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

The Coming of the Greeks

The dating of the arrival of the Greeks ca. 1600 B.C. has

been supported by a variety of arguments. Among them must

be mentioned the dubious doctrine that the megaron first ap-

peared in the Late Helladic period. A somewhat sounder ar-

gument was Nilsson's emphasis on the prevalence of amber at

LH sites of the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries and its com-

plete absence at earlier sites: since the amber found in Greece

came from the Baltic, Nilsson proposed that a people with

northern connections must have arrived in Greece at the begin-

ning of the LH period. Another of Nilsson's arguments cen-

tered on the horse: the horse, Nilsson believed, was brought to

the Mediterranean by Indo-Europeans, and so far as he knew,

the horse first appeared in Greece in the sixteenth century B.C.

Other and more recent arguments have focused on supposed

changes in dress and in burial practices at the beginning of the

LH period, on the chariot, on the evidence of destruction levels,

and on the evidence of language.

The most obvious reason, however, for dating "the coming

of the Greeks" to ca. 1600 B.C. has always been the shaft graves

of Mycenae. Because of their importance to this argument, a

reminder about the shaft graves is in order here. The sensa-

tional corredo that Schliemann discovered is well known: the

many gold ornaments, cups, diadems, and death masks; the

bronze daggers with inlays of silver and niello; the haul of other

weapons and grave goods. There is general agreement today

(because of correspondences, in the later tombs, with Late Mi-

noan la decorative motifs) that these six shaft graves, now re-

ferred to as Grave Circle A, date from the sixteenth and the

very early fifteenth century B.C. Most of the twenty-four buri-

als of Grave Circle B—which was found in 1951 and was not

quite so astounding as Grave Circle A—are also from the six-

teenth century, although the earliest (which are cist graves

Archaeology. R. A. van Royen and B. H. Isaac, The Arrival of the Greeks: The
Evidence from the Settlements (Amsterdam: Griiner, 1979), is a tightly focused
seventy-six-page monograph. Neither of these two publications was widely
reviewed.

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