The Coming of the Greeksgiven its archaeological articulation by Pedro Bosch-Gimpera. 7
According to Bosch-Gimpera's reconstruction, the centum
branch of the Indo-European family came into being in central
Europe, and the satem branch above the Black Sea and the Cau-
casus range.
During the last fifty years, the dates of the "breakup" of the
Proto-Indo-European community, and of "folk migrations" of
the PIE speakers, have either held their place or slipped back-
wards in archaeological and linguistic scholarship. An initial
impetus for earlier dates seems to have come from the classifi-
cation of Hittite as an Indo-European language. So little did
Hittite share with Sanskrit, or with Greek, that one was forced
to assume that the Proto-Indo-European community must have
begun splintering a very long time before the Hittites invaded
Asia Minor. The discovery of the Indus valley civilization, and
its publication in the 19305, did not much discourage an early
date for the Indo-European dispersal: that civilization, like
pre-Kassite Mesopotamia, was then dated several centuries ear-
lier than it is today (after the Second World War, the date for
the destruction or abandonment of the Indus valley sites was
lowered considerably, but by the time of the revision, the early
dating of the Indo-European dispersal was well entrenched; the
Aryan conquest of India, therefore, has in recent decades been
seen as a bird out of season, later than the main migrations by
centuries or even millennia). More recently, archaeological ar-
guments have encouraged earlier dates for the Indo-European
invasions. The earlier dating of Minyan Ware, of Corded Ware
in central Europe, and of Gray Ware in northern Iran per-
suaded Homer Thomas that the conventional dates for the
main Indo-European movements were four or five centuries too
low. 8 On the basis of new carbon-14 dates (and calibration of
j. P. Bosch-Gimpera, Les Indo-europeem: problemes archeologiques
(Paris: Payot, 1961).
- H. Thomas, "New Evidence for Dating the Indo-European Dis-
persal in Europe," in Indo-European and Indo-Europeans, ed. G. Cardona et
al., 199-215.
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