The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

Appendix One

THE END OF

THE BRONZE AGE IN GREECE

Consideration of an apparently unrelated topic, the Dorian In-
vasion, supports the construction here presented of "the com-
ing of the Greeks" and the Indo-European conquests in the
middle of the second millennium. The problematical Dorian
Invasion has from time to time been held responsible for the
destruction of the Mycenaean world, or for the creation of his-
torical Greece, or for both. Conversely, some scholars have de-
nied that a Dorian Invasion ever took place. The polarity of the
solutions to the problem reflects what appear to be irreconcil-
able contradictions in the evidence, each solution emphasizing
one part of the evidence and discounting another.' The contra-
dictions tend to disappear, however, if the evidence is seen
against the background suggested in Chapter Eight.
In the Classical Period of the fifth and fourth centuries, var-
ious dialects conventionally called "Doric" were spoken in
much of the Peloponnese, in Crete, in some of the small islands
of the southern Aegean, in Rhodes, and along the southwestern
coast of Asia Minor. For this linguistic fact the Classical Greeks
had an ethnic explanation: the Dorian ethnos had early on ap-
propriated these lands from other Greek nations. Herodotus
told the story in some detail (1.56), and being Herodotus he
started at the beginning. The Dorian nation inhabited Phthio-

i. A colloquium on the Dorians was held in Rome in April 1983
and brought together a variety of viewpoints from historians, linguists,
Mycenologists, and archaeologists. The papers have been critically summa-
rized by C. Brillante, "L'invasione dorica oggi," Quaderni Urbinati di Cul-
tura Classica n.s. 16(1984): 173-85.

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