The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

The Coming of the Greeks

The argument that the Shaft Grave Dynasty was indigenous
to the Argolid, and that Middle Helladic Greece evolved into
Late Helladic Greece without interruption or invasion, de-
pends entirely on pottery: the absence of an invader's ware and
the persistence of local wares. Much is made of the fact that
from the clay pots found in the two grave circles a continuum
can be traced from Middle to Late Helladic shapes and motifs.
This is, of course, true (although the progress from the drab
Middle Helladic wares to the striking, Minoanized pottery of
the Late Helladic period is more revolutionary than evolution-
ary), but ceramic continuity says nothing about the provenance
of the shaft-grave dynasts. Pottery was one of the least signifi-
cant artifacts in the shaft-grave corredo. In Grave iv, as we
have seen, there were only eight pots, but there were forty-
three vases of faience, alabaster, silver, and gold. To focus one's
attention on the pots, and to ignore the foreign materials and
motifs, the weaponry, the chariot stelai, and the gold (more
gold than has been found in any excavation before or since) is
to espy the gnat and overlook the camel.
The dynasts were charioteers and not potters, and it is hardly
surprising that their pottery, like other humble necessities of
daily life, should have been supplied to them by the subject
population (even here, however, it is evident that the chari-
oteers encouraged the Argolid potters to make more interest-
ing pots than was their custom). Linguistic evidence in fact
almost requires us to assume that the first Greek speakers in
the land secured their pottery from pre-Greek potters. The
Greek words for potter's clay (keramos), for a potter's kiln (ker-
amion), and for a range of ceramic vessels (kantharos, aryballos,
lekytbos, depas, phiale) did not come from the Proto-Indo-Eu-
ropean vocabulary.' 2 The fact of ceramic continuity from the

Greece": "If we can attach a Greek (IE) name to a cultural innovation on

Greek soil, either the IE invaders came at the same time as that innovation,

or they found it already there when they arrived, and themselves possessed

the object before they arrived. They cannot have preceded it" (p. 99).

52. On this linguistic point, see Grumach, "The Coming of the
    Greeks," 85-86.

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