Some Minority Viewsdating are primarily archaeological: the destruction levels
found at so very many sites at the end of the LH IIIB period,
and the overwhelming fact that Bronze Age Greece was com-
pletely different from historical Greece. But for most scholars
a date ca. 1200 B.C. for "the coming of the Greeks" has dis-
qualifying liabilities. Even before Ventris's decipherment this
view had its difficulties, since (as mentioned earlier) Greek leg-
end knows nothing of the Greeks' migration into Greece. Leg-
end did recall a Dorian migration from Doris to the Pelo-
ponnese after the Trojan War, and a migration of Aeolians and
lonians to the coast of Asia Minor at about the same time, but
the legends quite consistently recalled that during the Heroic
Age, Greeks were already living in Greece. Although it is un-
wise to construct history on the basis of a legend, it is far more
perilous to posit a momentous event of which subsequent gen-
erations remembered nothing at all (especially when oral tra-
dition seems to have commemorated other, and lesser, events
of the same time). In addition, as a later chapter will show in
some detail, there is virtually no archaeological evidence for a
Volkswanderung into Greece at the beginning of or during the
twelfth century. As for the destruction levels, archaeologists
and historians have traditionally explained them as the result
of the Dorian Invasion or (more recently) of hit-and-run raid-
ers. Thus, the belief that the Greeks first came to Greece ca.
1200 B.C. has no support in either legend or archaeology, and
is incompatible with the conclusion of most Linear B scholars
that the language of the tablets is Greek. Not surprisingly, the
theory has few adherents today, and I shall not deal with it
further in this essay. One of the better known books in which
it is advocated is Sinclair Hood's The Home of the Heroes. 2
Another and increasingly more popular view is that "the
coming of the Greeks" occurred at the break between Early
Helladic II and EH in, ca. 2100 B.C. For this relatively recent
proposal, Blegen's reconstruction was a prerequisite and a
- S. Hood, The Home of the Heroes: The Aegean before the Greeks (Lon-
don: Thames and Hudson, 1967).