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

Origins of the Question

first of them must have occurred very early, perhaps as early as
2OOO B.C.
The breakup of the Indo-European family was, of course,
put long before the arrival of the Greeks in Greece. Both Be-
loch and Eduard Meyer concluded that the dispersal of the
Indo-European race, and the beginning of the individual Indo-
European nations, took place ca. 2500 B.C. Meyer rested his
conclusion on three considerations: (i) the first wave of Greeks
seems to have arrived in Greece no later than ca. 2000 B.C.;
(2) since Sanskrit and Greek were already differentiated by
2000 B.C., each must by that time have been going its own
way for at least half a millennium; (3) Indo-European cognates
indicate that at the time of the dispersal the Indo-Europeans
had an Early Copper Age culture. 8
Circuitously, when dating the arrival of the first Greeks in
Greece, Meyer advanced as an argument the likelihood that the
Indo-European community broke up ca. 2500 B.C. 9 But there
were other arguments. Meyer noted, as did other historians,
that the Greeks (unlike the Israelites) had no legends about
their entry into the land in which they lived. The lack of such
saga indicated that their migration from the Eurasian steppe
had occurred long before the Heroic Age, about which the
Greeks had so many legends. Beloch added the argument, ec-
centric at the time, that the differentiation of Greek into its
various dialects—a differentiation that obviously was complete
by the end of the Bronze Age—must have occurred in Greece
itself, and would have required many centuries. Both Beloch
and Meyer regarded 2000 B.C. as the latest possible date for
the Greeks' arrival in Greece. 10

8. E. Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 3d ed. (Stuttgart and Berlin:
   Cotta, 1913), i, 2: 856-57.


9. Ibid., 806-808.


10. Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, 1:71 ("nicht unter das Ende des
    III. Jahrtausends"); Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, i: 808. Not surpris-
    ingly, Georg Busolt did not deal at all with either the Indo-European ques-
    tion or with the coming of the Greeks to Greece.