Who Were the Achaeans Mentioned in Homers Epics

In the epic poems of Homer, the  Iliad and Odyssey, the poet uses lots of different terms to refer to the many different groups of Greeks who fought the Trojans. Lots of other playwrights and historians did the same, too. One of the most commonly used ones was Achaean, both to refer to the Greek forces as a whole and specifically  to people from the region of Achilless homeland or Mycenaeans, the followers of Agamemnon. For example, the Trojan Queen Hecuba laments her fate in Euripidess tragedy  Hercules when a herald tells her that the two sons of Atreus and the  Achaean  people are approaching Troy. The Origins of Achaean Mythologically, the term Achaean derives from a family from which most of the Greek tribes claimed descent. His name? Achaeus! In his play Ion, Euripides writes that a people called after him [Achaeus] will be marked out as having his name. Achaeuss brothers Hellen, Dorus, and Ion also supposedly fathered great swaths of Greeks. Archaeologists seeking to prove the Trojan War really happened also cite the similarity between the word Achaean and the Hittite word Ahhiyawa, which was  archaeologically attested in a bunch of Hittite texts. The people of Ahhiyawa, which sounds like Achaea, lived in western Turkey, as many Greeks later did. There was even a recorded conflict between the guys from Ahhiyawa and the people of Anatolia: perhaps the real-life Trojan War? Sources Achaeans The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology. Timothy Darvill. Oxford University Press, 2008.Achaea The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Ed. M.C. Howatson and Ian Chilvers. Oxford University Press, 1996.The AchaeansWilliam K. PrenticeAmerican Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun., 1929), pp. 206-218 Ahhiyawa and Troy: A Case of Mistaken Identity?T. R. BryceHistoria: Zeitschrift fà ¼r Alte Geschichte, Vol. 26, No. 1 (1st Qtr., 1977), pp. 24-32