The Coming of the GreeksIn this scenario for "the coming of the Greeks" we are deal-
ing certainly with thousands of people, very likely with tens of
thousands, but not with hundreds of thousands. The forces
upon which the hyksos depended in Egypt, or upon which the
Kassite kings depended in southern Mesopotamia, could not
have been more than a tiny fraction of the indigenous popula-
tion of Egypt or Mesopotamia, too small a number to be ar-
chaeologically detectible. In the Levant and in Mitanni a mi-
nuscule Aryan minority took control over Semitic-speaking
and Hurrian-speaking majorities, but, of course, in the Levant
and in Mitanni the Aryan language was ultimately submerged.
Those PIE speakers who--as suggested here--crossed the seas
to take over Greece and northwest India, and whose language
ultimately was adopted by the people they conquered, may
have constituted a considerably larger fraction of the total pop-
ulation in the lands they took over. Nevertheless, we may still
suppose that when PIE speakers took over the best parts of the
Greek mainland-a land that seems to have had almost no po-
litical organization, and a populace that seems to have set little
store by military prowess-they controlled an alien population
perhaps ten times as large as their own. Such was the ratio of
helots to Spartiates at a much later time, and even the Greeks
who took over a relatively well-organized Knossos ca. 1450
B.C. may not have numbered over a tenth of their Minoan sub-
jects. One can only guess at the numbers involved in "the com-
ca. 1400 B. c., as Sir Arthur Evans asserted, Proto-Greek must have evolved
very quickly, and the dialect of the Linear B tablets must have immediately
thereafter branched off from Proto-Greek and reached its "classical" Mycen-
aean form (which it must then have retained, virtually unchanged, for the
next two centuries). Many specialists, however, now believe that the Linear
B tablets from Knossos, like those from Pylos, date from ca. 1200 B.C. The
argument met with considerable resistance when put forward by Leonard
Palmer in his Minoans and Mycenaeans, but since then has steadily won ad-
herents. An unusually vigorous assault on Evans's posicion has recently been
made by F. C. D. Hentschel, "The Basis for the Standard Chronology of the
Late Bronze Age at Knossos" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1982 [Univer-
sity Microfilms: Ann Arbor, 1982}).
(^195)