IntroductionLevant to be explained? What, if any, was the relationship be-
tween the Kassite and Hyksos conquests and the supposed
Volkerwanderungen of Indo-Europeans? Was the horse-drawn
chariot introduced into the Near East by PIE speakers, and to
what extent was the chariot responsible for the chaos of the
second quarter of the second millennium? There is an unfor-
tunate tendency among hellenists to suppose that ignorance
about Near Eastern matters is a venial sin, perhaps because
orientalists are not always obliged to be well informed about
the Greek world. Among specialists on the prehistoric Aegean,
this tendency is happily less pronounced, perhaps because it is
more dangerous. No explanation for "the coming of the
Greeks," or for the Indo-European migrations as a general phe-
nomenon, is likely to be worth very much if it does not accom-
modate the evidence for the coming of PIE speakers to the only
part of the Bronze Age world for which we have historical rec-
ords.
It is undoubtedly superfluous for me to confess that I am not
competent to deal with any one of these broad questions at the
depth that it deserves. On those points relevant to the thesis I
have tried to inform myself sufficiently to avoid at least the
most disabling errors; but as it makes its way from point to
point, this essay skirts vast fields of which my knowledge is at
best superficial. Something of this is perhaps inevitable when-
ever one tries to set the Bronze Age Greeks against the back-
drop of the general dispersal of the PIE speakers, since that
dispersal does not fit comfortably within any of the compart-
ments into which our knowledge of the past has traditionally
been divided. In hopes of reducing this compartmentalization,
so unfortunate for our topic, I have attempted to make the
entire essay intelligible for scholars in each of the several con-
tributing fields. The defect of this kind of presentation is that
the discussion of any given point will probably strike the spe-
cialist as elementary, but at least an attempt will have been
made to reach some common ground. In order to get our bear-
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