Pithos - Etymology

Etymology

Pithos has two irreconcilable derivations, classical and Mycenaean. On the one hand, it was a well-used word of the Iron Age in Greece, dating to as early as the works of Homer. Julius Pokorny and other professional linguists developed a derivation from Indo-European *bhidh-, "container," that followed all the rules of language change and moreover was related to Latin fiscus, "purse," from which English obtains "fiscal." Regardless of the real derivation, a pithos certainly seems to be a large purse containing economic goods in quantity. The derivation would have been elegant, tracing fiscality back to prehistoric Greece, it was thought, taking its place with oikos, "house," the origin word for "economic," and others. At that time Greek and Latin were believed to have had a common ancestor other than Proto-Indo-European.

Contemporaneously with Pokorny's epic dictionary, Linear B was first being deciphered, and various analyses were being put forward that Greek and Latin were not all that similar. There was no need to prove that developments in Latin were necessarily parallel to those in Greek. If bh- became f- in Latin, it would not necessarily do so in Greek.

The pithos was proposed to appear as qe-to in the Bronze Age records of Pylos and Mycenae, denoted by Ideogram 203, a small picture very similar to some Knossos pithoi, but which could just as well be matched by smaller pottery. Strangely enough it was not found at Knossos, a major find site of pithoi. It was duly transcribed as WINE JAR in Bennett's system, on the presumption that it would store primarily wine. According to the rules of reconstructing Mycenaean Greek from Linear B, qe-to must be a transcription of quethos or quhethos, from a "base" of *gwhedh-. The latter is similar to some Indo-European roots but has no meaningful connection to any. Ventris and Chadwick suggest that either qe-to was not a pithos, but was some smaller vessel, or that pithos is a foreign loan, like aryballos, lekythos, and some others. The Cretan pithos precedes by several hundred years any mentioned in Mycenaean Greek; moreover, many are inscribed with a line or two of Linear A. Perhaps pithos derives from a Linear A word. Ventris and Chadwick do not exclude fiscus from necessarily being related to pithos, they only point out that, if such is the derivation, the process is more complex than previously thought.