The Coming of the Greeksfrom was less clear, and the answer depended on one's beliefs
about the Indo-European homeland. In his 1928 revision of
Geschichte des Alterums, Meyer declared it virtually certain that
they had come across the Caucasus from a homeland in central
Asia, and had done so around the middle of the third millen-
nium. 11 On the other hand, Louis Delaporte and Eugene Ca-
vaignac routed them via the Bosporus from a "patrie septen-
trionale." 12 No evidence—archaeological, linguistic, or
documentary—was advanced in behalf of either view, and no
historian even suggested that such evidence was necessary.
That nothing Indo-European could have been indigenous to
Asia Minor was simply assumed by all scholars, whether ori-
entalists, Indo-Europeanists, or historians. If the Hittites were
Indo-European, at some time and some place the Hittite nation
must have invaded Asia Minor.
The thesis of Gamkrelidze and Ivanov—that Proto-Indo-
European developed in Armenia—now suggests a rather differ-
ent explanation for the appearance of Proto-Anatolian speakers
in Hatti. Many centuries before 2000 B.C., what until then
had been a single linguistic continuum—possibly stretching
from the Caspian to the Aegean—may have broken in two, one
of the two portions falling under those linguistic influences
that differentiated Proto-Anatolian from the more conservative
stream that evolved into Proto-Indo-European.
At any rate, it was from a Proto-Anatolian area of Asia Mi-
nor that migrants came to Hatti. This movement was certainly
not an invasion. The fact that ca. 1900 B.C. Proto-Anatolian
- Meyer, Geschichte des Altertums, 2d ed. Vol. 2, pt. i, 22-23.
Meyer argued that since the Hittites would not have been so foolish as to
prefer the Anatolian plateau to the fertile Balkans we can be sure that they
came to Anatolia from central Asia ("Dass sie in derselben Weise, wie spa-
ter die Kimmerier, iiber den Kaukasus gekommen sind, wird man kaum
bezweifelm konnen, da sie sich sonst gewiss in den reichen Ebenen des
Westens angesiedelt haben wiirden"). - L. Delaporte, Les Hittites (Paris: La Renaissance du Livre,
1936), 54-55; E. Cavaignac, Les Hittites (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1950), 15.