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

The Coming of the Greeks

Once it was clear who the Greeks were, and whence they
had come, questions arose about the date of their arrival. Cur-
tius said nothing on the topic, in part because he wrote before
archaeological work in Greece had begun. Heinrich Schlie-
mann's excavations at Troy, Mycenae, Tiryns, and Orchome-
nos not only revealed the greatness of the Greeks' Heroic Age
but also suggested that the sudden destruction of the three lat-
ter sites could have been the result of the last of the Greek
migrations, the Dorian. According to the ancient chronogra-
phers, that migration had occurred in the twelfth century. The
creation of the Heroic Age must therefore have begun some
centuries earlier, and was to be attributed to earlier Greek im-
migrants. 1
Philology was also of some help in dating the arrival of the
Greeks in Greece. In reconstructing the prehistory of the Greek
dialects, Paul Kretschmer concluded that there had been three
Greek invasions of Greece during the Bronze Age. 6 The last of
these, ca. 1200 B.C., was surely the Dorian Invasion. The two
earlier invasions brought in the lonians and "Achaeans" respec-
tively ("Achaean" was supposed to be the linguistic ancestor of
both the Aeolic and the Arcado-Cypriote dialects). 7 Since sev-
eral centuries must have separated each of these invasions, the

gendein anderer indogermanischer Stamm vom Schicksal nach Griechen-
land verschlagen worden ware, er im wesentlichen dasselbe geleistet haben
wiirde, wie die Hellenen; ganz sicher aber, dass alle Vorteile der Lage ohne
Wirkung geblieben sein wiirden, wenn cine Volk anderen Stammes in den
dauernden Besitz Griechenlands gekommen ware."

5. Not all scholars of Schliemann's generation accepted a twelfth-
   century date for the Dorian migration. The legend of the Return of the
   Heraclidae warranted the thesis that the Dorians had been in the Pelo-
   ponnese during the heyday of Mycenae, and some archaeologists and histo-
   rians proposed that the Dorian migration had occurred ca. 1500 B.C.


6. P. Kretschmer, "Zur Geschichte der griechischen Dialekte,"
   Glotta i (1909): 1-59.


7. The name and definition of "Achaean" had been put forward by
   O. Hoffmann, De mixtis graecae linguae dialectis (Gbttingen: Vandenhoeck,
   1882).

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