THREELinguistic and
Archaeological Considerations
All three of the preferred dates for "the coming of the Greeks"
are archaeologically based, but in weighing them, one must
consider more than the archaeological evidence. Studies in lin-
guistics very obviously have a special relevance here, and de-
velopments in this field have been somewhat startling. Spe-
cialists on the Greek dialects have come to some conclusions
that pertain directly to the date at which the Greek language
(or, more accurately, the form of Proto-Indo-European—
whether dialect or language—out of which the Greek language
would develop) arrived in the Aegean. And from Indo-Euro-
pean linguistics has come a novel suggestion about the place
from which the first PIE speakers may have come to Greece. It
will be useful here to review rather broadly the current theses
about the Indo-European homeland and Volkerwanderungen,
and to see how they arose.
A few devout scholars in the early days of Indo-European
philology believed that "the Indo-Europeans" came ultimately
from Mesopotamia (since that is where the Tower of Babylon
was built and where the Confusion of Tongues occurred) and
more directly from eastern Anatolia, since the Table of Nations
seemed to identify Asia Minor with the progeny of Japheth.
That, however, was a minority view. As we have seen, from the
time that Franz Bopp published his influential comparative
grammar in 1833 until late in the nineteenth century, most
philologists located the Indo-European homeland in the gen-
eral vicinity of what is today Afghanistan, and what was once