Dorian Invasion - Greek Origin in Greece

Greek Origin in 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-, and a glance at Linear B texts turned up the historical form wa-na-ka.

Ernst Risch lost no time in proposing that there was never more than one migration, which brought proto-Greek into Greece, and that proto-Greek 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 B.C., 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."

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 BC 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 mainsteam 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.