FOUR
Considerations from
Near Eastern History
The question we have been worrying about thus far is "When
did the Greeks arrive in Greece?" No less important than the
date, however, is the nature of "the coming of the Greeks."
Meyer, Beloch, and Breasted imagined it as a massive move-
ment of pastoralists, and in many quarters that is how it is
imagined today: a large, disadvantaged (and probably dispos-
sessed) nation on the move, coming from the pasture lands of
the Eurasian steppe, descends into the Balkan peninsula and
makes the place Greek. A smallish company, numbering only
a few thousand, would have been overwhelmed or turned back;
thus, it is necessary to imagine a migratory nation large and
cohesive enough to prevail. In this picture, a human tide in-
undates the land: whether or not the indigenous population is
spared, the arrival of the Greeks represents an ethnic transfor-
mation of the Greek mainland. Now, it is possible that such a
picture is valid, but it is also possible that the hellenization of
Greece happened in a very different way. These other possibil-
ities are suggested by a review of the history of the known
world in the late third and early second millennia.
During the period from 2500 to 1500 B.C., literary sources
from the Near East describe a great deal of destruction, death,
and upheaval, but few instances of a massive and destructive
migration by a primitive or pastoral people. An example of an
overwhelming folk migration would be the Magyar descent
into what is now Hungary, and what was then Great Moravia,
at the end of the ninth century. Of this kind of thing the lit-
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