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

Some Minority Views

Yet another suggestion about "the coming of the Greeks"
has with varying force been put forward from time to time. In
this view, the Greeks (or at least the most important contin-
gent of them) came to Greece relatively late: ca. 1600 B.C., at
the interface between the Middle and Late Helladic periods. A
rough equivalent of this suggestion was made first by Georges
Perrot in 1892 and by J. I. Manatt and Christos Tsountas in
1897,'° but it was first argued at length and in sophisticated
fashion by Martin Nilsson a generation later." More recently,
it appeared as a subthesis in L. R. Palmer's controversial Mi-
noans and Mycenaeans, 12 and as the main thesis in out-of-the-
way articles by William Wyatt and James Muhly. 13 It has also
in recent years been advocated by Dutch archaeologist Jan
G. P. Best and his collaborators, among whom was the distin-
guished Israeli general and archaeologist, Yigael Yadin.M

10. G. Perrot, "Les families de Schliemann a Mycenes," Journal des
    Savants (1892): 449; Chr. Tsountas and J. I. Manatt, The Mycenaean Age
    (London, 1897), 71, 248, and 345.


11. In his Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and its Survival in Greek Reli-
    gion (Lund: Gleerup, 1927) and again in Homer and Mycenae (London: Me-
    thuen, 1933).


12. L. R. Palmer, Minoans and Mycenaeans (London: Faber and Fa-
    ber, 1961).


13. W. F. Wyatt, Jr., "The Indo-Europeanization of Greece," in
    Indo-European and Indo-Europeans. Papers Presented at the Third Indo-European
    Conference at the University of Pennsylvania, ed. G. Cardona, H. M. Hoenigs-
    wald, and A. Senn (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), 89-


14. James Muhly's article, "On the Shaft Graves at Mycenae," appeared in
    Studies in Honor of Tom B. Jones (Alter Orient und Altes Testament, Bd. 203),
    ed. M. A. Powell and R. H. Sack (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Ver-
    lag, 1979), 311—23. Muhly had earlier given his support to the thesis in
    AJA 79(1975): 289-91, in reviewing Acta oftheSecond International Collo-
    quium on Aegean Prehistory: The First Arrival of Indo-European Elements in
    Greece (Athens: Ministry of Culture and Science, 1972).


15. In bibliographies, The Arrival of the Greeks (Amsterdam: Hak-
    kert, 1973), might appear to be a book coauthored by Jan Best and Yigael
    Yadin. It is in fact a twenty-one-page essay ("An Outline") by Best, fol-
    lowed by a twenty-page article by Yadin ("And Dan, Why Did He Remain
    in Ships?") originally published in 1968 in the Australian Journal of Biblical

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