End of the Bronze Age in GreeceIn addition, it is not irrelevant that in historical times many
people in the Doric areas of the Peloponnese and Crete consid-
ered themselves as belonging to an ethnos other than (and fre-
quently "older" than) the Dorian. 24 On Crete, inscriptions
found at three sites, the most productive of which is Praisos,
show that as late as the third century B.C., speakers of a non-
Greek language survived in the eastern part of the island. 25 No
such non-Greek inscriptions have been discovered in the Pelo-
ponnese, but circumstantial evidence suggests that at the be-
ginning of the Dorian occupation a non-Greek population
must have been present. In Archaic and Classical Laconia the
bulk of the population consisted of helots. These people were
apparently quite distinct from their Dorian superiors, yet in
the fifth century they seem to have spoken the Doric dialect.
That so large a population could have exchanged one Greek
dialect for another without substantially diluting the new dia-
lect is unlikely. A population can exchange one language for
another, but dialects do not survive such a borrowing. 26 It is
cat Studies in the Pylos Archives (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1973).
Some of them were bronzeworkers. M. Lejeune, "Les forgerons de Pylos,"
Historia 10 (1961): 426, observed that the total of 270 smiths mentioned in
the Pylos tablets "comprend un assez grand nombre de noms prehelle-
niques," but that it also included "un nombre appreciable" of Greek names.
Apparently many of the slaves mentioned in the tablets also have non-
Greek names: see Lejeune, "Textes myceniens relatifs aux esclaves," Historia
8(1959): 129-44.
- Herodotus 8.73 declared that "seven ethne inhabit the Pelo-
ponnese" and enumerated them: Arcadians, Kynourians, Achaeans, Dori-
ans, Aetolians, Dryopes, and Lemnians. The poet of the Odyssey (19.172—
- has Odysseus speak of five peoples as inhabiting Crete, each with its
own tongue: Achaeans, Eteocretans, Kydonians, Dorians, and Pelasgians.
- On the inscriptions and the language, see R. F. Willetts, The
Civilization of Ancient Crete (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977), 154. - It is now appreciated, as it was not a hundred years ago, that
dialects in preliterate societies are quite unstable: when two dialects are in
contact, they influence each other profoundly, in effect producing a third
dialect (it was in this way, it now appears, that the historical Greek dialects
were formed). The coexistence of two languages, on the other hand, does
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