Origins of the Questionconviction. 21 That the great kingdom of the Hittites was an
Indo-European state was remarkable, and so was its chronol-
ogy. Babylonian records indicated that Hammurabi's dynasty
had been terminated, and Babylon sacked, by Mursilis the
Hittite. The date of the sack was calculated to have been
shortly before 1900 B.C., and one could therefore suppose that
the Hittites had established themselves in Asia Minor some
time during the twentieth century B.C. Thus Blegen's date for
the arrival of the Greeks in Greece was seen as fitting closely
with the coming of other Indo-Europeans to a land immedi-
ately to the east. Also helpful for Blegen's thesis was the pos-
sibility that a third Indo-European nation may have poured
across the Alps into Italy early in the second millennium (the
Proto-Italic speakers were occasionally identified with the Lake
Dwellers, an archaeological population of Switzerland and the
Italian piedmont). Finally, Blegen did not have to contend
with the fact that the Aryans' arrival in India was a relatively
late event in Indian prehistory. The Indus valley civilization
was virtually unknown until the 19205, when excavation at
Harappa and Mohenjo-daro began. Thus the old assumption,
that the Aryan conquest of India took place in remotest antiq-
uity (and that the Rigveda was composed ca. 1500 B.C.) still
prevailed when Blegen and Haley wrote their article.
Everything fit together quite well, and there seemed to be
good and ample evidence from several quarters that Indo-Eu-
ropean peoples were arriving at their historical destinations at
the turn of the second millennium B.C. As we shall see in the
next chapter, Blegen's date for "the coming of the Greeks"
eventually lost its hold on specialists in Aegean prehistory. But
on the wider topic of the date and nature of "the Indo-Euro-
pean Vb'lkerwanderungen," it is still influential.
- Sommer, Hethitisches, 2 vols. (Bogbazkoi Studien, 4 and 7) (Leip-
zig: Hinrichs, 1920 and 1922), argued only that in grammar and morphol-
ogy Hittite was Indo-European. He conceded that there were few Indo-Eu-
ropean cognates in the Hittite vocabulary (Hrozny had proposed many such
cognates).