The Coming of the Greeksland (as well as southwestern Asia Minor). At the beginning of
the Middle Bronze Age, on the other hand, the Greek main-
land diverged radically from Crete and the other areas, with
Gray Minyan Ware blanketing southern Greece, while on
Crete the older pottery traditions continued to develop. Blegen
also observed that many of the sites identified with the pre-
Greek place names were destroyed at the end of the Early
Bronze Age. The import of all this was clear: a non-Greek peo-
ple, whose language included many names with suffixes in
-nthos, -ssos, and -ndos, occupied much of the Greek mainland,
the Cyclades, Crete, and southwestern Asia Minor through the
Early Bronze Age; ca. 1900 B.C. a new people arrived in the
Greek mainland, and this new people must have been the first
wave of the Greek nation.
It is important to note that Blegen saw his proposed date as
nicely congruent with other evidence for Indo-European mi-
grations and "the coming of the Greeks." 20 Further support for
the new date was provided by what seemed to have been an
Indo-European migration to the other side of the Aegean. In
1915 Bedrich Hrozny had announced his decipherment of the
language conventionally called "Hittite," and startled philol-
ogists and historians alike with his identification of Hittite as
an Indo-European language. Although Hrozny's somewhat ex-
travagant claims met with disbelief, Ferdinand Sommer's more
conservative presentation of the case in 1920 eventually carried
- Cf. his remarks at "The Coming of the Greeks," pp. 153-54:
"At any rate we can hardly go far astray if we take, in round figures, the
year 1900 B.C. as marking the passing of Early Helladic civilization on the
mainland and its supersession by the earliest form of Hellenic culture. The
results of our enquiry have, therefore, led us to push backward some three
hundred years the date of the arrival of the first Hellenic stock, which Pro-
fessor Buck, on the linguistic evidence, would place at least as early as 1600
B.C. The still earlier date, ca. 1900 B.C. , corresponds far better with a
clearly indicated cultural break.... We find ourselves, therefore, in essen-
tial agreement with E. Meyer and Beloch, who on other grounds have
placed the first entry of people of Indo-European stock into Greece at the
end of the third millennium B.C."