The Coming of the Greeks. Indo-European Conquests in the Aegean and the Near East

The Coming of the Greeks

There we see that for the most part "nations" did not yet play
a role in history. Volkerwanderungen are not attested, nor is
any massive migration by a primitive people. The barbarians
who appear in the documents are sometimes infiltrators who
peacefully attach themselves to a city or civilized land. On oc-
casion we meet barbarian raiders. Most importantly, toward
the end of our period we find that Aryan speakers played a
considerable role in what for the sake of convenience we may
call takeovers: the relatively benign takeovers of cities in Mi-
tanni (followed by the creation of a Great Kingship over all of
Mitanni) and of small principalities in the Levant, and the
much more violent takeover of northwest India. The "Hittite
nation" turns out, upon inspection, to be as illusory as the
"Hittite invasion" of central Anatolia. Thus the history of the
Near East during our critical period offers some useful analo-
gies and caveats. But in addition it offers a well-demarcated
period of chaos and turmoil in which perhaps "the coming of
the Greeks" will fit.
Quite clearly the second quarter of the second millennium
was tumultuous in the Near East. It began with the preten-
sions of city kings to become imperial kings and degenerated
into a dark age blanketing the whole of the Fertile Crescent
and Egypt. In Egypt, contemporary records fail in the eight-
eenth century, well before the arrival of the first hyksos, and do
not resume until the expulsion of the Great Hyksos after 1550
B.C. Documentation for Mesopotamia is relatively full in the
reign of Hammurabi (1792—1750 B.C.), but then dwindles
and virtually ends with the reign of Ammisaduqa late in the
seventeenth century: Ammisaduqa's successor fell victim to
Mursilis's raid, and much later king lists show that thereupon
Hammurabi's dynasty was replaced by the Kassites. The Kas-
site dynasty in Babylon seems to have controlled most if not all
of southern Mesopotamia. To the east of Babylonia, the land
known as Elam (and called Persis by the Greeks) falls into dark-
ness in the sixteenth century and is not again illuminated until
the thirteenth. In the Levant the seventeenth and sixteenth

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