Some Minority Viewsdirect, support for the new theory was provided by James Mel-
laart's demonstration that on the other side of the Aegean the
Anatolian Early Bronze II period ended in a vast calamity: most
of the EB II sites in Anatolia were destroyed ca. 2300 B.C., and
only a fraction of them were reoccupied in the EB in period.
From ca. 2300 B.C. until the end of the Bronze Age ca. 1200
B.C., the material culture of Anatolia showed an unbroken de-
velopment and continuity. Mellaart proposed that the Anato-
lian destruction was the work of Luwians, whom he regarded
as a nation closely related to the Hittite nation.' If the destruc-
tion at EH sites in Greece was not equally spectacular, it was
because at most EH II sites there was nothing very spectacular
to be destroyed.
But the destruction in Greece at the end of EH II was un-
doubtedly broad and catastrophic. In the words of M. I. Fin-
ley, archaeologists have seldom found an episode of destruction
"so massive and abrupt, so widely dispersed, as occurred at this
particular time. In Greece, nothing comparable was to happen
again until the end of the Bronze Age a thousand years later." 6
The evidence for disruption ca. 2100 B.C., along with the evi-
dence for continuity from the EH in to the MH period, per-
suaded a number of historians and archaeologists (although not
Caskey himself) that the first Greeks entered Greece not at the
outset of the Middle Helladic period, but at least two centuries
earlier. Finley's analysis is straightforward and clear:
If, as appears, the Argolid was the centre of de-
struction by intruders in the late third millennium,R. A. Crossland and A. Birchall (Park Ridge, N.J.: Noyes Press, 1974),
73-99-
- Mellaart, "The End of the Early Bronze Age in Anatolia and the
Aegean," A/A 62 (1958): 1-31. In CAH l, 2: 406, Mellaart presents in
tabular form the extent of the destruction between Anatolian EB II and EB
III (which he dates ca. 2300 B.C.): for EB II there are 421 known habitation
sites in southern and western Asia Minor, and for EB III there are only 108. - M. I. Finley, Early Greece: The Bronze and Archaic Ages, 2d ed.
(New York: Norton, 1981), 13.