in his 2001 book are his own decipherment claim of the Phaistos Disk as Proto-Ionic, and arguments of archaeoastronomy. Neither claim has any support in the academic mainstream. Inasmuch as the theory even is archaeological, it is pseudoarchaeology. Since it appears to rest primarily on a decipherment of the Phaistos Disk and arcane claims about Bronze Age astronomy (the Proto-Ionians are the "inventors of the constellations"), it could also be considered "pseudolinguistics" and "pseudoastronomy".

Faucounau's "Proto-Ionic" has most properties of Homeric Greek, including loss of labiovelars and even of digamma (both are preserved intact in 14th century BC Mycenaean). Digamma in Faucounau's reading of the Phaistos Disk has in some instances passed to y, a sound shift not known from any other Greek dialect.

For Faucounau, the Pelasgians, the Trojans, the Carians and the Philistines are all descended from the Proto-Ionians.

Literature

• Jean Faucounau, Le déchiffrement du Disque de Phaistos, Paris 1999
• Jean Faucounau, Les Proto-Ioniens : histoire d'un peuple oublié, Paris 2001.
  • review: Paul Faure, Revue des études grecques Vol. 15 (2002), p. 424f.
• Paul Kretschmer, Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache (1896)
• A. Thumb, E. Kieckers, Handbuch der griechischen Dialekte (1932)

See also

• Proto-Greek
• Greek dialects
• Ionic Greek

• Hellenic languages and dialects
• Archaeoastronomy
• Pseudoarchaeology
• Hypotheses