This article is about the ancient people of the Achaeans. See AchaeaMud for the MUD created by Iron Realms Entertainment.
The Achaeans (also Akhaians, Greek Αχαιοι) is the collective name given to the Greek forces in Homer's Iliad. An alternative name, used interchangeably, is Danaans. More specifically, Achaea in Homer is the province of Agamemnon, chief commander of the Greek forces, the northern part of the Peloponnese peninsula, roughly corresponding to the modern prefectures of Achaea and Corinth. The Homeric Achaeans would have been a part of the Mycenaean civilization that dominated Greece from ca. 1600 BC, with a history as a tribe that may have gone back to the prehistoric Hellenic immigration in the late 3rd millennium BC.
Some Hittite texts mention a nation in western Anatolia called Ahhiyawa; in particular the Hittite king Mursili II in ca. 1320 BC wrote a letter to the king of the Ahhiyawa, treating him as an equal and suggesting that Miletus (Millawanda) was under his control, and also referring to an earlier "Wilusa episode" involving hostility on the part of the Ahhiyawa. This people has been identified with the Achaeans of the Trojan War and the city of Wilusa with the legendary city of Troy. However the exact relationship of the term Ahhiyawa to the Achaeans beyond a similarity in pronunciation is hotly debated by scholars.
All the ancient dynasties traced their descent from Poseidon, who at the time of the Achaean conquest was the chief male divinity of Greece and the islands.
The leaders of the Achaeaninvasion were Pelops, who took possession of Elis, and Aeacus, who became master of Aegina and was said to have introduced there the worship of Zeus Panhellenius, whose cult was also set up at Olympia.
The culture of the HomericAchaeans corresponds to a large extent with that of the early Iron Age of the upper Danube (Hallstatt) and to the early Iron Age of upper Italy (Villanova).
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