The Coming of the Greeks

by Robert Drews

When did the Indo-Europeans enter the lands that they occupied during historical times? And, more specifically, when did the Greeks come to Greece? Robert Drews brings together the evidence--historical, linguistic, and archaeological--to tackle these important questions.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Greece, Ancient History, Classical Studies, Archaeology, World History

276 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1988

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of three books in my library dating from the period 1987 to 1989, each offering entirely different views of the thorny problem on the origins of the Indo-Europeans (whether considered as a set of languages or a set of peoples). These questions remain unresolved to this day.

This problem is one of those gifts to academics that never ceases to give. The general reader has to make some kind of existential commitment to a position on the data he or she is offered and then stick with that until someone argues the case better.

The answer they give, even if wrong, is vitally important because beliefs about origins can dictate our contemporary political and ideological positions. For example, the idea of superior Aryans had its place in building the politics of the first half of the twentieth century.

The reaction against the view that superior Aryans (white skinned and blue eyed) arose in the forests of Europe led to a post war instinct to position them far away on the steppes and turn them into less civilised barbarians.

The racial issues have gone away if only because no one seriously thinks language and genetics are co-terminous but it may now be politically inconvenient to broadcast that European populations have been surprisingly genetically coherent for thousands of years.

It is equally awkward to deal with the probability that much of what we admired in the past (such as the Roman Empire) were machines for brutal exploitation and that ideals of multiculturalism and 'universalism' were dependant for their success on that exploitation.

As to my own understanding of the origin of the Indo-Europeans, I have only these three books to go on, combined with my awareness of the rapidly developing science of historical genetics and some common sense notions of how power is wielded and of the human condition.

From this perspective, I find Drews most persuasive though not exclusively so. If he is right, he revives the importance of military technology and predation in history and the probability of genetic continuities being culturally determined by brute power.

I have to admit I read Mallory's 'In Search of the Indo-Europeans' (1989) and Renfrew's 'Archaeology and Language' (1987) thirty years ago so memory is hazy. I am not a specialist but a quick refresher did not change my view of Drews very much.

Mallory takes the traditional, perhaps still dominant, and I think romantic, view that the Proto-Indo-Europeans emerged on the steppelands of southern Eurasia, He concentrates on the Western Pontic region and puts his case well if you did not know any different.

Renfrew was one of the first to connect with the then-recent scientific exploration of historical demographics and he put forward a highly plausible model of Indo-Europeanism that had little to do with horse cultures and a lot to do with the population effects of farming in the neolithic.

He positioned Indo-Europeanism as arising out of Central Anatolia, spreading outwards with farming technique and diversifying with geography over time. He placed considerable emphasis on language and language change and rapid increases in farming populations.

The reason I find Drews more plausible is because his model of warrior 'takeover' seems to be more pragmatically linked to what we know of human predatory behaviour. His case is well and systematically argued on detailed assessments of the invention and use of chariot warfare.

This emphasis on warfare and the technology of military advantage sits well with another book of his (already reviewed by us) 'The End of the Bronze Age' (1993) where he proposes a change in power relations that were to allow new tactics and resources to destroy chariot power.

Renfrew and Drews are not entirely incompatible. Both would have a PIE population in Anatolia but Renfrew seems to assume that language remains stronger than elite power at all times whereas Drews creates the possibility that incoming minorities can impose their language and culture.

I do not know the answer to this. It is possible that the Pelasgians, prior to the Greeks, actually spoke a variant of Indo-European and so Renfrew's hypothesis stands but Drews gives us an alternative model where predatory chariot warriors used the sea lanes to conquer territory.

Once conquered, populations would lose their language in two or three generations leaving the barest trace of a previous language except in perhaps dialect words (eventually lost) and place names. What little we know of the Pelasgians suggests they were not Indo-European.

Instead of postulating huge mass migrations of people fully displacing natives along the late British and American imperial model (which may have influenced perceptions in the past), earlier exploitative conquerors, whether Celt, Roman or Anglo-Saxon would take the spoils and the labour.

A significant percentage of the population might be classed as part of the ruling community but genetically they would rely on native women or relatively small settler communities, pushing out non-dominant elites and expropriating the local labour.

The survival of English after the Norman conquest might prove the case wrong except that the Normans were much smaller in numbers relatively than earlier cross-Channel and North Sea invaders (who did bring more dependents) so that the final result became a hybrid language.

These situations remain highly complex and subject to endless speculation but Drews argues in a detailed and plausible way that horses may have been a steppe phenomenon but the construction of chariots and the use of horses emerged on the margins of the Near Eastern empires.

He argues that chariot warriors were skilled elites within a multicultural and multilinguistic community that did not recognise ethnicity and only recognised 'lands' over which was the divinely sanctioned (by might) of rulers. The gods favoured the most successful predator.

As chariot warfare developed into a must-have for these rulers, the charioteer corps became an elites within ruling networks, accidentally (by dint of geography) making post-PIE ascendancy dominant and some of this warrior elite then set about raiding to acquire land and labour.

Where these elites entered into already developed societies they retained their multicultural nature so Semites, Hassites, Hurrians or Indo-Europeans might well become petty chariot lords of the Levant or become the Hyksos of Egypt. The chariots were partially equivalent to Viking longships.

Where these elites found their way to virgin territory without even the prospect of a matching military technology, they seized power as a 'superior' warrior and trading aristocracy and so we find ourselves with the Myceneans and, when they collapsed, a little later by the Dorians.

Drews argues for Thessaly as the secondary organising centre for at least the Greek side of the story and it cannot be an accident that the plains of Thessaly were the main horse-breeding country of Greece: horses not being necessary for trade (that would need ships aand asses) but for war.

The Greeks only appear three quarters of the way through the book. The bulk of the book lays the ground work for a theory of Greek origins and it has plausible things to say not only about the course of Near Eastern history but the later Indo-Iranian invasions to the East.

The book is invaluable on two other grounds. In order to lay out his argument, Drews spends a great deal of time on the historiography of the issues about which he is to make his propositions and he does this in a fair and honourable way without polemic. This is worth reading.

The other ground is his engagement with and extension of Piggott's ground-breaking work on wheeled transport in the ancient world, demonstrating broadly to my satisfaction the complex relationship between horse geography, chariot manufacture and chariot use.

This is not to say that there are not problems. The Indo-Iranian side of the question is dealt with cursorily and his thesis is not demonstrated here as it is in the Near East and Aegean. And we are still left with the problem of the extent of Indo-European across Europe.

Somehow it does not seem entirely plausible that Indo-European would extend so far to the West on the back of a chariot so a compromise position might be that PIE did follow the farmers westwards but by-passed Greece which was later Indo-Europeanised by raiding and war.

Another model might be that of neolithic farmers pastoralising and moving on to the steppes without having anything to do with chariot warfare in the Near East. The mysterious Tocharians might merely be returning mercenaries who passed Near Eastern technology to the Chinese.

Chariot warfare as agent of Indo-Europeanisation might be limited therefore to Greece and Thrace in the East and then be a technology passed on to inland pre-existing Indo-Europeans who then adopt the same approach themselves (as the incoming Greeks) in moving south into Italy.

And so on and so forth - a thousand possibilities that mean that Drews strikes me as wholly reliable in describing an Aegean and Near Eastern phenomenon but that Renfrew may still be right about the language group as a whole. And Mallory may be completely off-beam (bar the Tocharians).

Then there is the problem of genetics. Greeks do not seem to have many blonde and blue-eyed people in their heartland and neither do the North Indians so something (a technology) must have brought the language to new communities where intermarriage changed characteristics.

The relationship between technology, power and language on populations that have remained (at least until the last quarter of the twentieth century) stubbornly genetically coherent is at the heart of this mystery and the mystery of all other major language 'conquests'.

Renfrew takes one technology (farming) and Drews takes another (military technology). Substrate populations may remain the same while elites transform the 'means of production' and structures of power. Who decides the culture and language is a live issue for study even today.

[Caterina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely specialized and academic, too many details on who wrote what, on chariot warfare, on pottery. I expected a more lively approach on the Indo-European question, something more Runciman-style.

[Koen Crolla · Rating 4 out of 5]

This deceptively small book brings together a formidable wealth of information from the literature on the comings and goings of the various Indo-Europeans in Greece and the Ancient Near East. It was published in 1988—notably, a year before J.P. Mallory's In Search of the Indo-Europeans, for better or for worse, so came to dominate important parts of the conversation—and parts of it are outdated; it often gives the impression of being more outdated than it actually is, though, and the situation is less dire than it appears at a glance.
One reason for this is that Drews often deliberately copies the terminology used in the most important source used for any given section regardless of that source's age, leading him to e.g. refer to the Indo-Iranian languages as "Aryan"—obviously unacceptable today, but really not done even in 1988 (he does take pains to be unambiguous about what he's talking about there, even though he clearly isn't a linguist himself). Another is that he takes the time to treat the major theories that have been formulated surrounding every major controversy, even if those haven't seen general acceptance in many decades at the time of writing. There's value in this, but it does mean significant swathes of the book are dedicated to material Drews correctly ends up dismissing in the end—which also means that if you're skimming rather than reading carefully, you can end up taking away exactly the wrong information.
If you are reading carefully, however (or you aren't in a position where believing something embarrassing about Bronze Age Indo-Europeans is harmful to you), The Coming of the Greeks is a surprisingly excellent survey of the field still.

(Drews apparently favours an Armenian homeland, but it doesn't affect anything he says. This is about what comes after.)

[Calvin Stevenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slow read but very interesting! This book illuminated how anthropologists guess mostly and like the create narratives that go against the evidence already known, for unknown reasons. The other is how these group invasions from a round 1900-1600 bc aren’t really mentioned much in media, and how they all seem to arise from around the caucus mountain range(he goes over how the Dorians came from the carpathians, however this was around 1100 bc). I will probably read his later works, apparently some insights have been reworked already surrounding the material in this book.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 2 out of 5]

I haven't really finished the book yet. But I don't know how many times I can think "wait, what does this have to do with the Greeks???" before I give up. Horses. Just one example. I look around but I don't see the Greeks in the discussion of the use of horses in warfare. Maybe it's fatigue. I spent 16 hours working the polls yesterday so it is a faint possibility....

[Liam Malone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I learned a lot and after reading this I agree with the with the idea that around 1600BC, a smaller group of people speaking an Ind-European language takes over Greece by their superior chariot warfare. The inhabitants had no defense.

[Rogue Podcast · Rating 3 out of 5]

Outdated, only read if you want a history of Indo European studies as a discipline or are a chariot completionist.

[Dawid Łaziński · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very academic, dry and demanding. Drews scrutinizes different theories on the origin of Greeks against available archeological material. He tries to pinpoint both the time and vector of various people migrations that ultimately gave birth to different Greek nations and civilizations. The book has been first published in 1988 so you won’t find taken into account any results of the recent studies utilizing DNA material, e.g. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/...- have-near-mythical-origins-ancient-dna-reveals

There are probably more up to date and lively publications. Not recommended.

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a somewhat limited use of evidence in this book. For example, Drews doesn't address Colin Renfew's main hypothesis and generally doesn't engage much on the topic of language. The scope of evidence is small, but the reliance on the evidence that is used is well done.

Thessaly: 190-194

Indo-European migrations and language
Chariots

[Jamey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating issue, great argumentation.