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

The Coming of the Greeks

Schachermeyr, and Stubbings have been summarized above.
Jan Best's explanation is even more radical. Rejecting—as one
must—the theory that the Greeks came to Greece in 1900 B.C.
or earlier, Best reasonably associated their arrival in Greece
with the Mycenaean shaft graves. Less reasonably, Best con-
cluded that "the earliest Greeks must have been identical to
the Hyksos." 54 Although that position is untenable, it is con-
ceded all round that in the sixteenth century B.C. the rulers of
Mycenae had productive connections with Egypt. Alongside
the Egyptianizing and Minoanizing artifacts, the shaft graves
gave evidence of connections with eastern Anatolia and Meso-
potamia. Several gold diadems, from both Circle A and Circle
B, are paralleled most closely by diadems found in a grave at
Assur that dates from the first half of the second millennium.
The decoration of another diadem recalls immediately a six-
teenth-century Kassite ring, and still other artifacts are paral-
leled at Kiiltepe and other Anatolian sites. 55
In addition to the influences and imports from Crete, Egypt,
Anatolia, and the Fertile Crescent, there is the gold. There are
no gold mines in the Argolid, and the gold buried in the shaft
graves necessarily came from far away, undoubtedly exchanged
for more utilitarian commodities that the dynasts had squeezed
from the subject population of the Argolid. The tastes of the
new rulers at Mycenae have with reason been characterized as
vulgar and barbarous, but they were indisputably cosmopoli-
tan.
Ironically, the international character of the shaft-grave ar-

54, Best, The Arrival of the Greeks, 29. Best's thesis depended in

part on the Egyptian parallels in the shaft graves, but also on what he calls

"literary accounts of the origin of the Greeks from the Near East," espe-

cially Diodorus's account (40.3.2) of Danaus's and Cadmus's migration

from Egypt to Greece. Unfortunately, neither Diodorus nor his source—

Hecataeus of Abdera—was in any position to tell us anything about second-

millennium history. To Best's thesis, linguists would undoubtedly object

that the Greek language shows no sign of an Egyptian substrate.

55. For details and references see Hooker, Mycenaean Greece, 47-48.

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