INTRODUCTIONOne of the chief attractions of the early Indo-Europeans, in-
cluding the Greeks of the Bronze Age, is their magnificent
obscurity. So much about them is unknown, so little is certain,
that one is encouraged to give the imagination free rein. Not
surprisingly, scholarship on the early Indo-Europeans is unu-
sually venturesome. In this field, radical theses cannot be dis-
missed without a hearing.
The Bronze Age Greeks must be the center of any discussion
of the early Indo-Europeans. This is so because more is known
about the Greeks than about any other Indo-European people
of the second millennium B.C. That is a sobering thought,
since the Bronze Age Greeks are themselves hazy enough that
specialist opinion about them is sharply divided on most im-
portant points. Nonetheless, the evidence of the Linear B tab-
lets, of other archaeological material, and of Homer and the
Greek myths does give a modicum of substance to the Bronze
Age Greeks. In comparison, the Italic or Celtic Indo-Europe-
ans of the second millennium are hopelessly beyond the histo-
rian's power to recreate. The Hittites in Asia Minor are known
from a great many tablets, but we know little about them from
their art, and nothing at all about them from the tales of their
descendants. About the Aryans of India something can be
learned from the Rigveda, although it seems that at least five
hundred years intervened between the Aryan invasion of India
and the crystallization of the Rigveda. More disconcerting is
the difficulty that Indian archaeologists have had in locating
the Aryans, either temporally or geographically. Thus Indo-
Europeanists continue to cast a hopeful eye in the direction of
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