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

Appendix One

gaded in three divisions, take over Lindos, lalysos, and Ka-
meiros.
The Herodotean story that the Dorians came to the Pelo-
ponnese from Doris (or Dryopis), on the Malian Gulf, may in-
dicate their point of embarcation. A slightly later story said
that the Dorian invaders of Crete came from the same place. 30
As has been suggested above, it is probable that "the coming
of the Greeks" in 1600 B.C. had been first of all to Thessaly,
and that it was immediately from Thessaly that the PIE speak-
ers had come to Mycenae, Pylos, Vrana, and other sites of cen-
tral and southern Greece. If that reconstruction is correct, it is
not surprising that in the twelfth or eleventh century B.C.,
Doric-speaking Greeks in Thessaly were numerous enough to
conquer a considerable area.
Linguistic analysis also points in the direction of Thessaly.
During most of the LH III period, North Greek seems to have
been spoken in the areas of the mainland to the north of the
Mycenaean world. Toward the end of the Bronze Age, some of
the speakers of North Greek began to differentiate themselves
from the rest of their linguistic community, and the innovation
is called the Aeolic dialect. This innovating group of North
Greeks seems to have lived on the Thessalian coast. Doric—
the more conservative branch of North Greek—ceased to have
contact with Aeolic speakers at about the same time that they
came into contact with the Attic variety of South Greek, and
that suggests that the Dorians' ancestors had been neighbors of
the coastal Thessalians. It is perhaps relevant to remember in
this connection that in the Peloponnese in historical times
there were a great many place names that seem to have been
transferred from Thessaly, including an Ithome, a Peneios

30. Strabo 10.4.6 tells us that according to Andron of Halicarnas-
    sus (FGrHist no. 10, fr. 16), an antiquarian writer who lived in the fourth
    century B.C. , the Dorians who established themselves in Crete "came from
    that part of Thessaly that was earlier called Doris but is now called Hes-
    tiaeotis."

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