A conquest such as this must have had a prologue: the intruders, that is, must
have known something about the Greek mainland and about the Cretan
thalassocracy and its limitations. Perhaps in the earlier phase of the MH III
period, as in the latter part of the MH II period, a few chariot crews from the east
had been employed by the Cretan rulers of the Aegean. These military
professionals would have brought back to their homeland tales about a metal-rich
land that was ripe for a takeover.
Because this is prehistory and not history we have no records of any of this.
The archaeological evidence, however, is substantial enough to support a theory
that this is what happened. I once hazarded the guess that no more than 75,000
people came to Greece at the end of the Middle Helladic period.^141 Even that figure
now seems much too high. A few thousand military men may have been all that
was needed to accomplish the “conquest,” after which they would have sent for
their families and dependents.
The militarizing of parts of Greece appears to have been parallel to—and almost
simultaneous with—the militarizing of the Carpathian basin, and to have been a
precursor of military takeovers in southern Scandinavia and in northern Italy. And
in Greece, as in Italy, the linguistic implications of the military takeover are clear
enough. The vehicular terms that the military men brought with them—to a land
in which wheeled vehicles were still unfamiliar—identify the intruders as speakers
of an Indo-European tongue. Over the course of the Late Bronze Age the lan -
guage of a small military class, greatly influenced by the (probably Anatolian)
languages of the large indigenous population, evolved into the Greek that is
inscribed on the Linear B tablets.
Notes
1 On Dörpfeld’s “Carian theory” see Siapkas 2014.
2 Nilsson 1932, pp. 21–22: “Younger archaeologists are prone to throw back the
commencement of the Greek immigration to the end of the Early Helladic age or
earlier, whilst I find it probable that it began at the end of the following Middle Helladic
Age.” See also Nilsson 1927, pp. 11 ff.
3 Wyatt 1970. See also Muhly 1979 for a supporting archaeological argument.
4 Drews 1988, pp. 160–161.
5 On the import of Forsén 1992 see Rutter 2001, p. 115:
In showing that Caskey’s criteria for an invasion of the northeastern Peloponnese,
based on his discoveries at Lerna, do not apply at other sites even within the
Argolid, much less further afield, Forsén’s study should mark the starting point
of a new generation of investigation into the significance of the EH II-III
transition.
6 Coleman 2000.
7 Wyatt 1970, p. 99; Drews 1988, p. 177.
8 Crouwel 1981, updated in Crouwel 2004. Already in 1909, when Eugen von Mercklin
presented his doctoral dissertation (Der Rennwagen in Griechenland), archaeologists
must have been dimly aware that they had no evidence for wheeled vehicles in Greece
before the Shaft Grave period. The absence of evidence was of no interest in 1909,
however, and subsequently it was ignored (even by Wyatt 1970 and Drews 1988).206 Militarism in Greece