The Coming of the GreeksMuhly has most recently done,' 7 that the best analogies for the
grave goods of Circles A and B are to be found in the kurgans
of southern Russia (in the great kurgan at Maikop, for exam-
ple, not far north of the Caucasus, a late third-millennium
"treasure" that anticipates some of the characteristics of the
Mycenaean material). The abrupt appearance in Greece of all
this splendor of the shaft graves has long seemed to many
scholars inexplicable without the concession that at least some
Greeks came from a distant place to the Argolid ca. 1600 B.C.
Within the framework of Kretschmer's view that the Greeks
came to Greece in several dialect-waves, the invaders of ca.
1600 B.C. were most often identified with the second or
"Achaean" wave of Greek immigrants (the lonians, on this
same view, were held to have been the first wave of Greeks to
enter Greece, arriving three centuries before the Achaeans).
A few scholars, however, have seen the shaft graves as evi-
dence that simply "the Greeks"—either the first of them, or
by far the most important contingent of them—came to Greece
ca. 1600 B.C. The view that "the coming of the Greeks" oc-
curred at this time, and that the grave circles at Mycenae are
the material record of that event, involves more than the ques-
tion of chronology. If one dates the arrival of the Greeks in
Greece to the beginning of the LH period, one tends to picture
the first Greeks as warriors rather than as herdsmen. And in-
stead of a massive Volkswanderung, what comes to mind is a
conquest of the indigenous population by a relatively small
number of intruders.
- Ibid., 316—22.