| |
The Dorian invasion is a concept devised by
historians of Ancient Greece to explain the replacement of pre-classical
dialects and traditions in southern Greece by the ones that prevailed in
Classical Greece. The latter were named Dorian by the ancient Greek writers,
after the Dorians, the historical population that spoke them. Greek legend
asserts that the Dorians took possession of the Peloponnesus in an event called
the Return of the Heracleidae. Nineteenth-century Classical scholars saw in the
legend a possibly real event they termed the Dorian invasion. The meaning of
the concept has changed several times, as historians, philologists and
archaeologists used it in attempts to explain the cultural discontinuities
expressed in the data of their fields. The pattern of arrival of Dorian culture
on certain islands in the Mediterranean, such as Crete, is also not well
understood. The Dorians colonised a number of sites on Crete such as Lato.
Despite nearly 200 years of investigation, the historicity of a mass migration
of Dorians into Greece has never been established, and the origin of the
Dorians remains unknown. Some have linked them or their victims with the
emergence of the equally mysterious Sea Peoples. The meaning of the phrase
"Dorian invasion" as an explanation for the cultural and economic
breakdown after the Mycenaean period has become to some degree amorphous.
Investigations into it have served mainly to rule out various speculations,
though the possibility of a real Dorian invasion remains open.
Return of the Heracleidae:
Classical tradition, as recorded for example in Herodotus, describes the
"Return of the Heracleidae", the descendants of Heracles, who were
exiled at his death and returned in later generations to reclaim the dominion
that Heracles had held in the Peloponnesus. The Greece to which the tradition
refers is the mythic one, now considered to be Mycenaean Greece. The details
differ from one ancient author to another, the commonality being that a
traditional ruling clan traced its legitimacy to Heracles. The Greek words
referring to the influx of the Dorians are katienai and katerchesthai,
literally "to descend", "come down" or "go down"
or, less commonly, "be brought down." It means a descent from uplands
to lowlands, or from earth to grave, or rushing down as a flood, or sweeping
down as a wind, or those who have returned from exile by ship. This sweeping
down upon the Peloponnesus invited the English translation
"invasion". There is, however, a distinction between Heracleidae and
Dorians.
George Grote summarizes the relationship as follows: "Herakles himself had
rendered inestimable aid to the Dorian king Aegimius, when the latter was hard
pressed in a contest with the Lapithae .... Herakles defeated the Lapithae and
slew their king Koronus; in return for which Aegimius assigned to his
deliverers one third part of his whole territory and adopted Hyllus as his
son."
Hyllus, a Perseid, was driven from the state of Mycenae into exile after the
death of Heracles by a dynastic rival, Eurystheus, another Perseid: "After
the death ... of Herakles, his son Hyllos and his other children were expelled
and persecuted by Eurystheus ... Eurystheus invaded Attica, but perished in the
attempt .... All the sons of Eurystheus lost their lives ... with him, so that
the Perseid family was now represented only by the Herakleids ...." The
Pelopid family now assumed power. The Heraclids "endeavored to recover the
possessions from which they had been expelled" but were defeated by the
Ionians at the Isthmus of Corinth. Hyllus staked peace for three generations
against immediate reoccupation on a single combat and was killed by Echemus of
Arcadia. The Heracleidae now found it prudent to claim the Dorian land granted
to Heracles: "and from this moment the Herakleids and Dorians became
intimately united together into one social communion." Three generations
later the Heracleidae with Dorian collusion occupied the Peloponnesus, an event
Grote terms a "victorious invasion."
The term "invasion" A 6th-century cup from Laconia, the very center
of the classical Dorians, representing Nike, the goddess of victory, attending
upon a Spartan warrior. The first widespread use of the term "Dorian
invasion" appears to date to the 1830s. A popular alternative was the
"Dorian migration". For example, in 1831 Thomas Keightly was using
"Dorian migration" in Outline of History; by 1838 in The Mythology of
Ancient Greece and Italy he was using "Dorian invasion". Neither of
those two words exactly fits the events, as they imply an incursion from
outside a society to within; but the Dorians were not outside of either Greece
or Greek society. William Mitford's History of Greece (1784–1810)
described a "Dorian conquest" followed by "a revolution in
Peloponnesus so complete that, except in the rugged province of Arcadia,
nothing remained unaltered." In 1824 Karl Otfried Müller's Die Dorier
was published in German and was translated into English by Tufnel and Lewis for
publication in 1830. They use such terms as "the Doric invasion" and
"the invasion of the Dorians" to translate Müller's "Die
Einwanderung von den Doriern" (literally: "the migration of the
Dorians"), which was quite a different concept. On one level the
Einwanderung meant no more than the Heraklidenzug, the return of the
Heracleidae. However, Müller was also applying the sense of
Völkerwanderung to it, which was being used of the Germanic migrations.
Müller's approach was philological. In trying to explain the distribution
of tribes and dialects he hypothesized that the aboriginal or Pelasgian
population was Hellenic. His first paragraph of the Introduction asserts:
"The Dorians derived their origin [der Ursprung des dorischen Stammes]
from those districts in which the Grecian nation bordered toward the north upon
numerous and dissimilar races of barbarians. As to the tribes which dwelt
beyond these borders we are indeed wholly destitute of information; nor is
there the slightest trace of any memorial or tradition that the Greeks
originally came from those quarters." Müller goes on to propose that
the original Pelasgian language was the common ancestor of Greek and Latin,[11]
that it evolved into Proto-Greek and was corrupted in Macedon and Thessaly by
invasions of Illyrians. This same pressure of Illyrians drove forth Greeks
speaking Achaean (including Aeolian), Ionian, and finally Dorian in three
diachronic waves, explaining the dialect distribution of Greek in classical
times.
Following this traditional view, Thumb noticed that in the Peloponnesus and in
the islands, where the Dorians established themselves, their dialect showed
elements of the Arcadian dialect. This can be explained if the Dorians
conquered a Pre-Doric population, which was pushed into the Arcadian mountains.
Where the Dorians were a minority, there is a mixed dialect, as in Boeotia, or
the Dorians adopted the existing dialect, as in Thessaly. To the Achaeans
described by Homer belongs the Aeolic-Arcadian dialect in the whole of eastern
Greece, with the exception of Attica, where the Ionians were confined. The
Ionians must be considered the oldest first wave of the Greek migration. In
1902, K. Paparigopoulos, calling the event the "Descent of the
Heraclidae", stated that the Heraclidae came from Thessaly after being
expelled by the Thessalians living in Epirus.[
Kretschmer's external Greeks Toward the end of the 19th century the philologist
Paul Kretschmer made a strong case that Pelasgian was a pre-Greek substrate,
perhaps Anatolian, taking up a classical theme of remnant populations existing
in pockets among the Greek speakers, in mountainous and rural Arcadia and in
inaccessible coasts of the far south. This view left Müller's proto-Greeks
without a homeland, but Kretschmer did not substitute the Heracleidae or their
Dorian allies from Macedon and Thessaly. Instead he removed the earliest Greeks
to the trail leading from the plains of Asia, where he viewed the
Proto-Indo-European language as having broken up about 2500 . Kretschmer
suggested that somewhere between that Asian homeland and Greece a new cradle of
the Greek tribes developed, from which Proto-Ionians at about 2000 ,
Proto-Achaeans at about 1600 and Dorians at about 1200 came to swoop down on an
increasingly less aboriginal Greece as three waves of external Greeks.
Kretschmer was confident that if the unknown homeland of the Greeks was not
then known, archaeology would find it. The handbooks of Greek history from then
on spoke of Greeks entering Greece. As late as 1956 J.B. Bury's History of
Greece (3rd edition) wrote of an "invasion which brought the Greek
language into Greece". Over that half-century Greek and Balkan archaeology
united in an effort to locate the Dorians further north than Greece. The idea
was combined with a view that the Sea Peoples were part of the same north-south
migration about 1200 . The weakness in this theory[18] is that it requires both
an invaded Greece and an external area where Greek evolved and continued to
evolve into dialects contemporaneously with the invaded Greece. However,
although the invaded Greece was amply represented by evidence of all sorts,
there was no evidence at all of the external homeland. Similarly, a clear Greek
homeland for the Sea Peoples failed to materialize. Retaining Müller's
three waves and Kretschmer's Pelasgian pockets the scholars continued to search
for the Dorians in other quarters. Müller's common ancestor of Greek and
Latin had vanished by 1950; and by 1960, although still given lip service, the
concept of Greek developing outside of Greece was in decline.
Greek origin in Greece:
The Greek dialects after the event or events termed "the Dorian
invasion." Before this, the dialect spoken in the later Dorian range
(except for Doris itself) is believed to have been Achaean, from which Attic,
Ionic and Aeolic descended. Doric displaced Achaean in southern Greece.
Additional progress in the search for the Dorian invasion resulted from the
decipherment of Linear B inscriptions. The language of the Linear B texts is an
early form of Greek now known as Mycenaean Greek. Comparing it with the later
Greek dialects scholars could trace the development of the dialects from the
earlier Mycenaean. For example, classical Greek anak-s, "king", was
postulated to be derived from a reconstructed form *wanak. In the Linear B
texts appears the form wa-na-ka, sometimes accompanied by the, wa-na-sa (assa,
"queen"). Ernst Risch lost no time in proposing that there was never
more than one migration, which brought proto-Greek into Greece. Proto-Greek is
the assumed last common ancestor of all known varieties of Greek and then
dissimilated into dialects within Greece. Meanwhile, the linguists closest to
the decipherment were having doubts about the classification of proto-Greek.
John Chadwick summarizing in 1976 wrote: "Let us therefore explore the
alternative view. This hypothesis is that the Greek language did not exist
before the twentieth century BC, but was formed in Greece by the mixture of an
indigenous population with invaders who spoke another language .... What this
language was is a difficult question ... the exact stage reached in development
at the time of the arrival is difficult to predict." Georgiev suggested
that: "The Proto Greek region included Epirus, approximately up to in the
north including Paravaia, Tymphaia, Athamania, Dolopia, Amphilochia, and
Acarnania, west and north Thessaly (Hestiaiotis,, Perrhaibia, Tripolis, and
Pieria), i.e. more or less the territory of contemporary northwestern
Greece" In another ten years the "alternative view" was becoming
the standard one. JP Mallory wrote in 1989 concerning the various hypotheses of
proto-Greek that had been put forward since the decipherment:
"Reconciliation of all these different theories seems out of the question
... the current state of our knowledge of the Greek dialects can accommodate
Indo-Europeans entering Greece at any time between 2200 and 1600 to emerge
later as Greek speakers."
By the end of the 20th century the concept of an invasion by external Greek
speakers had ceased to be the mainstream view, (although still asserted by a
minority); thus Geoffrey Horrocks writes: "Greek is now widely believed to
be the product of contact between Indo-European immigrants and the speakers of
the indigenous languages of the Balkan peninsula beginning c. 2,000 B.C."
If the different dialects had developed within Greece no subsequent invasions
were required to explain their presence.
Destruction at the end of Mycenaean IIIB:
A record of Pylos, preserved by baking in the fire that destroyed the palace
about 1200 , according to the excavator, Carl Blegen. The record must date to
about 1200, as the unbaked clay, used mainly for diurnal or other short-term
records, would soon have disintegrated. Meanwhile, the archaeologists were
encountering what appeared to be a wave of destruction of Mycenaean palaces.
Indeed, the Pylos tablets recorded the dispatch of "coast-watchers",
to be followed not long after by the burning of the palace, presumably by
invaders from the sea. Carl Blegen wrote: "the telltale track of the
Dorians must be recognized in the fire-scarred ruins of all the great palaces
and the more important towns which ... were blotted out at the end of Mycenaean
IIIB." Blegen follows Furumark in dating Mycenaean IIIB to 1300–1230
. Blegen himself dated the Dorian invasion to 1200 . A destruction by Dorians
has its own problems (as discussed in the next section) and is not the only
possible explanation. At approximately this time Hittite power in Anatolia
collapsed with the destruction of their capital Hattusa, and the late 19th and
the 20th dynasties of Egypt suffered invasions of the Sea Peoples. A theory,
reported for instance by Thomas and Conant, attributes the ruin of the
Peloponnesus to the Sea Peoples: "Evidence on the Linear B tablets from
the Mycenaean kingdom of Pylos describing the dispatch of rowers and watchers
to the coast, for instance, may well date to the time that the Egyptian pharaoh
was expecting the arrival of foes." The identity of the foes remained a
question. The evidence suggests that some of the Sea Peoples may have been
Greek. However, most of the destroyed Mycenaean sites are far from the sea, and
the expedition against Troy at the end of this period shows that the sea was
safe. Desborough believes that the sea was safe in central and south Aegean in
this period.
Michael Wood suggests relying on tradition, especially that of Thucydides:
"[L]et us not forget the legends, at least as models for what might have
happened. They tell us of constant rivalries with the royal clans of the Heroic
Age – Atreus and Thyestes, Agamemnon and Aigisthes, and so on ...."
In summary, it is possible that the Mycenaean world disintegrated through
"feuding clans of the great royal families". The possibility of some
sort of internal struggle had long been under consideration. Chadwick, after
following and critiquing the development of different views, in 1976 settled on
a theory of his own: There was no Dorian invasion. The palaces were destroyed
by Dorians who had been in the Peloponnesus all along as a subservient lower
class (Linear B: do-e-ro, "male slave"; latter Greek form: d, and now
were staging a revolution. Chadwick espoused the view that northern Greek was
the more conservative language, and proposed that southern Greek had developed
under Minoan influence as a palace language. Mylonas joins two of the previous
possibilities. He believes that some developments in Argolis and attempts for
recovery after 1200 , can be explained by an internal fighting, and by an enemy
pressure, by the Dorians. Even if the Dorians were one of the causes of the
Bronze age collapse, there is evidence that they brought with them some new
elements of culture. It seems that the Doric clans moved southward gradually
over a number of years, and they devastated the territory, until they managed
to establish themselves in the Mycenaean centres.
Closing the gap:
The quest for the Dorian invasion had begun as an attempt to explain the
differences between Peloponnesian society depicted by Homer and the historical
Dorians of classical Greece. The first scholars to work on the problem were
historians researching the only resources available to them: the Greek legends.
The philologists (later linguists) subsequently took up the challenge but in
the end only brought the problem into sharper definition. Finally the
archaeologists have inherited the issue. Perhaps some distinctively Dorian
archaeological evidence will turn up or has turned up giving precise insight as
to how and when Peloponnesian society changed so radically. The historians had
defined the Greek Dark Ages, a period of general decline, in this case the
disappearance of the palace economy and with it law and order, loss of writing,
diminishment of trade, decrease in population and abandonment of settlements
(destroyed or undestroyed), metals starvation and loss of the fine arts or at
least the diminution of their quality, evidenced especially in pottery. By its
broadest definition the dark age lasted between 1200 and 750, the start of the
archaic or orientalizing period, when influence from the Middle East via the
overseas colonies stimulated a recovery. A dark age of poverty, low population
and metals starvation is not compatible with the idea of great population
movements of successful warriors wielding the latest military equipment
sweeping into the Peloponnesus and taking it over to rebuild civilization their
way. This dark age consists of three periods of art and archaeology:
sub-Mycenaean, Proto-geometric and Geometric. The most successful, the
Geometric, seems to fit the Dorians better, but there is a gap, and this period
is not localized to and did not begin in Dorian territory. It is more to be
associated with Athens, an Ionian state. Still, the Dorians did share in the
Geometric period and therefore to find its origin might be perhaps to find the
origin of the Dorians. The Geometric originated by clear transition from the
Proto-geometric. The logical break in material culture is the start of the
Proto-geometric at about 1050 , which leaves a gap of 150 years. The year 1050
offers nothing distinctively Dorian either, but if the Dorians were present in
the Geometric, and they were not always in place as an unrecorded lower class,
1050 is most likely time of entry. Cartledge says humorously: "It has of
late become an acknowledged scandal that the Dorians, archaeologically
speaking, do not exist. That is, there is no cultural trait surviving in the
material record for the two centuries or so after 1200 which can be regarded as
a peculiarly Dorian hallmark. Robbed of their patents for Geometric pottery,
cremation burial, iron-working and, the unkindest prick of all, the humble
straight pin, the hapless Dorians stand naked before their creator – or,
some would say, inventor." The question remains open to further
investigation.
|
|
