End of the Bronze Age in GreeceGreece still did not speak Greek. Stated another way, a neces-
sary link between this essay's reconstruction of events ca. 1600
B.C. and ca. 1200 B.C. is the persistence in the palace states
(at least of the Argolid, Laconia, Messenia, and Crete) of a non-
Greek-speaking population, most likely in the villages and ru-
ral areas. The percentage of people in Mycenaean Greece who
spoke a non-Indo-European language would, one may reason-
ably assume, have shrunk rather than grown during the Late
Helladic period, and one can therefore infer that ca. 1600 B.C.
far less than half the population was PIE speaking. Thus in a
roundabout way the apparently conflicting evidence about the
end of the Greek Bronze Age strengthens the case that I have
tried to make in this book: the "coming of the Greeks," like
the other Indo-European movements for which we have some
documentation, occurred no earlier than ca. 1600 B.C. And it
was essentially a takeover of a relatively large alien population
by a relatively small group of PIE speakers, whose advantage
lay in their chariotry.
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