Appendix One
was for the twelfth. The salient fact, Snodgrass urged, was the
destruction of Mycenaean Greece: that was the most visible
sign of intruders, and it indicated that the Dorians came to the
Peloponnese and other parts of mainstream Greece ca. 1200
B.C. The absence of anything novel in the material record for
the LH me period, Snodgrass suggested, showed only that the
Dorians had come from a nearby province, and that their ma-
terial way of life was virtually identical to that of their Myce-
naean victims.
Yet another solution to the problem of the Dorian Invasion
was formulated and advanced in the light of Desborough's sur-
vey of the end of the Greek Bronze Age. In 1976 John Chad-
wick proposed that the Dorians did not enter the Peloponnese
at the end of the Bronze Age, either as conquerors ca. 1200
B.C. or as infiltrators in the eleventh century: they had been in
the Peloponnese all along, as a lower class. 7 Like most other
students of the Greek dialects, Chad wick sees Doric as a very
conservative descendant of Common Greek, the language of all
the Greeks before innovations began to produce South Greek.
But Chadwick's theory is eccentric in explaining how South
Greek differentiated itself from this Common Greek that Doric
so faithfully preserved: what made the difference was not ge-
ography, but class. According to Chadwick's theory, the new
South Greek dialect arose when the royal administration—the
palace officials—came under the influence of Minoan scribes.
But while the speech of this narrow aristocracy was Minoanized
into South Greek, the great bulk of the populace in the palace
states continued to speak Common Greek. What happened at
the end of the thirteenth and throughout the twelfth centuries,
- J. Chadwick, "Who were the Dorians?" Parola del Passato 31
(1976): 103—17. The thesis has been defended by J. T. Hooker, "New Re-
flexions on the Dorian Invasion," Klio 61 (1979): 353—60; see also Hooker's
Mycenaean Greece, 163-80. In the 19505 Chadwick held the more tradi-
tional view that during the LH period the ancestors of the Dorians lived in
northern Greece; cf. Chadwick, "The Greek Dialects and Greek Pre-His-
tory," 38-50.
208
