Origins of the Question
the period they called Late Helladic. Wace and Blegen con-
cluded that "Minyan Ware indicates the introduction of a new
cultural strain," 17 but they did not yet identify this new strain
with the Greeks. However, since there were only two interrup-
tions in the Bronze Age pottery sequence, and since the second
of these had to do with Minoans, the only alternative was to
tie the Greeks' arrival in Greece to the appearance of Minyan
Ware.
That conclusion Blegen presented in a second influential ar-
ticle, this one written in collaboration with a philologist, J. B.
Haley and published in 1928.l8 Basing his part of the article
on work done at the turn of the century by Paul Kretschmer
and August Pick,' 9 Haley listed the non-Greek place names of
Greece, most of them being in east central Greece, the Pelo-
ponnese, Crete and the Aegean islands. He also showed that a
surprising number of these place names (many of them ending
in -nthos, -ssos, or -ndos) duplicated names in western Asia Mi-
nor, some rather far inland.
In his half of the article, Blegen preceded to match Haley's
findings with the archaeological record of these areas, looking
for a period during which a rough homogeneity in pottery and
other artifacts obtained from western Asia Minor through
Crete and the southeastern areas of the Greek mainland. The
Early Bronze Age, Blegen concluded, was such a period, and
pottery indicated that at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age
the people who lived in southwestern Anatolia expanded into
Crete and across the Aegean to the Greek mainland. Through-
out the third millennium B.C., therefore, there was a common
language and a common culture in Crete and the Greek main-
- Ibid., 189.
- J. B. Haley and C. Blegen, "The Coming of the Greeks," AJA
32 (1928): 141-54.
- P. Kretschmer, Einleitung in die Geschichte der griechischen Sprache
(Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1896); A. Pick, Vorgriechiscbe Orts-
namen ah Qtidlefiir die Vorgeschichte Griechenlands (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1905).
