End of the Bronze Age in Greecethe migration. Nor, with a few exceptions, did other historians
of the early nineteenth century.
Schliemann's excavations put things in a very different
light. None of the ancient writers had suggested that the Do-
rian migration, or the Return of the Heraclidae, was an espe-
cially destructive affair, and Thucydides had in fact presented
it as not unlike the return of exiles to cities in his own day. But
Schliemann found that the splendid centers of Mycenaean
Greece had been suddenly and terribly destroyed, surely by hu-
man hands. The logical culprits were, of course, the Dorians.
Thus the Dorian migration became, at the end of the nine-
teenth century, the Dorian Invasion. The invasion was a dis-
aster of vast proportions and was the watershed between the
Mycenaean Age and historical Greece. Its date was synchro-
nized with the fall of Mycenae, somewhere between the end of
the thirteenth and the end of the twelfth centuries.
The most compelling and comprehensive picture was pub-
lished by Eduard Meyer in i893. 2 Meyer imagined the end of
the Bronze Age in Greece and the rest of the eastern Mediter-
ranean world to have been rather like the Fall of Rome. The
Dorian Invasion he saw as part of a general movement of bar-
barians into the civilized world in the decades before and after
1200 B.C., a movement most clearly seen in Egyptian records
of the Sea Peoples' assault on the Delta. After the Dorian In-
vasion of Greece, as after the Germanic invasion of the Roman
Empire, came a dark age during which primitive tribesmen
appropriated the ruins of a once-sophisticated civilization. And
just as the foundations of modern Europe were laid early in the
European Middle Ages, so the institutions and ideals of Clas-
sical Greece took root in the Mittelalter that began with the fall
of the Mycenaean world. Thus the Dorians were both the de-
stroyers of one world and the creators of another.
Although the overall picture was a valuable contribution,
- E. Meyer, Geschkhte des Alterthums (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1893), 2:
249-532.
205