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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ifly6 (talk | contribs) at 20:14, 10 October 2024 (→Doric Greek in LB?: Reply). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Specialisms

@UndercoverClassicist: Is this your specialism? It's most certainly not mine. However, Cline (who was a professor of mine) did note that our article on the Dorian invasion sucks, so I wanted to take a stab or something at it. If you're interested in working on a rewrite I'd be happy to. Ifly6 (talk) 18:25, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi -- yes, it is, and yes, he's completely right. It basically needs the same treatment as Marian Reforms -- to disentangle the historiographical/mythological narrative from the "real" archaeology. The challenge is that we've got multiple strata here:
  1. The ancient mythical narrative (in Thucydides et al) that becomes an important foundational myth for (especially) Spartan royalty.
  2. The modern myth, which is heavily tied up in C19th racialist archaeological pseudoscience, that the people of Greece were replaced by nebulous northern Europeans/"Aryans" after the Late Bronze Age.
  3. The really ancient myth of the "Sea Peoples" and so on, which basically comes out of Egyptian (and to a lesser extent other Near Eastern) LBA sources, and gets tied into the first two by various modern scholars for various reasons, though it doesn't really have anything to do with either.
  4. The current archaeological discussion of what actually happened c. 1180 BCE, which is much more circumspect about whether these "sea peoples" are really a useful category in the way that Rameses III would like us to believe, much less happy to talk about societal "collapse" rather than "transformation", and generally much less hasty to put all the big social/political changes between c. 1250 and c. 1100 BCE under the same umbrella.
All the sources you note below look good, though I'd also note that a lot of good work on the final LBA in Greece has happened in the last 10-15 years.
I must admit that I have some issues with Cline's general take on the LBA "Collapse": in essence, I think he takes too credulous a view of the catastrophist Near Eastern sources, and downplays -- though does not ignore -- the degree to which the evidence is compatible with a "Collapse" of -- especially -- mainland Mycenaean "civilisation" where we're fundamentally talking about a social change rather than a disaster, and also somewhat too slow to use differential archaeological visibility (plus preservation and publication biases) as a major component of the explanation. However, his work is a pretty good starting point, and certainly a Cline-led article on the "Dorian Invasion" would be much better than what we have now. This one has been on my to-do list for a while, and I'd be very happy to help out with a rewrite. UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:49, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Honestly if this is your specific specialism I would much rather let you take the lead. At least with something like an outline and source list? Ifly6 (talk) 20:52, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I think you could do worse than the outline above: split it into three macro-sections, one for the "Dorian invasion" qua ancient myth (that is, the Return of the Heraclidae and so on) one for the "Dorian invasion" qua historiographical explanation, and one for the current state of the field regarding the end of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean. A full bibliography would be gigantic, unfortunately, but a few sources you don't have so far -- I've starred the key ones I'd start with in each section.
Greek legend
  • *Hall, Jonathan (2013). "Dorians". In Wilson, Nigel (ed.). Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece. New York: Taylor and Francis. pp. 240f. ISBN 978-1-136-78800-0. (with biblio; also applies to the contemporary picture)
  • Malkin, Irad (2024). Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean. esp. ch. 1: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-009-46605-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
Modern myth
  • **Gainsford, Peter (7 March 2022). "The Dorian invasion and the Nazis". Kiwi Hellenist. (start here: don't use it directly, but Gainsford knows what he's on about -- follow up what he discusses into academic sources -- plenty of bibliography here too).
  • *Daniel, John Franklin; Broneer, Oscar; Wade-Gery, H. T. (1948). "The Dorian Invasion: The Setting". American Journal of Archaeology. 52 (1): 107–110. JSTOR 500556. (good for setting out the contours of the orthodoxy c. 1948)
  • Cook, R. M. (1962). "The Dorian Invasion". Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society. 8: 16–22. JSTOR 44712965. (already in the 1960s, casting major doubts on the story, and coming to a rather unconvincing rescue-effort conclusion)
  • Chadwick, John (1972). The Mycenaean World. Cambridge University Press. pp. c. 172. (already disavowing the "invasion", partly on the basis of the then-fresh decipherment of Linear B, which really should have killed the whole thing).
  • Robertson, Noel (1980). "The Dorian Invasion and Corinthian Ritual". Classical Philology. 75 (1): 1–22. JSTOR 267822.
  • Stiebing, William H. (1980). "The End of the Mycenaean Age". The Biblical Archaeologist. 43 (1): 7–21. JSTOR 3209748.
Contemporary LBA studies
  • **Voutsaki, Sofia (2000). "Review: The Dorian Invasion". The Classical Review. 50 (1): 232–233. JSTOR 3065393. (a nice, fairly early, concise summary of the problems with the "Invasion" narrative as they appeared 25 years ago or so)
  • Dickinson, Oliver (2006). The Aegean from Bronze to Iron Age: Continuity and Change. New York: Taylor and Francis. ISBN 978-1-134-77871-3.
  • Thomas, Carol G.; Conant, Craig (2009). Citadel to City-State: The Transformation of Greece, 1200–700 B.C.E. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 20ff. ISBN 978-0-253-00325-6.
  • *Knapp, A. Bernard; Manning, Stuart (2016). "Crisis in Context: The End of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean". American Journal of Archaeology. 120 (1): 99–149. JSTOR 10.3764/aja.120.1.0099.
  • *Middleton, Guy D. (2017). Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths. chapters 5–7: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-15149-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  • Murray, Sarah C. (2017). The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy: Imports, Trade, and Institutions 1300-700 BCE. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-18637-8.
  • *Middleton, Guy D., ed. (2020). Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in the Aegean. Oxford: Oxbow Books. ISBN 978-1-78925-428-0. (** for ch. 16, but basically all the chapters need a read)
  • Broodbank, Cyprian (2013). The Making of the Middle Sea. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-999978-1.
Thinking on this, I might have more time and energy for this than I thought: how about we shift over to draftspace at Draft:Dorian Invasion? UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:28, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Sure. Moved. Ifly6 (talk) 22:33, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Most of these sources should now be added to the article source list. I've also added some of those cited in Cline 2024 (below) as well, preferring the newer ones. As to most of the Taylor and Francis books, I don't have access to them since they're not available on WP:LIBRARY. Ifly6 (talk) 22:09, 9 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I've got both of them: I'll add a bit from Wilson 2013 (it's got good bibliography as well) on the ancient part of the myth. Dickinson 2006 may not end up being used directly, but I'll have a look there later in the process to see if he has anything we need but can't find elsewhere. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:17, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
You should have some time to work on the text; I'm looking in to recreating that map which shows the ancient legend of the Dorians kinda chilling in central Greece for a while before deciding to couch-surf into the Peloponnese. Ifly6 (talk) 18:19, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, yes -- I saw that in Gainsford's blog and thought it would be an excellent addition, to make clear just how different the Herodotus/Thucydides/Valerius Maximus picture is from the "Aryan Dorians" of C20th imagination. UndercoverClassicist T·C 18:39, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sources

Other sources noted in Cline 2024:

  • R Carpenter Discontinuity in Mycenaean Civilisation (Cambridge, 1966)
  • J A Tainter The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge, 1988)
  • G Nagy “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XVII, with placeholders that stem from a conversation with Tom Palaima, starting with this question: was Herakles a Dorian?” Classical Inquiries (15 Nov 2019), …
  • G Nagy “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XVI, with a focus on Dorians led by kingly ‘sons’ of Herakles the Kingmaker” Classical Inquiries (8 Nov 2019), …
  • J M Hall Ethnical Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, 2019)
  • J M Hall Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago, 2002)
  • J M Hall “The Dorianisation of the Messenians” in Helots and Their Masters in Laconica and Messenia: Histories, Ideologies, Structures (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2003) ch 6
  • J M Hall “Dorians” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece (Routledge, 2006)
  • J M Hall A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca 1000–479 BC (Blackwell, 2007)
  • I Morris Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece (Blackwell, 2000)
  • T R Bryce “Change and continuity from Bronze Age to Iron: a review” in A Life Dedicated to Anatolian Prehistory: Festschrift for Jak Yakar (Gilgin Kultur Sanat Sti, 2020)
  • T G Palaima “Special vs normal Mycenaean: Hand 24 and writing in th service of the king?” Minos 33–34 (1998–99)
  • J K Papadopolous “Greece in the early Iron Age: mobility, commodities, polities, and literacy” in Cambridge History of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean (Cambridge, 2014) pp 178–95

It was honestly a pain to drag these through two layers of indirection (text → notes → reference list). Very happy that on Wikipedia is can be all done automatically with {{harvnb}}. Ifly6 (talk) 18:27, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Doric Greek in LB?

  • Doric Greek is now detected in pre-Iron Age Linear B texts, removing any need to suppose a group of invaders introduced the dialect to the Aegean region

I don't have Cline 2024 to hand, but this sounds shifty: I think he's talking about "Special Mycenaean", a proposed dialect of Mycenaean Greek identified by Ernst Risch, which John Chadwick later suggested may have been the ancestor of the classical Doric dialect, and so could explain the division between Aolic/Ionic and Doric dialects in the classical period. Sadly, Special Mycenaean doesn't exist -- Rupert Thompson and others have shown that the proposed markers of dialect difference simply don't hold up to scrutiny. See Thompson's article here. UndercoverClassicist T·C 06:23, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have the book in front of me right now but I think he does claim that, citing Chadwick. Are there any sources which claim that Thompson's refutation of the special Mycenaean is well accepted? I don't know enough about Linear B or the evolution of archaic Greek to judge for myself. Ifly6 (talk) 20:14, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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