The Coming of the Greekstifacts has from time to time been used as an argument that the
people buried in the shaft graves could not have been the first
Greek speakers to come to Greece. Thus George Mylonas, in
his response to L. R. Palmer's Mycenaeans and Minoans:Professor Palmer brings the "Greeks" into the
Mainland of Greece ca. 1600 BC. If we actually as-
sume their arrival on that date, we shall have to
account for the fact that on their establishment, or
even before that, they were able to amass so much
gold, certainly introduced from the outside and
possibly from Egypt, that they were able to absorb
at once the Minoan artistic ways, that they were
capable of establishing overseas connections with
Egypt or the Eastern Mediterranean territories in-
dicated by objects such as ostrich eggs, the inlaid
daggers, the embalmed body found in Grave v, etc.
This I believe would prove a most difficult if not
impossible task. 56A most difficult task it certainly would be, if one imagines "the
coming of the Greeks" as a massive migration of nomads or
pastoralists, perhaps evicted from their original homeland and
therefore forced to seek new lands in which to make an honest
living. In such a picture, the Greeks arrive by an overland
route, driving their herds and flocks in front of them, and sev-
eral centuries are required before the Greek yeomen work up
their nerve to go to sea.
If "the coming of the Greeks" was a takeover of Greece by a
charioteering community who came from the lands south of the
Caucasus, the invaders would most likely have come by sea,
- G. Mylonas, "The Luvian Invasions of Greece," Hesperia 31
(1962): 300. Perhaps it should be pointed out that the "embalmed body" of
Grave v may owe a great deal to the vivid imagination of Heinrich Schlie-
mann, although according to Hooker (Mycenaean Greece, 52-53), "Mylonas
promises a closer investigation of a lump of earth that may contain remains
of this 'mummy.'
181