End of the Bronze Age in GreeceThebes and of Troy) and continued into the twelfth century. 21
Undoubtedly many of the Greek speakers in these lands were
killed when the palaces and towns were destroyed, but many
survived. The survivors, however, seem to have gone off to
safer places. Although several LH me sites in the pertinent
lands were destroyed, many were simply abandoned. The evi-
dence of dialects shows that some Mycenaean Greeks sailed off
to Cyprus, and that others withdrew into the Arcadian interior
of the Peloponnese. Archaeological evidence suggests that still
other Mycenaean Greeks banded together in Achaea, the
northern rim of the Peloponnese, along the Corinthian Gulf:
during the twelfth century, as settlements in the Argolid and
the southern Peloponnese were abandoned, new settlements
with strong LH me characteristics appeared in Achaea, as well
as in Cyprus. One must suppose that what brought about the
collapse of Mycenaean civilization was not so much the actual
destruction of its towns and palaces, and the slaughter of their
inhabitants, but the fear of these things—a fear sufficient to
motivate migration into less attractive but more secure lands.
The sanctuary of Achaea, as it turned out, was temporary. In
the eleventh century the South Greek speakers seem to have
left their asylum on the Corinthian Gulf, possibly going ini-
tially to Attica but eventually to the coast of Asia Minor.
Although there was an exodus from the Argolid, Messenia,
- The details are available in Desborough's The Last Mycenaeans.
For a tabular summary of the destruction and abandonment of sites, see
Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age, 323-25. In his detailed presentation of
the subject, Hooker, Mycenaean Greece, 140—52, emphasizes the fact that
there was no single, once-for-all destruction ca. 1200 B.C., and that the
destructions continued sporadically for almost a century. The evidence on
destruction of Cretan sites (especially the palace at Khania, ancient Ky-
donia) at the end of the LM IIIB period is most comprehensively presented
by A. Kanta, The Late Minoan HI Period in Crete: A Survey of Sites, Pottery
and their Distribution (Stud, in Medit. Archaeol. LVIII) (Goteborg: Paul As-
troms Forlag, 1980), 324ff.; it was most recently presented by L. Godard
at the 1983 colloquium in Rome (for a summary of Godard's paper, see
Brillante, "L'invasione dorica oggi," 179—80).
2I 7 ,