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.
Another neighbour of the Ahhiyawa were the Lukka people, a fact that only helps us in locating the Ahhiyawa geographically.
The Ahhiyawa must have inhabited western Anatolia or one of the islands in the Aegean Sea, or both.
The harmony between the Ahhiyawa and the Hittites was broken around 1230 BCE, when king Attarissiya led several attacks on Hittite vassals and main villages.
It was one of the cities of the Danaja, Homeric Danaans, named, in legend, after Danae, which suggests that the Perseids were in fact in some sort of dominion.
In the 13th century BC the great king of the Ahhiyawa began to be troublesome to numerous kings of the Hittite Empire.
Ahhiyawa or Ahhiya, which occurs a few dozen times in Hittite tablets over the century, is probably Achaiwia, reconstructed Mycenaean Greek for Achaea.
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