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

The Coming of the Greeks

the further implication is that it was from this dis-

trict that there eventually grew and spread the cul-

ture of the Early Helladic 111 and Middle Helladic

periods out of which, in turn, there emerged the

Late Helladic (or Mycenaean) civilization. That is a

very different picture from the romantic one of the

conquest which blanketed the whole, or even most,

of Greece in one great swoop. The "coming of the

Greeks," in other words, meant the arrival of a new

element who combined with their predecessors to

create, slowly, a new civilization and to extend it

as and where they could. 7

In Caskey's more conservative (and therefore more ambigu-
ous) reconstruction of events there are two very similar inva-
sions: a first contingent of Indo-European and Greek-like (but
not quite Greek) newcomers arrives at the end of EH 11, de-
stroys Lerna and much else, and settles down, especially in the
Argolid. At ca. 1900 B.C. a second and perhaps larger wave of
invaders arrives; these are the first people who can truly be
called Greek. They are "kindred" to the earlier invaders, how-
ever, and speak what the earlier group would have found an
"intelligible language." These invaders therefore spare the EH
III towns of their kinsmen, while destroying the settlements
whose populations spoke an altogether alien language. 8 This
"two-wave" hypothesis, with invasions distributed between
the end of EH II and the beginning of MH, has most recently
been advanced in a lengthy study by M. B. Sakellariou. 9

7. Ibid., 19.


8. Caskey, CAH II, i: 136-40. Caskey tentatively identified the in-
   vaders at the beginning of EH in as Luwians, an identification that Mellaart
   also favored in his "The End of the Early Bronze Age." The most glaring
   contradiction in Caskey's reconstruction is that his EH in people are respon-
   sible for the pre-Greek and non-Greek names of places such as Corinth and
   Tiryns, but yet speak a language intelligible to the Proto-Greeks.


9. M. B. Sakellariou, Les Proto-grea (Athens: Ekdotike Athenon,
   1980).

2O