Near Eastern Historyspeakers were an integral element of Hattic society, while Hat-
tic continued to be the language of the cults, shows clearly
enough that the Proto-Anatolian speakers had not entered
Hatti in a violent invasion or a massive Volkswanderung. Im-
migrants there evidently had been, and perhaps even a steady
and—to some—unwelcome flow of Proto-Anatolian speakers
into Hatti for an extended period in the third millennium. But
whatever migration had occurred would have been a movement
of individuals, or families, or small groups. 13 No Proto-Ana-
tolian or Hittite nation is known to have migrated anywhere.
Such are the relocations of barbarous or primitive peoples
attested in documents for the late third and the early second
millennium (the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries are some-
thing of a dark age, from which few documents survive). This
is not the sort of thing that most of us have envisaged for "the
coming of the Greeks," and I do not suggest that this is how
the Greeks did indeed come to Greece. It was, however, the
normal way in which nomadic peoples moved into settled re-
gions in the Early and Middle Bronze Age, and provides us
with a useful point of reference.
Another phenomenon attested (although rarely) in our
souces is barbarian harassment. The Mesopotamian cities were
tempting targets for raiders in the late third and early second
millenium. Beginning ca. 2200 B.C., raiders from Gutium
(along the Zagros mountains) began to harass the cities in the
plain, and continued to do so for over a century. Shortly before
2000 B.C., the less barbarous but equally fearsome Elamites
pillaged and destroyed Ur itself, the bulwark of southern Mes-
opotamia.
Much more frequent than harassment by the godless barbar-
- On the implications of the occasional evidence for the Hittite
language in the Kiiltepe tablets, cf. Bilgic,, "Ortsnamen," 18: "Diese gering-
en Spuren des indogermanischen Hethitisch mochten wir im Gegensatz zu
anderen nicht als Zeugnisse fur einen zur Kolonistenzeit schon bestehenden
hethitischen Staat, sondern vielmehr einer beginnenden Infiltration deu-
ten."