End of the Bronze Age in Greeceobject that if any Greek speakers' dialect was Minoanized, it
should have been the dialect of these soldiers who kept the
peace in Crete; but in Chadwick's thesis, the Doric-speaking
soldiers in LH Crete retain their dialect without Minoan con-
tamination. 1 ^
A second major objection to the thesis is that there were a
great many South Greek speakers in the Dark Age—enough to
hellenize all of Arcadia, much of Cyprus, and all the lands and
islands where in historical times the Ionic dialect was spoken.
If all of these South Greek speakers were the survivors of the
Mycenaean palace administration (among whom, surely, cas-
ualties in the raids of ca. 1200 B.C. must have been quite
high), one would need to conclude that the palace class in My-
cenaean Greece was enormous (and this class, in Chadwick's
thesis, does not include the soldiers).
The difficulties do not stop here. The thesis proposes that in
Attica the commoners' speech was so much affected by the Mi-
noanizing South Greek of the upper class that a new dialect—
Ionic—arose, and that in Thessaly the interaction resulted in
Aeolic. Yet in the Peloponnese (where Minoan influences were
apparently greater than they were in Attica, and far greater
than they were in Thessaly), the speech of the commoners was
entirely unaffected by the Minoanizing dialect of their supe-
riors.
In addition to these paradoxes, the thesis must completely
ignore the Greeks' traditions on the matter—the story of the
Dorian migration and the Return of the Heraclidae. In fact,
- A potential difficulty with Chadwick's theory is that if one ac-
cepts Evans's date for the Knossos Linear B tablets (as Chadwick does), one
would have to conclude that neither the upper-class dialect, nor the lower-
class dialect, nor their relationship to each other changed between 1400 and
1200 B.C. It is difficult enough to explain how a single dialect could have
remained unchanged for two hundred years, and one would be hard pressed
indeed to explain how two dialects, supposedly in daily contact with each
other, could have remained unchanged over such a period. However, since
Evans's date for the tablets is increasingly suspect, this objection is of little
import.
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