The Coming of the Greeks
three-vowel system employed in Aryan (both Sanskrit and
Avestan). This feature of Aryan, he concluded, seems to have
been adopted from the Semitic languages of Mesopotamia. 6 '
The linguistic arguments are here more useful than the archae-
ological and supply at least a fragile basis for reconstructing
the Aryan route to India. With Mitanni and southern Meso-
potamia taken over soon after 1600 B.C. , the next most attrac-
tive target may have been the rich Indus Valley far to the east.
Those Aryans who were too slow off the mark to carve out a
domain closer to home may very well have embarked their
horses and chariots and sailed to India. 64
A sea-borne invasion of Greece ca. 1600 B.C. is suggested
by the four sites known to have been destroyed at that time:
Argos, Eleusis, Pylos, and Kirrha are all on the sea (Kirrha, on
Phocis's Corinthian Gulf coast, was apparently a thriving little
town before its destruction at the end of the Middle Helladic
period). By the fifteenth century, the Greeks were evidently
able to land a fleet on Crete, which by that time must have lost
whatever "thalassocracy" it may once have had. And it is quite
clear that even in the sixteenth century the Mycenaean Greeks
were quite dependent on the sea, for the wealth and the im-
ports found in the shaft graves require the conclusion that the
Mycenaeans engaged rather seriously in overseas trade.
Although the shaft graves of Mycenae give us by far our best
- O. Szemerenyi, "Structuralism and Substratum—Indo-Europe-
ans and Semites in the Ancient Near East," Lingua 13 (1964): 1-29. Cf. his
summary statement on page 19: "If we want to save continuity, both geo-
graphical and chronological, we must assume that part at least of the later
Indians also lived for a time in, or on the fringes of, Mesopotamia."
- On linguistic grounds, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov, "Migrations,"
75-76, observed that "we must also consider the possibility that rhe Indo-
Europeans migrated by water.... The Indo-European lexicon of terms
concerning navigation (cf. the words erH-/reH- 'to navigate in a boat or a
ship with oars,' naHu- 'vessel, boat,' p/h/leu- 'to navigate') indicates a
familiarity on the part of the speakers of these dialects with means of trans-
port over large bodies of water." Proto-Indo-European mari- became the
Latin mare, the English "mere," and German Meer.
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