The Coming of the Greeksvery end of the MH period. 88 If this tholos was in fact con-
structed ca. 1600 B.C., it would suggest very strongly that at
that date virtually the whole of the Thessalian plain had been
taken over by PIE speakers. In general, "Mycenaean" pottery
has been found at some seventy sites in Thessaly, but few sites
have produced "Mycenaean" architecture. At lolkos, a Late
Helladic building designated as a palace by its excavator has
not yet been precisely dated. Most puzzling of all is the site of
Petra, on the western edge of what was once Lake Boibe. Here
a circuit wall, of "Cyclopean" construction that in some
stretches reached a thickness of five meters, ran for more than
four kilometers. If the wall is indeed Mycenaean in date, the
1,000,000 square meters that it encloses would be the largest
fortified site of the period. 89
Archaeology thus provides only occasional and ambiguous
evidence that "the Greeks" took over the Thessalian basin at a
very early date. An argument can nevertheless be made that
the PIE speakers came first to Thessaly, and from there went on
to take over central and southern Greece. The argument is
based on linguistics and on the Greek myths. The latter make
Thessaly something of an Hellenic cradle. Here the original
Hellas was located, and it was here that Prometheus begat
Deucalion, Deucalion begat Hellen, and Hellen begat Aeolus,
Dorus, and Xuthus. Despite Nilsson's arguments to the con-
trary, 90 it is evident that a great many myths have Thessalian
connections, and that some must have originated in Thessaly
- D. R. Theochares, "Thessalian Antiquities and Monuments,"
AD 16 (1960): 168—86. Hope Simpson, Mycenaean Greece, 173—74, ex~
pressed reservations about the date of the pottery, conceding only that "the
time of the construction of the tomb must surely lie within the Mycenaean
period, to judge from its size and quality." Cf. also Feuer, Thessaly, 44. - Feuer, Thessaly, 44.
- M. Nilsson, The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology (Berkeley:
Univ. of California Press, 1932), argued vigorously that most of Greek my-
thology originated near the "Mycenaean" palace centers in central Greece
and the Peloponnese. Thessaly, he proposed (p. 232), was much too poor a
place, and too far from the Greek mainstream, to have played any signifi-
cant role in the creation of the stories.
192