The Coming of the Greeksminority of PIE speakers. In this respect, as in its date, the
Hellenization of Greece thus seems to parallel the Aryanization
of northwest India. The material record of the event is pre-
served in the shaft graves of Mycenae and in the tholoi and
tumuli found in the plains of the Peloponnese, central Greece,
and Thessaly.
A second conclusion on which our alternative picture of "the
Indo-European invasions" is based has to do with the so-called
Hittites. There was once a consensus among historians that a
Hittite nation had invaded central Anatolia by the beginning
of the second millennium. This Hittite nation, historians sup-
posed, was the first in a series of Indo-European nations to have
left its distant homeland and to have arrived in the more-or-
less civilized world. Indo-Europeanists, however, have long
known that the relationship of Hittite (or Proto-Anatolian) to
the other Indo-European languages is unclear: although possi-
bly a sibling to Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, and the other daughter
languages of Proto-Indo-European, it is increasingly more
likely that Proto-Anatolian was an "aunt" rather than a sister
of the Indo-European languages. In a clear light not only the
Hittite invasion but even the Hittite nation disappears: its ex-
istence depended not upon any evidence, literary or archaeo-
logical, but upon a cluster of presuppositions (the most impor-
tant being that a Greek nation had come to the other side of
the Aegean by 1900 B.C.).
A third conclusion indispensable for our new picture has to
do with the time and place effective chariot warfare began. Spe-
cialized studies now permit us to be rather precise about the
chronology of this development: although "chariots" were first
made in the nineteenth century B.C., and although they may
have occasionally appeared on Anatolian battlefields as early as
ca. 1800 B.C., effective chariot warfare (dependent upon the
bit, and perhaps upon the composite bow) seems not to have
begun before the middle of the seventeenth century B.C. So far
as the locale is concerned, specialists have for some time sug-
gested that eastern Anatolia played the leading role in the de-
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