The Coming of the Greeksmainland." 70 Hood, of course, thought of Minoans rather than
Greeks because he supposed that the Greeks did not enter
Greece until the end of the Bronze Age. But the Peristeria tho-
loi rule out the thesis that Minoans were responsible for what
happened in Messenia in the LH I period, for these tholoi
yielded very little Minoan or Minoanizing material. Not until
the second half of the sixteenth century did the lords of Mes-
senia, like their contemporaries in the Argolid, begin to de-
velop a taste for Cretan things. A more natural explanation
than Hood's would be that a ruling elite established itself in
Messenia early in the sixteenth century B.C., and that the in-
truders spoke the form of Proto-Indo-European that was to
evolve into Greek.
In central Greece, the spacious Boeotian plain was domi-
nated by establishments at Thebes and Orchomenos (and in the
thirteenth century B.C. at Gla). The recent discovery of a pal-
ace at Orchomenos was mentioned above. What has thus far
been recovered at the site seems to belong, according to first
reports, to a palace of the LH IIIA period. 71 The Orchomenos
tholos is also relatively late: it has been dated no earlier than
the LH II period, and as late as ca. 1300 B.C. At Thebes, how-
ever, a dynasty had established itself well before the end of the
sixteenth century, since a palace was apparently standing there
by 1500 B.C. 72
The evidence from Attica is of extraordinary interest. Until
recently, the known Mycenaean remains in Attica were neither
very early nor very significant; but recent excavations have
changed the situation dramatically. Tholoi assigned to the fif-
teenth century have been found at Thorikos and Marathon (the
slaughtered team of horses in the dromos of the Marathon tomb
- Hood, Home of the Heroes, 76.
- Catling, AR 1984-85, 31.
- H. Reusch, Die zeichnerische Rekonstruktion des Framnfrieses im
bb'otischen Theben (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1956), concluded that the frag-
ments of a frieze from the Kadmeion at Thebes show it to have been one of
the earliest "Mycenaean" frescoes yet discovered.
I8 7