The Coming of the Greeks
to be the legitimate rulers of the land, they were castigated as
interlopers by their Theban adversaries.
A more cleanly denned takeover occurred in Babylon soon
after the city was raided by Mursilis the Hittite. Two or three
years after 1595 B.C., a Kassite took over Babylon (and appar-
ently most of southern Mesopotamia), establishing a dynasty
that was to last almost four centuries. Its durability was in
large part the result of the fact that the Kassite rulers were
quickly Babylonianized, and one assumes that they had taken
over southern Mesopotamia with little or no bloodshed. The
Kassite language is known only from a few texts, the personal
names of the rulers, and a few words that later Babylonian
scholars included in their lexical lists. From the scant evidence,
Kassite seems to have been unrelated to any known language.
Circumstantial evidence, however, suggests that the Kassites
were once neighbors of the PIE speakers. Although the Kassites
were assiduous in their piety toward the deities of Mesopota-
mia, they also worshipped several gods dear to the Aryans. 15
Another takeover, or cluster of takeovers, occurred in the
Levant. Throughout this area, from the Upper Euphrates to
southern Palestine, intruders from afar seem to have gained
control of cities and districts about the middle of the second
millennium. Many of the intruders had Human or—more re-
markably—Aryan names ("Aryan" is here used in the technical
sense of "Indo-Iranian," that is, belonging to the Indo-Iranian
branch of the Indo-European family of languages).l6 Unfortu-
- Some specialists have suspected that Kassite may have been an
Indo-European language, but the evidence is apparently very slight. What
evidence there is has been assembled by K. Balkan, Kassitemtudien 1: Die
Sprache der Kassiten (Amer, Orient. Ser., no. 37) (New Haven: Amer. Orient.
Soc., 1954). For a general assessment, see Margaret S. Drower, CAH 11, i:
437-39-
- For a detailed study of the names, see M. Mayrhofer, Die Indo-
Arier im Alien Vorderasien (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1966), and the same
author's "Zur kritischen Sichtung vorderasiatisch-arischer Personennamen,"
IF 70 (1965): 146-63. Mayrhofer finally settles on 114 personal names as
being "very likely" Aryan.
