The Coming of the Greeks
As for the time of these takeovers in the Levant, a terminus
ante quern is furnished by tablets from Taanach, near Megiddo,
that show that in the middle decades of the fifteenth century
B.C., kinglets with Aryan names were in control. 19 On the
other hand, documents from the eighteenth century B.C. men-
tion no Indo-European names and no maryannu. 20 It would
seem that Aryan speakers came to the Levant in the dark period
of the late seventeenth and early sixteenth centuries. By the
beginning of the fourteenth century, it seems that Aryan was
no longer spoken in the Levant, even by the maryannu or the
princes with Aryan names, and one may infer that the Aryan
names and class designation are a vestige of what had once been
a thin but elevated stratum of Aryan speakers. 21
We also find kings with Aryan names in Mitanni, which by
the middle of the second millennium was largely Hurrian
speaking. A Hittite text from early in the sixteenth century
refers to petty kings with Aryan names in three of the cities of
Hurri. 22 In the second half of the century, another Aryan dy-
nasty (featuring names such as Shuttarna, Paratarna, Shausha-
tar, Artatama, and Tushratta) had established, with the help
of its many maryannu, a "great kingship" in what was thence-
forth called the kingdom of Mitanni. Although the kings, of
course, worshiped the gods of their Hurrian-speaking subjects,
- W. F. Albright, "Further Observations on the Chronology of
Alalakh," BASOR 146(1957): 32 n. 19.
- M. S. Drower, CAH n, i: 420-21.
- J. Friedrich, "Arier in Syrien und Mesopotamien," Reallexikon
der Assyriologie, i: 148, concluded that the Aryans of the Amarna period
were thoroughly assimilated—in culture, religion, and language—to the
Semitic majority in the Levant, and that the incursion of Aryans into the
Levant must have occurred many generations prior to the Amarna period.
- For text and translation of the pertinent lines of this Old King-
dom Hittite text, see H. Giiterbock, "Die historische Tradition und ihre
literarische Gestaltung bei Babyloniern und Hethitern bis 1200, II (Hethi-
ter)," ZA 44 (1938): 108-109. O° tne date, cf. O'Callaghan, Aram Nahar-
aim, 62 and 64, and W. F. Albright, "New Light on the History of West-
ern Asia in the Second Millennium BC," BASOR 78 (1940): 30.
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