Dorian invasion

The Dorians were credited with introducing new forms of material culture and destroying the Mycenaean palaces, though this created conflicts between the interpretative narrative, the mythological tradition, and the archaeological evidence.

During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars attempted to find archaeological and linguistic evidence of the Dorian invasion and to trace its route, though these efforts proved largely unsuccessful.

Although Müller's narrative of the Dorian invasion received early challenges, particularly from Karl Julius Beloch in 1893, it was only rarely questioned until the decipherment of the Mycenaean Linear B script in 1952.

Archaeological discoveries in the 1960s demonstrated that the cultural innovations previously ascribed to the Dorians were spread over a long period, often showing continuity from Bronze Age Mycenaean civilisation, and often arose in regions, such as Attica and Euboea, believed to have been unaffected by the invasion.

Modern archaeologists explain the collapse of Mycenaean palatial civilisation through factors including social conflicts, climate change, technological developments and the breakdown of the palaces' socio-economic model.

In the classical period (that is, from c. 600 BCE), the Dorians were an ethno-linguistic group, speaking the Doric dialect of Greek, concentrated in the southern Peloponnese, Crete, Sicily and the Dodecanese.

[8] Two further Dorian migrations were believed to have occurred: the first resulted in the foundation of Doric colonies in the southern Aegean and in Asia Minor, while the second, in the eighth century BCE, established Doric-speaking communities at Cyrene and in Magna Graecia.

[4] At least initially, the stories of the Dorian migration and the Return of the Heracleidae formed separate traditions, which were combined by the time of Herodotus (that is, the mid-fifth century BCE) at the latest.

[14] The most complete surviving accounts of the myth are those of the first-century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus and the Bibliotheca, a mythological compendium dating to the first or second century CE, but these probably followed earlier sources closely.

The version of the invasion narrative used in Sparta seems to have been a pastiche of various myths, with only a tenuous connection to the ancient Greeks' understanding of the Dorians as a people: the historian Nigel Kennell has called it "drastically underwritten" and likely to have developed in Laconia itself.

This was considered to be marked by the introduction of new material culture, specifically bronze violin-bow fibulae, a new sword of the Naue II type, cremation, cist graves, and – of most importance – ironworking.

[26] Müller's student, Ernst Curtius, called them "northern mountaineers", stronger than the coastal peoples of Greece due to what he saw as their vigour born of a comparative lack of development and civilisation.

[29] Hermann Müller argued in 1844 for the Nordic origin of Dorian (and so classical Greek) civilisation: this view became the standard in German historiography and remained so until the mid-twentieth century.

[30] In 1870, Alexander Conze proposed that the recently identified Geometric style of pottery was the work of Dorian invaders, whom he considered to be a Germanic people from northern Europe.

[35] In France, Victor Duruy linked the Dorian invasion to the autocratic nature of the Spartan state, suggesting that it made Sparta ethnically homogeneous and so more acquiescent to repressive government.

[34] In 1893,[36] Karl Julius Beloch attempted to integrate the Greek historical tradition with recent archaeological discoveries, such as those made at Mycenae by Heinrich Schliemann and Panagiotis Stamatakis.

[44] During the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the Dorian invasion paradigm remained dominant, partly as a result of the limited archaeological and historical evidence then available for the Greek world around and after the end of the Bronze Age.

[51] The idea of the Dorian invasion remained the scholarly orthodoxy throughout the 1960s,[52] and was adapted by Soviet historians, who integrated it into a Marxist view of history as the mechanism by which Greek culture transitioned from primitive communism to a mode of production based on slavery.

[56] In 1980, Leonard Palmer defended the Dorian invasion hypothesis against recent criticisms, citing it as the only means of explaining the distribution of the West Greek dialects in the classical period.

[70] During the period of Nazi rule between 1933 and 1945, German classicists universally portrayed the Dorians, in the words of Richard Wolin, as "fearless Aryan conquerors", contrasted with supposedly racially inferior Ionians.

[75] The fundamental aspects of the racialised view of the Dorian invasion were rarely denied, even by those opposed to Nazi rule and politics, such as the German exile Werner Jaeger and the French scholars Georges Dumézil and Charles Picard.

[77] Although "Aryan" and related terms largely disappeared from scholarship following the downfall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the underlying paradigm of heroic, migrating invaders remained into the 1960s, both in mainstream historiography and in explicitly right-wing and Neo-Nazi works.

[86] More broadly, archaeological studies in the 1960s moved away from migration as a dominant explanation for cultural change, leading in turn to the decline of the Dorian invasion and related hypotheses in mainstream scholarship.

[90] Desborough suggested that the Dorians had retreated from their initial invasion, thereby explaining the lack of evidence for their settlement after the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces, and returned in the Submycenaean period around 50–100 years later.

[97] In 1978, Carol G. Thomas wrote that Chadwick's linguistic argument was incompatible with the mythological tradition, and would imply that the Dorian invasion was a post facto ethnogenesis myth created in the Iron Age.

[101] By the 1990s, the Dorian invasion was considered a myth by most scholars in the field, though it continued to have adherents, such as Birgitta Eder, Nicholas Hammond and Theodore Cressy Skeat, and remained prevalent in German-speaking scholarship.

[110] Where movements of people are believed to have occurred, they seem to have resulted in net migration away from Mycenaean centres; the population of the areas previously considered to have been settled by Dorians appears to have declined sharply.

[111] Furthermore, these population movements, on a smaller scale than imagined by the Dorian invasion, are now recognised as part of a broader, multi-causal systems collapse, rather than as a monocausal explanation for the changes of the period.

[115] Modern scholarship explains the ancient narrative of the Dorian invasion as a rationalising myth, created as part of a process of ethnogenesis by Peloponnesian communities whose cultural forms gradually converged over time.

[116] Oliver Dickinson has written that the myths of the Dorian invasion are "likely to have little relevance to what actually happened", citing the long span of time between the supposed events and the composition of the retellings that survive, as well as the distorting effect of contemporary politics, ideology and society upon any historical elements that may have existed in the narratives.

A young man in early nineteenth-century formal dress: a black coat and a white shirt. He has a slightly receding hairline, a pale face and dark hair.
Karl Otfried Müller , painted by Wilhelm Ternite in 1838. Müller popularised the ancient myth of the Dorian invasion in modern archaeology, and within German nationalism and pseudoscientific race theory .
Distribution of the major dialects of Ancient Greek within the Aegean region and Cyprus, c. 500 – c. 323 BCE
Drawing of a black-figure vase: Heracles, to the left, holds his club and wears a lion-skin, while Athena faces him with a shield, spear and helmet, a deer at her feet.
Drawing by Eduard Gerhard of a late sixth-century BCE Greek amphora , showing Heracles (left) with Athena . Behind Heracles is a column of the Doric order ; behind Athena is one of the Ionic order , showing the association between Heracles and Dorian identity. [ 13 ]
Map showing several population movements, including the Dorians, Aeolians and Ionians, as arrows moving into Greece: the Dorians start from central Thessaly and spread into the Peloponnese and towards Italy and Rhodes.
Map from H. G. Wells 's The Outline of History (1920), showing the Dorian invasion as a migration from northern Greece
Young Spartans Exercising ( c. 1860 ) by Edgar Degas : an idealised vision of Spartan pedagogical methods and social institutions [ 59 ]
A clay tablet, approximately twice as tall as it is wide, inscribed with Linear B signs
Linear B tablet from Pylos , c. 1180 BCE . The discovery that these tablets were written in Greek led to doubts over the Dorian invasion hypothesis. [ 79 ]
A small tomb, constructed of a square hole edged by stone pieces
Cist grave in the Mycenaean cemetery at Dendra in the Argolid . Previously associated with the Dorian invasion, such graves are known to have been used throughout the Mycenaean period. [ 104 ]