Editing Dorians (section)

====Chosen Greeks====
It sometimes happens that different derivations of an [[Indo-European languages|Indo-European]] word exploit similar-sounding Indo-European roots. Greek ''doru'', "lance," is from the o-grade of Indo-European *''deru'', "solid," in the sense of wood. It is similar to an extended form, *''dō-ro-'', of ''*dō-'', (give), as can be seen in the modern Greek imperative δώσε (''dose'', "give [sing.]!") appearing in Greek as δῶρον (''dōron'', "gift").  This is the path taken by [[Jonathan M. Hall|Jonathan Hall]], relying on elements taken from the myth of the Return of the Herakleidai.<ref>{{cite book | first=Jonathan | last=Hall | title=Hellenicity: between ethnicity and culture | year=2002 | location=Chicago | publisher=University of Chicago | pages=85–89}}</ref>

Hall cites the tradition, based on a fragment of the poet, [[Tyrtaeus]], that "Sparta is a divine gift granted by Zeus and Hera" to the Heracleidae. In another version, [[Tyndareus]] gives his kingdom to Heracles in gratitude for restoring him to the throne, but Heracles "asks the Spartan king to safeguard the gift until his descendants might claim it."

Hall, therefore, proposes that the Dorians are the people of the gift. They assumed the name on taking possession of Lacedaemon. Doris was subsequently named after them. Hall makes comparisons of Spartans to Hebrews as a chosen people maintaining a covenant with God and being assigned a Holy Land. To arrive at this conclusion, Hall relies on Herodotus' version of the myth (see below) that the Hellenes under Dorus did not take his name until reaching the Peloponnesus. In other versions the Heracleidae enlisted the help of their Dorian neighbors. Hall does not address the problem of the Dorians not calling Lacedaemon Doris, but assigning that name to some less holy and remoter land. Similarly, he does not mention the Dorian servant at Pylos, whose sacred gift, if such it was, was still being ruled by the Achaean Atreid family at Lacedaemon.{{citation needed|date=November 2019}}

A minor, and perhaps regrettably forgotten, episode in the history of scholarship was the attempt to emphasize the etymology of Doron with the meaning of 'hand'. This in turn was connected to an interpretation of the famous lambda on Spartan shields, which was to rather stand for a hand with outstanding thumb than the initial letter of Lacedaimon.<ref>{{cite book | first=Gilbert | last= Murray | title= The Rise of Greek Epic |orig-year=1907|year= 1934 | location=Oxford | publisher=OUP | pages=39 n.2}}</ref> Given the origin of the Spartan shield lambda legend, however, in a fragment by [[Eupolis]], an Athenian comic poet, there has been a recent attempt to suggest that a comic confusion between the letter and the hand image may yet have been intended.