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

End of the Bronze Age in Greece

River, and Mrs. Ossa and Olympus (along with the nearby
Olympia). 31
Although our thesis proposes an interlude between the col-
lapse of the Mycenaean world and the Dorian conquest, it is
not at all unlikely that the culprits in the collapse had also been
North Greeks. I have argued elsewhere that the men who
sacked Troy and Thebes came from the Thessalian coast, and
that it was among the ancestors of the Aeolic speakers that
"sacker of cities" was a proud epithet in the thirteenth and
twelfth centuries. 32 Most of the richest Mycenaean sites de-
stroyed at this time lay on or near the sea—Tiryns, Pylos, Ky-
donia in Crete—and I think it is not impossible that the raiders
who pillaged and destroyed these places came from the Thes-
salian coast. It seems that by the twelfth century, North Greek
had bifurcated into an Aeolic and a Doric-Northwest Greek
branch, Aeolic having come about because of an admixture of
South Greek to the North Greek base. Although there are
other explanations for the admixture, one comes to mind rather
quickly: Thessalian raiders who sacked South Greek towns may
have carried back with them the women of these towns.
Women, after all, ranked ahead of horses, cattle, and gold as
prizes for the pillagers. 33 Perhaps it is not out of the question

31. On the high incidence of Thessalian names in the Peloponnese,
    see Grumach, "The Coming of the Greeks," 402—403.


32. Drews, "Argos and Argives in the Iliad."


33. Perhaps the most vivid reconstruction of the raiders' ethos was
    offered by G. Murray in his The Rise of the Greek Epic, 4th ed. (Oxford: Ox-
    ford Univ. Press, 1934), 54—55- Murray imagined himself among raiders
    who at the end of the Bronze Age descended upon an island in the Aegean:
    "After due fighting it is ours. The men who held it yesterday are slain.
    Some few have got away in boats, and may some day come back to worry
    us; but not just yet, not for a good long time. There is water to drink; there
    is bread and curded milk and onions. There is flesh of sheep or goats. There
    is wine, or, at the worst, some coarser liquor of honey or grain, which will
    at least intoxicate. One needs that, after such a day.... No more thirst,
    no more hunger, no more of the cramped galley benches, no more terror of
    the changes of wind and sea. The dead men are lying all about us. We will

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