Pre-Greek

The lexicon of Ancient Greek contains hundreds of foreign words. These words can be recognized, because they do not correspond with the Greek outcomes of Indo-European phonology and corresponding sound laws. Moreover, the semantics of many Greek words are obviously not Indo-European, since their concepts were absent in this language of nomadic pastoralists from the Pontic steppes. Such concepts include words for certain plants, animals and sedentary habitation.
A solution for these obscure words with their various forms in Greek was proposed, namely the assumption of a Pre-Greek substrate from which Greek borrowed the words. Important developers of this theory were Furnée and Beekes. Based on variation in forms that were semantically close or identical, they reconstructed the phonology and morphology of this language. Besides that, they proposed a Pre-Greek etymology for a lot of Greek words.
On the other hand, scholars have tried to find a Semitic origin of these phonologically deviant Greek words. The first article in which this was done systematically, was written by A. Müller in 1877. Since then, especially in the nineteenth century, a large number of new proposals for Semitic loanwords in Greek have been made by, for instance, Muss-Arnolt (1892), Lewy (1895), etc. In total, around 500 of such etymologies (without mythical and personal names) have been proposed until now, though many of them have been rejected by more recent scholars, like É. Masson (1976) and Rosół (2013) as many proposals were semantically or phonologically improbable. Nevertheless, for a substantial amount of Greek words a Semitic origin cannot be denied.