The Coming of the Greeks
occurred toward the beginning of the Late Helladic period, 24
it also suggests that the splintering of the Proto-Indo-Euro-
pean community may have been an event of the second millen-
nium rather than of the third (to say nothing of the fourth- and
fifth-millennium dates posited in Gimbutas's thesis). Taking
temporary leave of the larger problem, let us focus on the more
specific question: when did "the Greeks" arrive in Greece?
As noted above, the Greek dialects of historical times were
once thought to have arrived in Greece in waves. According to
this reconstruction, successive waves of Greeks came from their
northern homeland to the Aegean, each bearing with it that
form of Greek that was current in the homeland at the time of
the wave's departure. Although the theory that three prehis-
toric dialects corresponded to three waves of invaders held the
field for half a century after it was systematically set out by
Kretschmer, today it has been abandoned by most specialists.
The theory began to unravel in 1954 when Walter Porzig, us-
ing a new approach called Sprachgeograpbie, showed that Ionic
was not the most ancient Greek dialect, but that it came into
being quite late: Arcado-Cypriote and Ionic were both de-
scended from a common "East Greek" dialect of the prehistoric
period. 25 Porzig's insight came at an opportune moment. Al-
though Porzig had written his article in 1945, long before the
decipherment of the Linear B tablets, the decipherment nicely
confirmed and extended his thesis.
The next step was taken by Ernst Risch, who in 1955 aban-
doned the wave theory altogether. 26 Basing his arguments in
- Wyatt, "Greek Dialectology," 18, summarizes thus: "the evi-
dence of the Greek dialects and their distribution points to a rather late
date, say around 1400, for the introduction of Greek speech to the Pelo-
ponnesus." Wyatt concluded that the Greeks were in Thessaly before they
appeared in the Peloponnese, but that "we have no linguistic evidence for
Greek speech in any part of Greece prior to 1600 B.C."
- W. Porzig, "SprachgeographischeUntersuchungenzudengriech-
ischen Dialekten," IF 61 (1954): 147—69.
- E. Risch, "Die Gliederung der griechischen Dialekte in neuer
38
