Appendix One
of the tenth century, has been defended on the basis of what
little can be pieced together from archaeological evidence and
from dialectology (Doric influence is what differentiated Attic
from Ionic; therefore one can suppose that Doric speakers did
not begin to influence speech patterns on the borders of Attica
until after the Ionian migration). Both the archaeological and
the linguistic evidence is equivocal, however, 20 and it is not
impossible that the Dorian takeover occurred at the end of the
twelfth century (the legends presented the Return of the Her-
aclidae as the close of the Heroic Age, and as the reason for the
cessation of the old royal lines). Our thesis would at any rate
separate the "Dorian Takeover" from the destruction of the
Mycenaean world. That destruction had been effected by ca.
1125 B.C., and the destruction had almost certainly been per-
petrated, as we shall see, by raiders and city-sackers of the sort
familiar to us from the Iliad.
The reconstruction proposed here fits the evidence—histor-
ical, archaeological, and linguistic—that we have on the end
of the Bronze Age in the Aegean. There is, to begin with, good
reason to think that the South Greek speakers vacated the lands
that would one day be Doric. Destruction of the richest settle-
ments on the periphery of the Peloponnese, and on Crete, be-
gan shortly before 1200 B.C. (and not long after the sack of
- It is conceivable, for example, that Doric speakers were already
in contact with western Attica before a migration from Attica to Ionia, but
that the presence of Doric speakers had not yet begun to alter speech pat-
terns in Attica. It is also possible that the Ionian Migration departed chiefly
from Achaea, and in that case no relative chronology could be established
for the Ionian Migration and the Doric contamination of the South Greek
dialect of Attica.
Although in Last Mycenaeans Desborough had proposed that the Dorians
migrated ca. 1050 B.C., in Greek Dark Ages, 64-79, he presents an archaeo-
logical argument for their incursion into Boeotia, western Attica and the
northern Peloponnese ca. 1125 B.C., P. Cartledge, Sparta andLakonia: A
Regional History 7300—362 B.C. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979),
79—92, argues that the Dorians came to Laconia in the later tenth century
when Laconian Protogeometric ware came into use.
2l6
