[CP]
The name in Greek literature for the pre-Hellenic peoples living in central and northern Greece at the time of the immigration of the first true Greeks about 2000 bc. The Pelasgians were widely dispersed in these mass movements, and Herodotus mentions pockets of the Pelasgian language surviving to his own day in Chalcidice and near Cyzicus on the Sea of Marmora. The Athenians claimed a Pelasgian ancestry and in doing so believed that they were the autochthonous inhabitants of Attica. The name of their city and goddess is indeed pre-Hellenic: more probably, a Pelasgian element survived and was absorbed when Attica was occupied by Greeks in the early immigration. The Dorian invasion had little effect on Athens, which was the only citadel of Mycenaean times to survive into the Hellenistic period.
