The Coming of the Greeksrowing Evans's Cretan divisions, Wace and Blegen introduced
what would become the standard terminology for Bronze Age
Greece: the Early, Middle, and Late Helladic periods. Wace
and Blegen based their scheme squarely on an analysis of
changes in—and evolution of—mainland pottery through the
prehistoric millennia. Such an analysis was feasible because ex-
cavations that the youthful Blegen had carried out at small sites
near Corinth (Korakou and Zygouries) had yielded a fairly
complete pottery sequence.
As the diagnostic pottery for their Middle Helladic period,
Wace and Blegen settled upon "Minyan Ware." This is a gray,
wheelmade pottery that feels pleasantly soapy rather than ab-
rasive, and contrasts markedly with the handmade and coarser
pottery of earlier levels. It had first been encountered by Schlie-
mann at Orchomenos. Although some of his contemporaries
referred to it prosaically as "Orchomenos Ware," the name that
prevailed was Schliemann's more romantic Minyan Ware,
which recalled the glorious but tenuous Minyans of Greek my-
thology. The ware was subsequently found at many sites in
Boeotia, Attica, the Peloponnese, and elsewhere. Because of its
ubiquity, and because at several sites it appeared above a de-
struction level, Wace and Blegen found it a convenient feature
for distinguishing Middle from Early Helladic levels. An ab-
solute date for this break was eventually furnished by Troy. In
the continuing excavations at Troy, it became clear that Min-
yan Ware began with Troy vi. The wonderfully complete stra-
tigraphy at Troy established the date of this archaeological ho-
rizon as ca. 1900 B.C.
In their 1918 article, Blegen and Wace did not yet associate
Minyan Ware with "the coming of the Greeks." They did ob-
serve, however, that the sudden appearance of Minyan Ware at
the beginning of the Middle Helladic period was one of only
two interruptions in the otherwise unbroken evolution of pot-
tery on the Greek mainland from neolithic times to the Myce-
naean Age. The only other interruption, they found, was the
advent of Minoan and Minoanizing pottery at the beginning of
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