165-578: The Dorians ( / ˈ d ɔːr i ə n z / ; Greek : Δωριεῖς , Dōrieîs , singular Δωριεύς , Dōrieús ) were one of the four major ethnic groups into which the Hellenes (or Greeks) of Classical Greece divided themselves (along with the Aeolians , Achaeans , and Ionians ). They are almost always referred to as just "the Dorians", as they are called in the earliest literary mention of them in
330-615: A Dorian colony on the southwest coast of Asia Minor ; following the literary tradition of the times he wrote in Ionic Greek , being one of the last authors to do so. He described the Persian Wars , giving a thumbnail account of the histories of the antagonists, Greeks and Persians. Herodotus gives a general account of the events termed "the Dorian Invasion", presenting them as transfers of population. Their original home
495-540: A German-trained anthropologist with a professorship at the University of Athens , concurred with Nazi views as to the primacy of race in historical events and social organisation, but argued that the Dorian migrations had been "local movements" within a heterogeneous Greek race. 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
660-577: A basis for coinages: anthropology , photography , telephony , isomer , biomechanics , cinematography , etc. Together with Latin words , they form the foundation of international scientific and technical vocabulary ; for example, all words ending in -logy ('discourse'). There are many English words of Greek origin . Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European language family. The ancient language most closely related to it may be ancient Macedonian , which, by most accounts,
825-596: A campaign of reasserting itself as the quintessential Dorian city, including efforts to re-establish what were considered primordial Doric cultural forms, including the "hyperdoricisation" of its dialect. A reference in the work of the second-century CE geographer Pausanias , where the Messenians appeal to the Spartans on the basis of their shared Dorian ancestry during the Second Messenian War in
990-437: A continuation of that of ancient Greece. Germans were, under this paradigm, viewed as the "new Dorians". From 1794 onwards, Friedrich Schlegel promoted a Romantic and idealised view of Sparta as a definingly Dorian society. For Schlegel, Sparta represented a racial and cultural ideal, characterised by successful social integration and respect for the rights and dignity of women. This admiration and emulation of Sparta became
1155-558: A fairly stable set of consonantal contrasts . The main phonological changes occurred during the Hellenistic and Roman period (see Koine Greek phonology for details): In all its stages, the morphology of Greek shows an extensive set of productive derivational affixes , a limited but productive system of compounding and a rich inflectional system. Although its morphological categories have been fairly stable over time, morphological changes are present throughout, particularly in
1320-560: A faster, more convenient cursive writing style with the use of ink and quill . The Greek alphabet consists of 24 letters, each with an uppercase ( majuscule ) and lowercase ( minuscule ) form. The letter sigma has an additional lowercase form (ς) used in the final position of a word: In addition to the letters, the Greek alphabet features a number of diacritical signs : three different accent marks ( acute , grave , and circumflex ), originally denoting different shapes of pitch accent on
1485-540: A foreign language. It is also often stated that the historical changes have been relatively slight compared with some other languages. According to one estimation, " Homeric Greek is probably closer to Demotic than 12-century Middle English is to modern spoken English ". Greek is spoken today by at least 13 million people, principally in Greece and Cyprus along with a sizable Greek-speaking minority in Albania near
1650-517: A fragment of the poet, Tyrtaeus , that "Sparta is a divine gift granted by Zeus and Hera" to the Heracleidae. In another version, Tyndareus gives his kingdom to Heracles in gratitude for restoring him to the throne, but Heracles "asks the Spartan king to safeguard the gift until his descendants might claim it." Hall, therefore, proposes that the Dorians are the people of the gift. They assumed
1815-665: A land in which they had once had a share. The return is described in detail: there were "disturbances" throughout the Peloponnesus except in Arcadia , and new Dorian settlers. Pausanias goes on to describe the conquest and resettlement of Laconia , Messenia , Argos and elsewhere, and the emigration from there to Crete and the coast of Asia Minor . Greek language Greek ( Modern Greek : Ελληνικά , romanized : Elliniká , [eliniˈka] ; Ancient Greek : Ἑλληνική , romanized : Hellēnikḗ )
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#17327625076111980-471: A manner not easily explained by the migration of a conquering elite. Cook published an article in 1962 in which he called the Dorian invasion "not a subject that is worth much study", citing the paucity of available evidence: he considered that the invasion probably did take place, but that it left no trace in the material record and that most elements of the mythical and historical tradition concerning it were unproven. Vincent Desborough , in 1964, demonstrated
2145-486: A process of ethnogenesis by Peloponnesian communities whose cultural forms gradually converged over time. 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
2310-610: A prominent Nazi historian and adherent of race theory, was particularly influential in entrenching the Dorian invasion in German-speaking scholarship. In February 1941, Adolf Hitler stated his belief that the Aryan race had only reached its apogee through its supposed invasion of Greece and Italy. The racialised view of the Dorians promoted in Nazi Germany was echoed by historians in other countries. Ioannis Koumaris ,
2475-452: A prominent feature of German nationalist ideologies. Müller extended his archaeological theories about the Dorians to promote a "Dorian way of life", based on his identification of the Dorians with the qualities of honour, liberty and patriotism. He argued that the god Apollo , whom he associated with the qualities of tranquillity, harmony and clarity, had been Dorian in origin. He contrasted this with Dionysus , whom he believed to embody
2640-683: A recent attempt to suggest that a comic confusion between the letter and the hand image may yet have been intended. Dorian social structure was characterized by a communal social structure and separation of the sexes. The lives of free men centered around military campaigns. When not abroad, men stayed in all-male residences focusing on military training until the age of 30, regardless of marital status. Dorian women had greater freedom and economic power than women of other Greek ethnicities. Unlike other Hellenic women, Dorian women were able to own property, manage their husbands' estate, and delegate many domestic tasks to slaves. Women in ancient Sparta possessed
2805-469: A rise to supremacy at the end of the Dark Age rather than during and after the fall of Mycenae. The Messenian population was reduced to serfdom . Only a few fragments of Tyrtaeus' five books of martial verse survive. His is the earliest mention of the three Dorian tribes: Pamphyli , Hylleis, Dymanes . He also says: For Cronus' Son Himself, Zeus the husband of fair-crowned Hera, hath given this city to
2970-400: A single large-scale movement of people. Cultural features previously believed to have been introduced by the Dorian invasion, such as iron-working, Protogeometric and Geometric pottery, cist graves and cremation, are now known either to have predated the palatial destructions or to have originated in areas of Greece, such as Attica and Euboea, which were not considered to have been affected by
3135-615: 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. Although cultural and linguistic change did occur between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, different aspects of the changes occurred at different times and speeds and affected different regions, rather than occurring suddenly and simultaneously, as would be expected with
3300-586: Is also considered doubtful whether the events of the end of the Bronze Age should be explained as a single, interconnected collapse, and that the "collapse" was largely limited to the regions, institutions and practices associated with palatial administration. Most regions of Greece were outside the control of palatial states in the Mycenaean period and saw continuity in their populations, culture and traditions. While population movements probably occurred at
3465-804: Is also found in Bulgaria near the Greek-Bulgarian border. Greek is also spoken worldwide by the sizable Greek diaspora which has notable communities in the United States , Australia , Canada , South Africa , Chile , Brazil , Argentina , Russia , Ukraine , the United Kingdom , and throughout the European Union , especially in Germany . Historically, significant Greek-speaking communities and regions were found throughout
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#17327625076113630-773: Is an Indo-European language, constituting an independent Hellenic branch within the Indo-European language family. It is native to Greece , Cyprus , Italy (in Calabria and Salento ), southern Albania , and other regions of the Balkans , Caucasus , the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor , and the Eastern Mediterranean . It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system
3795-629: Is an ancient Greek myth and discredited archaeological hypothesis describing the movement of the Dorian people into the Peloponnese region of Greece. According to the myth, the Dorians migrated from central Greece shortly after the Trojan War and populated most of the southern Peloponnese, particularly the regions of Laconia , Messenia and the Argolid . The myth became combined with that of
3960-479: Is an Indo-European language, but also includes a number of borrowings from the languages of the populations that inhabited Greece before the arrival of Proto-Greeks, some documented in Mycenaean texts ; they include a large number of Greek toponyms . The form and meaning of many words have changed. Loanwords (words of foreign origin) have entered the language, mainly from Latin, Venetian , and Turkish . During
4125-519: Is from the o-grade (either ō or o ) of Proto-Indo-European *deru- , "tree", which also gives the Homeric Δούρειος Ἵππος ( Doureios Hippos , "Wooden Horse"). This derivation has the advantage of naming the people after their wooded, mountainous country. A second popular derivation was given by the French linguist, Émile Boisacq, from the same root, but from Greek δόρυ ( doru ) 'spear-shaft' (which
4290-533: Is from the o-grade of Indo-European * deru , "solid," in the sense of wood. It is similar to an extended form, * dō-ro- , of *dō- , (give), as can be seen in the modern Greek imperative δώσε ( dose , "give [sing.]!") appearing in Greek as δῶρον ( dōron , "gift"). This is the path taken by Jonathan Hall , relying on elements taken from the myth of the Return of the Herakleidai. Hall cites the tradition, based on
4455-454: Is not compatible with a Dorian invasion that brought Dorians to Crete only after the fall of the Mycenaean states. In the Odyssey , Odysseus and his relatives visit those states. Two solutions are possible, either the Odyssey is anachronistic or Dorians were on Crete in Mycenaean times. The uncertain nature of the Dorian invasion defers a definitive answer until more is known about it. Also,
4620-519: Is protected and promoted officially as a regional and minority language in Armenia, Hungary , Romania, and Ukraine. It is recognized as a minority language and protected in Turkey by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne . The phonology , morphology , syntax , and vocabulary of the language show both conservative and innovative tendencies across the entire attestation of the language from the ancient to
4785-852: Is sometimes called aljamiado , as when Romance languages are written in the Arabic alphabet. Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Greek: Transcription of the example text into Latin alphabet : Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in English: Proto-Greek Mycenaean Ancient Koine Medieval Modern Dorian invasion The Dorian invasion (or Dorian migration )
4950-526: Is spoken by at least 13.5 million people today in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Albania, Turkey , and the many other countries of the Greek diaspora . Greek roots have been widely used for centuries and continue to be widely used to coin new words in other languages; Greek and Latin are the predominant sources of international scientific vocabulary . Greek has been spoken in the Balkan peninsula since around
5115-763: Is still used internationally for the writing of Ancient Greek . In Greek, the question mark is written as the English semicolon, while the functions of the colon and semicolon are performed by a raised point (•), known as the ano teleia ( άνω τελεία ). In Greek the comma also functions as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό,τι ( ó,ti , 'whatever') from ότι ( óti , 'that'). Ancient Greek texts often used scriptio continua ('continuous writing'), which means that ancient authors and scribes would write word after word with no spaces or punctuation between words to differentiate or mark boundaries. Boustrophedon , or bi-directional text,
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5280-650: Is the Greek alphabet , which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary . The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin , Cyrillic , Coptic , Gothic , and many other writing systems. The Greek language holds a very important place in the history of the Western world. Beginning with
5445-454: Is the valedictory phrase uttered by Spartan mothers to their sons before sending them off to war: ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς ( ḕ tàn ḕ epì tâs , literally "either with it or on it": return alive with your shield or dead upon it) would have been ἢ τὴν ἢ ἐπὶ τῆς ( ḕ t ḕ n ḕ epì t ê s ) in the Attic - Ionic dialect of an Athenian mother. Tsakonian , a descendant of Doric Greek, is still spoken in some parts of
5610-582: The Iliad , combined with the administrative records of the former Mycenaean states, prove to universal satisfaction that East Greek (Ionian) speakers were once dominant in the Peloponnesus but suffered a setback there and were replaced at least in official circles by West Greek (Doric) speakers. An historical event is associated with the overthrow, called anciently the Return of the Heracleidai and by moderns
5775-502: The Odyssey , where they already can be found inhabiting the island of Crete . They were diverse in way of life and social organization, varying from the populous trade center of the city of Corinth , known for its ornate style in art and architecture, to the isolationist, military state of Sparta ; and yet, all Hellenes knew which localities were Dorian and which were not. Dorian states at war could more likely, but not always, count on
5940-602: The -eus suffix as very productive. One of its uses was to convert a toponym to an anthroponym; for example, Megareus, "Megarian", from Megara . A Dōrieus would be from Dōris, the only classical Greek state to serve as the basis for the name of the Dorians. The state was a small one in the mountains of west central Greece. However, classical Doris may not have been the same as Mycenaean Doris. A number of credible etymologies by noted scholars have been proposed. Julius Pokorny derives Δωριεύς, Dōrieus from δωρίς, dōris , "woodland" (which can also mean upland). The dōri- segment
6105-581: The Battle of Thermopylae . The Congress of Corinth, formed prior to it, "split into two sections." Athens headed one and Lacedaemon the other: For a short time the league held together, till the Lacedaemonians and Athenians quarreled, and made war upon each other with their allies, a duel into which all the Hellenes sooner or later were drawn. He adds: "the real cause I consider to be ... the growth of
6270-619: The Dorian Invasion . This theory of a return or invasion presupposes that West Greek speakers resided in northwest Greece but overran the Peloponnesus replacing the East Greek there with their own dialect. No records other than Mycenaean ones are known to have existed in the Bronze Age so a West Greek of that time and place can be neither proved nor disproved. West Greek speakers were in western Greece in classical times. Unlike
6435-602: The Doric order of architecture, the Dorian mode in music, and the Doric dialect. These were not exclusive to communities considered Dorian, some of which used other linguistic dialects: Halicarnassus , for instance, was considered a Dorian city into the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE), but used Ionic for official inscriptions from the fifth century BCE and may never have widely spoken Doric. The Doric dialect itself
6600-495: The Eastern Mediterranean , in what are today Southern Italy , Turkey , Cyprus , Syria , Lebanon , Israel , Palestine , Egypt , and Libya ; in the area of the Black Sea , in what are today Turkey, Bulgaria , Romania , Ukraine , Russia , Georgia , Armenia , and Azerbaijan ; and, to a lesser extent, in the Western Mediterranean in and around colonies such as Massalia , Monoikos , and Mainake . It
6765-516: The Indo-Iranian languages (see Graeco-Aryan ), but little definitive evidence has been found. In addition, Albanian has also been considered somewhat related to Greek and Armenian, and it has been proposed that they all form a higher-order subgroup along with other extinct languages of the ancient Balkans; this higher-order subgroup is usually termed Palaeo-Balkan , and Greek has a central position in it. Linear B , attested as early as
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6930-774: The Peloponnese , Crete , southwest Asia Minor , the southernmost islands of the Aegean Sea , and the various Dorian colonies of Magna Graecia in Southern Italy and Sicily . After the classical period, it was mainly replaced by the Attic dialect upon which the Koine or "common" Greek language of the Hellenistic period was based. The main characteristic of Doric was the preservation of Proto-Indo-European [aː] , long ⟨α⟩ , which in Attic-Ionic became [ɛː] , ⟨η⟩ . A famous example
7095-629: The Return of the Heracleidae , such that the descendants of the hero Heracles were imagined to have led the Dorians and who founded the ruling lines of several Dorian cities, including Sparta . The myth probably emerged during the Early Iron Age as part of a process of ethnogenesis between cities claiming Dorian ancestry. In the fifth century BCE, it gained greater prominence through its use to promote unity among Sparta's Peloponnesian allies , and to differentiate Sparta from its rival Athens, believed to be of Ionian heritage. In 1824,
7260-686: The Spartan state and its illustrious individuals are detailed at great length in such authors as Plutarch and Diodorus Siculus . The Odyssey has one reference to the Dorians: There is a land called Crete , in the midst of the wine-dark sea, a fair, rich land, begirt with water, and therein are many men, past counting, and ninety cities. They have not all the same speech, but their tongues are mixed. There dwell Achaeans , there great-hearted native Cretans , there Cydonians , and Dorians of waving plumes, and goodly Pelasgians . The reference
7425-622: The Tanagra campaign of 457, in which they sent troops to fight on behalf of Doris against an invasion from Phocis , an ally of Sparta's enemy Athens. During the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta at the end of the fifth century BCE, Sparta asserted kinship with its Peloponnesian allies through a claim of common Dorian heritage. Around the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian ( r. 117–138 CE ), Sparta underwent
7590-638: The Trojan War except to say that it was full of barbarians and that there was no distinction between barbarians and Greeks. The Hellenes came from Phthiotis . The whole country indulged in and suffered from piracy and was not settled. After the Trojan War, "Hellas was still engaged in removing and settling." Some 60 years after the Trojan War the Boeotians were driven out of Arne by the Thessalians into Boeotia and 20 years later "the Dorians and
7755-693: The Trojan War . The myth appears to have originated in the Argolid or in Sparta at the end of the Early Iron Age , and to have combined earlier mythic traditions concerning the Dorians and the Heracleidae. 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 . At least initially,
7920-492: The nominal and verbal systems. The major change in the nominal morphology since the classical stage was the disuse of the dative case (its functions being largely taken over by the genitive ). The verbal system has lost the infinitive , the synthetically -formed future, and perfect tenses and the optative mood . Many have been replaced by periphrastic ( analytical ) forms. Pronouns show distinctions in person (1st, 2nd, and 3rd), number (singular, dual , and plural in
8085-481: 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. In the framing of Annie Schnapp-Gourbeillion, the Nazis cast the Dorian invasion as "saving" Greece from the "contamination" of Asiatic races . Through the Dorian invasion, they argued that classical Greece
8250-627: The two Spartan royal lines – the Agiad and Eurypontid dynasties – claimed descent from Heracles into the classical period. 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. Functionally,
8415-456: 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. Carl Blegen , the excavator of the Mycenaean site of Pylos in Messenia from 1939, considered the site to have been destroyed by the Dorians, and adjusted his view of
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#17327625076118580-442: The 1960s, both in mainstream historiography and in explicitly right-wing and Neo-Nazi works. The art historian Robert Cook has written that the association between the Dorians and Geometric pottery, despite its initial scholarly popularity, was never a comfortable fit with the evidence. In 1903, Hans Dragendorff challenged it, arguing that Geometric pottery was simply a development of Mycenaean styles: Dragendorff's view became
8745-551: The 1960s. 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
8910-440: The 1970s, various scholars, particularly in the United Kingdom, revived Beloch's argument that the Dorians had already been present in Greece during the Mycenaean period. John Chadwick argued that Special Mycenaean, a putative dialect of Mycenaean Greek posited by Ernst Risch in 1965, was an ancestral form of Doric Greek. The Dorian invasion was therefore recast as either a revolt by a previously subject population, or else only
9075-415: The 3rd millennium BC, or possibly earlier. The earliest written evidence is a Linear B clay tablet found in Messenia that dates to between 1450 and 1350 BC, making Greek the world's oldest recorded living language . Among the Indo-European languages, its date of earliest written attestation is matched only by the now-extinct Anatolian languages . The Greek language is conventionally divided into
9240-435: The Achaeans. Under other leadership they managed to be victorious over the Achaeans and remain in the Peloponnesus, a mythic theme called "the return of the Heracleidae ." They had built ships at Naupactus in which to cross the Gulf of Corinth . This invasion is viewed by the tradition of Pausanias as a return of the Dorians to the Peloponnesus, apparently meaning a return of families ruling in Aetolia and northern Greece to
9405-402: The Battle-Charge which are also called Enoplia or Songs-under-Arms". These were chants used to establish the timing of standard drills under arms. He stressed patriotism: For 'tis a fair thing for a good man to fall and die fighting in the van for his native land, ... let us fight with a will for this land, and die for our children and never spare our lives. Herodotus was from Halicarnassus ,
9570-479: The Bronze Age are believed to have been relatively small in scale and generally to have been directed away from, rather than towards, the southern Peloponnese. 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 . Several cultural forms were identified as "Dorian" in classical times, such as
9735-545: The Dorian invasion "a spectre [haunting] historians of ancient Greece", and wrote that the archaeological evidence then available could support, at best, the hypothesis of "a series of violent but limited raids" rather than a theory of invasion followed by large-scale settlement. 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 , particularly in German-speaking scholarship. The theory that
9900-451: The Dorian invasion and to trace its route, though these efforts proved largely unsuccessful. Müller and his successors, such as Ernst Curtius , considered the Dorians to have been racially and culturally superior to the peoples whom they replaced. German nationalists, following Hermann Müller , portrayed the Dorians as belonging to a Nordic race , and so being fundamentally Germanic in character. The Dorian invasion became connected with
10065-444: The Dorian invasion as a similar point of discontinuity. The view of a break between Mycenaean and classical Greece was rejected in Greece itself: an updated 1970 edition of the History of the Greek Nation argued against it, as did a 1968 exhibition in Athens sponsored by the ruling military junta . One of the exhibition's panels characterised the Dorians as "the healthy powers of the [Greek] race". In 1980, Leonard Palmer defended
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#173276250761110230-418: The Dorian invasion as part of the Sonderweg hypothesis, by which the German nation was imagined to have a preordained historical path and superior racial status. Building on developments in Indo-European studies , which reconstructed the linguistic connections between German, Greek and Sanskrit , the German language was considered to be particularly strongly associated with Greek, and German culture to be
10395-473: The Dorian invasion had happened; this view was considered "drastic" by John Myres , though Myres considered the archaeological and linguistic evidence for the invasion inconclusive, and that the mythical narratives surrounding it had been exaggerated by Greek settlers in Asia Minor. In 1956, Wace suggested that the invasion was historical, but that it had involved only political rather than cultural change, since he viewed Greek culture as broadly continuous between
10560-431: 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. Robert Drews further defended it in 1988, writing that the Dorians conquered Greece by mastering new modes of warfare, to which the existing Mycenaean states failed to adapt. After the Enlightenment , eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germans developed
10725-474: The Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese to be conceived of as a homeward journey. Similarly, the term " Return of the Heracleidae " was often used to refer to the Dorian migration into that region. 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. It
10890-492: The Dorian invasion remained the scholarly orthodoxy throughout the 1960s, 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. In English-language scholarship, the focus of the debate became the effort to find material traces of the Dorians in Greek archaeological sites. Blegen stated in 1962 that "the fire-scarred ruins of all
11055-517: The Dorian invasion was the main cause of the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization. The source of the West Greek speakers in the Peloponnese remains unattested by any solid evidence. Though most of the Dorians settled in the Peloponnese, they also settled on Rhodes and Sicily and in what is now Southern Italy. In Asia Minor existed the Dorian Hexapolis (the six great Dorian cities): Halikarnassos (Halicarnassus) and Knidos (Cnidus) in Asia Minor , Kos , and Lindos , Kameiros , and Ialyssos on
11220-481: The Dorian islands, dotted the southern coasts of Sicily from Syracuse to Selinus. Also Taras was a Spartan colony. A man's name, Dōrieus , occurs in the Linear B tablets at Pylos , one of the regions later invaded and subjugated by the Dorians. Pylos tablet Fn867 records it in the dative case as do-ri-je-we , *Dōriēwei , a third- or consonant-declension noun with stem ending in w. An unattested nominative plural, *Dōriēwes , would have become Dōrieis by loss of
11385-402: The Dorians did not name themselves after Dorus until they had reached Peloponnesus. Herodotus does not explain the contradictions of the myth; for example, how Doris, located outside the Peloponnesus, acquired its name. However, his goal, as he relates in the beginning of the first book, is only to report what he had heard from his sources without judgement. In the myth, the Achaeans displaced from
11550-478: The Dorians had used identical material culture to the Mycenaeans whom they replaced, and that that the received tradition as to the location of Dorian settlement was unreliable. In 1978, Klaus Kilian proposed the name "Dorian Ware" for a class of non-wheel-made pottery, now known as Handmade Burnished Ware , found in post-destruction layers of his excavation at Tiryns . He suggested that this pottery should be associated with Dorian invaders, to whom he attributed
11715-428: The Dorians invaded the Peloponnese or otherwise migrated there is now rejected as a "scholarly mirage". It is generally agreed that the collapse of Mycenaean palatial civilisation is better explained by endogenous factors, such as social conflicts or the breakdown of the palaces' socio-economic model, possibly exacerbated by external causes such as natural disaster, disease, climate change and changing technologies. It
11880-544: The Dorians is a multifaceted concept. In modern scholarship, the term has often meant the location of the population disseminating the Doric Greek dialect within a hypothetical Proto-Greek speaking population. The dialect is known from records of classical northwestern Greece, the Peloponnesus and Crete and some of the islands. The geographic and ethnic information found in the west's earliest known literary work,
12045-461: The Dorians to import his worship to Rhodes . In Greek historiography , the Dorians are mentioned by many authors. The chief classical authors to relate their origins are Herodotus , Thucydides and Pausanias . The most copious authors, however, lived in Hellenistic and Roman times, long after the main events. This apparent paradox does not necessarily discredit the later writers, who were relying on earlier works that did not survive. The customs of
12210-605: The Dorians were imagined as an Aryan people, in line with other similar hypotheses about northern or Aryan invaders in the Near East. 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. In 1870, Alexander Conze proposed that the recently identified Geometric style of pottery
12375-462: The Dorians. Overseas were the islands of Rhodes , Cos , Nisyrus and the Anatolian cities of Cnidus , Halicarnassus , Phaselis and Calydna. Dorians also colonised Crete including founding of such towns as Lato , Dreros and Olous . The Cynurians were originally Ionians but had become Dorian under the influence of their Argive masters. Thucydides professes little of Greece before
12540-543: The East Greeks, they are not associated with any evidence of displacement events. That provides circumstantial evidence that the Doric dialect disseminated among the Hellenes of northwest Greece, a highly-mountainous and somewhat-isolated region. The Dorian invasion is a modern historical concept attempting to account for: On the whole, none of the objectives has been met, but the investigations served to rule out various speculative hypotheses. Most scholars doubt that
12705-480: The German antiquarian Karl Otfried Müller published The Dorians , in which he argued that the Dorians were a northern, Indo-European people who invaded Greece and subjugated the Peloponnese. Müller's views gained general scholarly acceptance throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The Dorians were credited with introducing new forms of material culture and to have destroyed
12870-464: The German exile Werner Jaeger and the French scholars Georges Dumézil and Charles Picard . Picard wrote in 1935 that the Dorian invasion had been "no bad thing ... [since] it allowed Greek art to cross the mirages of the Asian spirit". Where Müller's view of the Dorians as superior, civilising invaders was challenged, its critics, such as Gustave Glotz , rarely disputed the underlying paradigm of
13035-486: The Greek alphabet since approximately the 9th century BC. It was created by modifying the Phoenician alphabet , with the innovation of adopting certain letters to represent the vowels. The variant of the alphabet in use today is essentially the late Ionic variant, introduced for writing classical Attic in 403 BC. In classical Greek, as in classical Latin, only upper-case letters existed. The lower-case Greek letters were developed much later by medieval scribes to permit
13200-433: The Greek historical tradition with recent archaeological discoveries, such as those made at Mycenae by Heinrich Schliemann and Panagiotis Stamatakis . Beloch considered the Dorians to have been indigenous to Mycenaean Greece and to have differentiated from them during the eighth century BCE. However, his views were generally rejected in favour of invasion-based narratives. In response to Beloch, Eduard Meyer called
13365-425: The Greek language are often emphasized. Although Greek has undergone morphological and phonological changes comparable to those seen in other languages, never since classical antiquity has its cultural, literary, and orthographic tradition been interrupted to the extent that one can speak of a new language emerging. Greek speakers today still tend to regard literary works of ancient Greek as part of their own rather than
13530-495: The Greek language was the Cypriot syllabary (also a descendant of Linear A via the intermediate Cypro-Minoan syllabary ), which is closely related to Linear B but uses somewhat different syllabic conventions to represent phoneme sequences. The Cypriot syllabary is attested in Cyprus from the 11th century BC until its gradual abandonment in the late Classical period, in favor of the standard Greek alphabet. Greek has been written in
13695-629: The Greek verb have likewise remained largely the same over the course of the language's history but with significant changes in the number of distinctions within each category and their morphological expression. Greek verbs have synthetic inflectional forms for: Many aspects of the syntax of Greek have remained constant: verbs agree with their subject only, the use of the surviving cases is largely intact (nominative for subjects and predicates, accusative for objects of most verbs and many prepositions, genitive for possessors), articles precede nouns, adpositions are largely prepositional, relative clauses follow
13860-685: The Greek-Albanian border. A significant percentage of Albania's population has knowledge of the Greek language due in part to the Albanian wave of immigration to Greece in the 1980s and '90s and the Greek community in the country. Prior to the Greco-Turkish War and the resulting population exchange in 1923 a very large population of Greek-speakers also existed in Turkey , though very few remain today. A small Greek-speaking community
14025-617: The Hellenic and Roman Peoples ( Rassengeschichte des Hellenischen und des Römischen Volkes ), in which he argued that both the Greeks and Romans belonged to the Nordic race. Günther argued that references in ancient writers, such as Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, to the mythical Hyperboreans as the ancestors of the Dorians represented a genuine memory that the Dorians had come from the far north. He also adduced linguistic arguments, such as
14190-485: The Heracleidae as reflecting a historical migration of Aryan Dorians into Greece, although this interpretation conflicted with both ancient testimony and the understanding that the earlier Mycenaeans were themselves Greek. 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. In 1893, Karl Julius Beloch attempted to integrate
14355-481: The Heracleidae enlisted the help of their Dorian neighbors. Hall does not address the problem of the Dorians not calling Lacedaemon Doris, but assigning that name to some less holy and remoter land. Similarly, he does not mention the Dorian servant at Pylos, whose sacred gift, if such it was, was still being ruled by the Achaean Atreid family at Lacedaemon. A minor, and perhaps regrettably forgotten, episode in
14520-571: The Heraclids became masters of the Peloponnese." So the lines were drawn between the Dorians and the Aeolians (here Boeotians) with the Ionians (former Peloponnesians). Other than these few brief observations Thucydides names but few Dorians. He does make it clear that some Dorian states aligned or were forced to align with the Athenians while some Ionians went with the Lacedaemonians and that
14685-452: The Late Bronze Age and the classical period. From the 1960s onwards, linguistic arguments were advanced to support the Dorian invasion hypothesis. Certain common features of Arcadocypriot Greek , shared between Arcadia in the Peloponnese and the island of Cyprus, were held to be evidence that the two represented the remnants of a larger language group, broken up by the invading Dorians and including refugees who fled to Cyprus. The idea of
14850-711: The Messenian town of Dorium is mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships . If its name comes from Dorians, it would imply there were settlements of the latter in Messenia during that time as well. Tyrtaeus , a Spartan poet, became advisor of the Lacedaemonians in their mid-7th-century war to suppress a rebellion of the Messenians . The latter were a remnant of the Achaeans conquered "two generations before", which suggests
15015-480: The Mycenaean palaces , though both theories created conflicts between the interpretative narrative, the mythological tradition, and the archaeological evidence. The Dorians also became associated with the Sea Peoples , believed to have destroyed several Near Eastern sites at the end of the Bronze Age. During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars attempted to find archaeological and linguistic evidence of
15180-522: The Pelasgians used to speak I am not able with certainty to say. But if one must pronounce judging by those that still remain of the Pelasgians who dwelt in the city of Creston above the Tyrsenians, and who were once neighbours of the race now called Dorian, dwelling then in the land which is now called Thessaliotis, and also by those that remain of the Pelasgians who settled at Plakia and Skylake in
15345-571: The Peloponnese since the Bronze Age, leading many scholars to abandon the Dorian invasion as a hypothesis. From the 1960s onwards, new archaeological discoveries pushed into the Mycenaean period the chronological horizons of key cultural changes, such as the Naue II sword, the development of iron-working, the practice of cremation and the development of what became Geometric pottery. It also became clear that these were not universally found in supposedly "Doric" areas, and were often adopted piecemeal in
15510-525: The Peloponnese. The earliest surviving attestation of the myth is in the work of the seventh-century BCE Spartan poet Tyrtaeus . The term used for the Heraclidae's return by Herodotus is kathodos , which can mean both "descent" and "return from exile". By the sixth century BCE, the ethnic divisions between the Heracleidae and the Dorians were often elided, such that the Heracleidae and Heracles himself were often imagined to be Dorians, and
15675-419: The Peloponnese. He characterised the Dorians as a "young race", superior in their individual characters, their political organisation, and their language. 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. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
15840-421: The Peloponnesus gathered at Athens under a leader Ion and became identified as "Ionians". Herodotus' list of Dorian states is as follows. From northeastern Greece were Phthia , Histiaea and Macedon . In central Greece were Doris (the former Dryopia) and in the south Peloponnesus , specifically the states of Lacedaemon , Corinth , Sicyon , Epidaurus and Troezen . Hermione was not Dorian but had joined
16005-404: The acute during the late 20th century, and it has only been retained in typography . After the writing reform of 1982, most diacritics are no longer used. Since then, Greek has been written mostly in the simplified monotonic orthography (or monotonic system), which employs only the acute accent and the diaeresis. The traditional system, now called the polytonic orthography (or polytonic system),
16170-429: The affairs of each of the besiegers at home suffered much owing to the seditious conduct of the young men. For when the soldiers returned to their own cities and homes, these young people did not receive them fittingly and justly, but in such a way that there ensued a vast number of cases of death, slaughter, and exile. So they, being again driven out, migrated by sea; and because Dorieus was the man who then banded together
16335-402: The ancient language; singular and plural alone in later stages), and gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), and decline for case (from six cases in the earliest forms attested to four in the modern language). Nouns, articles, and adjectives show all the distinctions except for a person. Both attributive and predicative adjectives agree with the noun. The inflectional categories of
16500-462: The arrival of newcomers, and those newcomers named as the Dorians. Destruction layers at Mycenaean palatial sites were then attributed to this putative invasion, even though such destruction went unmentioned in ancient accounts of Dorian origins. In 1824, Karl Otfried Müller published The Dorians ( Die Dorier ). He argued that the Dorians were a northern, Indo-European (in German, indogermanisch ) people who invaded Greece and subjugated
16665-556: The assistance of other Dorian states. Dorians were distinguished by the Doric Greek dialect and by characteristic social and historical traditions. In the 5th century BC, Dorians and Ionians were the two most politically important Greek ethnē , whose ultimate clash resulted in the Peloponnesian War . The degree to which fifth-century Hellenes self-identified as "Ionian" or "Dorian" has itself been disputed. At one extreme Édouard Will [ fr ] concludes that there
16830-403: The children of Heracles, with whom we came into the wide isle of Pelops from windy Erineus. Erineus was a village of Doris. He helped to establish the Spartan constitution, giving the kings and elders, among other powers, the power to dismiss the assembly. He established a rigorous military training program for the young including songs and poems he wrote himself, such as the "Embateria or Songs of
16995-432: The chronological inconsistency between the widespread adoption of burial in cist graves ( c. 1100 BCE ) and the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces ( c. 1180 BCE ). 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. In
17160-474: The culture of their day as well; their biases contribute to the traditional modern interpretation of "Dorians". Accounts vary as to the Dorians' place of origin. One theory, widely believed in ancient times, is that they originated in the mountainous regions of Greece , such as Macedonia and Epirus , and obscure circumstances brought them south into the Peloponnese , to certain Aegean islands . The origin of
17325-487: The date of Troy VIIa , which he believed to be the setting of the Trojan War, to make it compatible with this theory. He frequently discussed the Dorian invasion, among other then-current archaeological topics, in letters to Wace. The invasion became linked with other putative migrating peoples, known collectively as the Sea Peoples , mentioned in Egyptian and Near Eastern sources. Manolis Andronikos denied in 1954 that
17490-404: The early 19th century that was used for literary and official purposes in the newly formed Greek state. In 1976, Dimotiki was declared the official language of Greece, after having incorporated features of Katharevousa and thus giving birth to Standard Modern Greek , used today for all official purposes and in education . The historical unity and continuing identity between the various stages of
17655-492: The end of the Bronze Age, neither the mythical tradition nor the archaeological evidence are compatible with a single large-scale migration of a coherent population of "Dorians" into the Peloponnese. 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. Furthermore, these population movements, on
17820-618: The epics of Homer , ancient Greek literature includes many works of lasting importance in the European canon . Greek is also the language in which many of the foundational texts in science and philosophy were originally composed. The New Testament of the Christian Bible was also originally written in Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world , the Greek texts and Greek societies of antiquity constitute
17985-421: The exiles, they got the new name of "Dorians", instead of "Achaeans". But as to all the events that follow this, you Lacedaemonians relate them all fully in your traditions. The Description of Greece by Pausanias relates that the Achaeans were driven from their lands by Dorians coming from Oeta , a mountainous region bordering on Thessaly . They were led by Hyllus , a son of Heracles , but were defeated by
18150-458: The fact that the Greek word iris means both "rainbow" and the iris of the eye , which he took as proof that the original speakers of Greek had had blue eyes rather than brown. In 1930, Alfred Rosenberg , a Nazi racial theorist and later war criminal, wrote of the Dorians as one of several waves of Aryan invaders into Greece, arguing that both Mycenaean and post-Mycenaean Greece, along with ancient Rome, were Nordic in racial character. During
18315-452: The following periods: In the modern era, the Greek language entered a state of diglossia : the coexistence of vernacular and archaizing written forms of the language. What came to be known as the Greek language question was a polarization between two competing varieties of Modern Greek: Dimotiki , the vernacular form of Modern Greek proper, and Katharevousa , meaning 'purified', a compromise between Dimotiki and Ancient Greek developed in
18480-510: The great [Mycenaean] palaces" were "the telltale track of the Dorians". During the 1960s, the Dorian invasion became connected with the nineteenth-century ideas of Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer , who had argued that modern Greeks were of Slavic ancestry rather than the descendants of classical Greeks; though Fallmerayer had dated this population replacement to the Byzantine period, his followers, such as Rhys Carpenter and Donald Nicol , saw
18645-415: The greatest agency and economic power, likely due to the prolonged absences of men during military campaigns. Dorian women wore the peplos , which was once common to all Hellenes. This tunic was pinned at the shoulders by brooches and had slit skirts which bared the thighs and permitted more freedom of movement than the voluminous Ionian chiton (costume) . The Doric dialect was spoken in northwest Greece,
18810-424: The history of scholarship was the attempt to emphasize the etymology of Doron with the meaning of 'hand'. This in turn was connected to an interpretation of the famous lambda on Spartan shields, which was to rather stand for a hand with outstanding thumb than the initial letter of Lacedaimon. Given the origin of the Spartan shield lambda legend, however, in a fragment by Eupolis , an Athenian comic poet, there has been
18975-439: The infinitive entirely (employing a raft of new periphrastic constructions instead) and uses participles more restrictively. The loss of the dative led to a rise of prepositional indirect objects (and the use of the genitive to directly mark these as well). Ancient Greek tended to be verb-final, but neutral word order in the modern language is VSO or SVO. Modern Greek inherits most of its vocabulary from Ancient Greek, which in turn
19140-544: The invasion "one of the few indubitably certain facts of earlier Greek history". Christos Tsountas and Ernst Meyer [ de ] , in 1893 and 1937 respectively, posited it as the reason for the destruction of the Mycenaean palaces at the end of the twelfth century BCE. At the end of the nineteenth century, Paul Kretschmer argued that an early form of the Greek language had spread from Anatolia , rather than from northern Europe, but that during this spread these proto-Greeks had divided into several tribes, of which
19305-400: The invasion. More generally, modern scholarship has problematised the relationship between cultural forms and ethnic identity, corresponding to the decline of the culture-historical paradigm by which changes in material culture were generally explained by population transfer. Modern scholarship explains the ancient narrative of the Dorian invasion as a rationalising myth, created as part of
19470-406: The invasion. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, academic belief in the Dorian invasion declined, to the point where it was generally accepted as a myth. 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. Population movements at the end of
19635-455: The invasion: instead, they portrayed the Dorians as barbaric, destructive forces. Schnapp-Gourbeillion writes of both Glotz and contemporary pro-Dorian scholars as having "recreate[d] from scratch a past marked by its false rationality and its moralising aspects". 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
19800-596: The island of Rhodes. The six cities would later become rivals with the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The Dorians also settled Crete . The origin traditions remained strong into classical times: Thucydides saw the Peloponnesian War in part as "Ionians fighting against Dorians" and reported the tradition that the Syracusans in Sicily were of Dorian descent. Other such "Dorian" colonies, originally from Corinth, Megara, and
19965-466: The last in a series of migrations. 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. Anthony Snodgrass alternatively considered it most probable that the Dorian invasion had occurred, but that
20130-467: The late 15th century BC, was the first script used to write Greek. It is basically a syllabary , which was finally deciphered by Michael Ventris and John Chadwick in the 1950s (its precursor, Linear A , has not been deciphered and most likely encodes a non-Greek language). The language of the Linear B texts, Mycenaean Greek , is the earliest known form of Greek. Another similar system used to write
20295-640: The membership of Greece and Cyprus in the European Union, Greek is one of the organization's 24 official languages . Greek is recognized as a minority language in Albania, and used co-officially in some of its municipalities, in the districts of Gjirokastër and Sarandë . It is also an official minority language in the regions of Apulia and Calabria in Italy. In the framework of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages , Greek
20460-441: The modern period. The division into conventional periods is, as with all such periodizations, relatively arbitrary, especially because, in all periods, Ancient Greek has enjoyed high prestige, and the literate borrowed heavily from it. Across its history, the syllabic structure of Greek has varied little: Greek shows a mixed syllable structure, permitting complex syllabic onsets but very restricted codas. It has only oral vowels and
20625-402: The motives for alignment were not always ethnic but were diverse. Among the Dorians was Lacedaemon , Corcyra , Corinth and Epidamnus , Leucadia , Ambracia , Potidaea , Rhodes , Cythera , Argos , Syracuse , Gela , Acragas (later Agrigentum), Acrae , Casmenae. He does explain with considerable dismay what happened to incite ethnic war after the unity between the Greek states during
20790-607: The mythological tradition; competing hypotheses developed that Geometric pottery was in fact a "peasant style", originally predating Mycenaean culture, that it represented a mixture of northern-European styles with those of the Mycenaean period, or that it had in fact been brought from the Near East by the Phoenicians . Later, the Geometric style was divided from its earlier manifestation, the Protogeometric , used until
20955-405: The name on taking possession of Lacedaemon. Doris was subsequently named after them. Hall makes comparisons of Spartans to Hebrews as a chosen people maintaining a covenant with God and being assigned a Holy Land. To arrive at this conclusion, Hall relies on Herodotus' version of the myth (see below) that the Hellenes under Dorus did not take his name until reaching the Peloponnesus. In other versions
21120-481: The ninth century BCE; the Protogeometric was also argued to be Dorian in origin. The paradigm of the Dorian invasion spread from German into British and French scholarship, though its tenets were rarely debated or developed outside France and Germany. Influential scholars such as William Ridgeway , Ernst Grumach [ de ] and Sinclair Hood saw the ancient myths of the Dorian invasion and
21285-399: The noun they modify and relative pronouns are clause-initial. However, the morphological changes also have their counterparts in the syntax, and there are also significant differences between the syntax of the ancient and that of the modern form of the language . Ancient Greek made great use of participial constructions and of constructions involving the infinitive, and the modern variety lacks
21450-536: The objects of study of the discipline of Classics . During antiquity , Greek was by far the most widely spoken lingua franca in the Mediterranean world . It eventually became the official language of the Byzantine Empire and developed into Medieval Greek . In its modern form , Greek is the official language of Greece and Cyprus and one of the 24 official languages of the European Union . It
21615-706: The older periods of Greek, loanwords into Greek acquired Greek inflections, thus leaving only a foreign root word. Modern borrowings (from the 20th century on), especially from French and English, are typically not inflected; other modern borrowings are derived from Albanian , South Slavic ( Macedonian / Bulgarian ) and Eastern Romance languages ( Aromanian and Megleno-Romanian ). Greek words have been widely borrowed into other languages, including English. Example words include: mathematics , physics , astronomy , democracy , philosophy , athletics , theatre, rhetoric , baptism , evangelist , etc. Moreover, Greek words and word elements continue to be productive as
21780-660: The one never migrated from its place in any direction, while the other was very exceedingly given to wanderings; for in the reign of Deucalion this race dwelt in Pthiotis, and in the time of Doros the son of Hellen in the land lying below Ossa and Olympos, which is called Histiaiotis; and when it was driven from Histiaiotis by the sons of Cadmos, it dwelt in Pindos and was called Makednian; and thence it moved afterwards to Dryopis, and from Dryopis it came finally to Peloponnesus, and began to be called Dorian. 1.57.1-3 What language however
21945-463: The opposite qualities and to have entered Greek religion from Thrace . These ideas influenced the composer Richard Wagner , who used Müller's view of the Dorians as a stand-in for his own belief in the enmity between Germany and its neighbours, particularly in France and Italy. Müller saw Dorian culture as prefiguring the hierarchical, autocratic, militarised German state of Prussia : this became, in
22110-450: The people of Creston do not speak the same language with any of those who dwell about them, nor yet do the people of Phakia, but they speak the same language one as the other: and by this it is proved that they still keep unchanged the form of language which they brought with them when they migrated to these places. 1.58 As for the Hellenic race, it has used ever the same language, as I clearly perceive, since it first took its rise; but since
22275-582: The power of Athens and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon...." In the Platonic work Laws is mentioned that the Achaeans who fought in the Trojan War , on their return from Troy were driven out from their homes and cities by the young residents, so they migrated under a leader named Dorieus and hence they were renamed "Dorians". Now during this period of ten years, while the siege lasted,
22440-527: The proto-Dorians were the last to migrate into Greece. Some of the cultural changes, such as the widespread adoption of cremation, created similarities between Greek culture and that of the Urnfield culture of central Europe, lending support to the view that the Dorian invaders had come from the north. Alan Wace and Maurice S. Thompson advocated the northern-origin theory in their 1912 book Prehistoric Thessaly . In 1921, Stanley Casson attempted to trace
22605-627: The region of the Hellespont, who before that had been settlers with the Athenians, and of the natives of the various other towns which are really Pelasgian, though they have lost the name,—if one must pronounce judging by these, the Pelasgians used to speak a Barbarian language. If therefore all the Pelasgian race was such as these, then the Attic race, being Pelasgian, at the same time when it changed and became Hellenic, unlearnt also its language. For
22770-564: The romanticisation of ancient Sparta , and was used to assert a special connection between Prussia and ancient Greece. During the Nazi period , the association between the Dorians and the Aryans became a matter of orthodoxy, and high-ranking Nazis, including Adolf Hitler , integrated the Dorian invasion into their pseudoscientific theories of race . Racialised views of the Dorians remained common in scholarship, both inside and outside Germany, until
22935-521: The routes of the Dorian invasion based on the finds of Geometric pottery, and concluded that both Sparta and a settlement at the Dipylon Gate of Athens were Dorian. Nicholas Hammond did likewise in 1934, arguing that the Dorians had entered Greece via the Pindus mountains of Albania, contrary to the accounts in ancient Greek historians, by which they universally originated within Greece. During
23100-509: The scholarly consensus after it was demonstrated by Bernhard Schweitzer in a work of 1917. In 1939, Gaetano De Sanctis , an Italian classicist who had refused to swear allegiance to the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini , wrote a history of early Greece in which he rejected Müller's view of the Dorian invasion, and ascribed only a small historical role to the Dorians. The 1952 decipherment of Linear B indicated that Greek had been spoken in
23265-490: The seventh century BCE, is unlikely to be historical. Early archaeological work in the nineteenth century gave the impression of a substantial break between the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age in Greece. 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. These cultural changes were associated with
23430-479: The site's destruction. However, the same pottery was later found in layers predating the site's destruction, and it is now considered to have been of local Mycenaean manufacture, or else the work of small immigrant populations, who may already have been present in Mycenaean society. Paul Cartledge , in 1979, defended the historicity of the Dorian settlement of Sparta, though noted that such a settlement could not have occurred prior to c. 950 BCE , and so
23595-598: The southern Argolid coast of the Peloponnese , in the modern prefecture of Arcadia . Culturally, in addition to their Doric dialect of Greek, Doric colonies retained their characteristic Doric calendar that revolved round a cycle of festivals, the Hyacinthia and the Carneia being especially important. The Dorian mode in music also was attributed to Doric societies and was associated by classical writers with martial qualities. The Doric order of architecture in
23760-416: 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. By the late fifth century BCE, Greeks considered the Dorian invasion a major turning point in their history, and it was reckoned as the beginning of the main line of historical continuity for Dorian states in
23925-541: The story of the Dorian invasion, in conjunction with the story of the Heracleidae, served to assert Sparta's right to its territory in the Peloponnese, both in Laconia and in Messenia. In Messenia itself, a version of the myth held that the Dorians had killed the Heraclid Kresphontes , who was allotted the kingdom after the initial Heraclid contest: after the restoration of Messenian independence by Epaminondas of Thebes in 370 BCE, this latter version
24090-437: The stressed vowel; the so-called breathing marks ( rough and smooth breathing ), originally used to signal presence or absence of word-initial /h/; and the diaeresis , used to mark the full syllabic value of a vowel that would otherwise be read as part of a diphthong. These marks were introduced during the course of the Hellenistic period. Actual usage of the grave in handwriting saw a rapid decline in favor of uniform usage of
24255-404: The time when it parted off feeble at first from the Pelasgian race, setting forth from a small beginning it has increased to that great number of races which we see, and chiefly because many Barbarian races have been added to it besides. Moreover it is true, as I think, of the Pelasgian race also, that so far as it remained Barbarian it never made any great increase. Thus, according to Herodotus,
24420-529: The tradition inherited by Vitruvius included the Doric column, noted for its simplicity and strength. The Dorians seem to have offered the central mainland cultus for Helios . The scattering of cults of the sun god in Sicyon , Argos , Ermioni , Epidaurus and Laconia , and his holy livestock flocks at Taenarum , seem to suggest that the deity was considerably important in Dorian religion, compared to other parts of ancient Greece. Additionally, it may have been
24585-407: The w and contraction. The tablet records the grain rations issued to the servants of "religious dignitaries" celebrating a religious festival of Potnia , the mother goddess. The nominative singular, Dōrieus , remained the same in the classical period. Many Linear B names of servants were formed from their home territory or the places where they came into Mycenaean ownership. Carl Darling Buck sees
24750-607: The words of Édouard Will [ fr ] , "a quasi-permanent temptation" in German intellectual culture. His ideas became associated with Prussian militarism ; by the 1930s, Müller, militarism and ancient Sparta were closely connected in German political culture, to a much greater extent than they had been in Müller's own work. In 1929, Hans Günther – an early supporter of the Nazi Party and major influence upon its racial theories – published Racial History of
24915-574: Was a distinct dialect of Greek itself. Aside from the Macedonian question, current consensus regards Phrygian as the closest relative of Greek, since they share a number of phonological, morphological and lexical isoglosses , with some being exclusive between them. Scholars have proposed a Graeco-Phrygian subgroup out of which Greek and Phrygian originated. Among living languages, some Indo-Europeanists suggest that Greek may be most closely related to Armenian (see Graeco-Armenian ) or
25080-574: Was also alluded to by the Theban poet Pindar , who wrote in the early fifth century BCE. The narrative of the Dorian invasion was particularly important in Sparta, where it formed the city's foundation myth . Tyrtaeus wrote of the Spartans as Dorians, who arrived in the land of Laconia from Erineus , in Doris , with the Heracleidae. There, Zeus and Hera granted Sparta to the Heracleidae:
25245-568: Was also used as the official language of government and religion in the Christian Nubian kingdoms , for most of their history. Greek, in its modern form, is the official language of Greece, where it is spoken by almost the entire population. It is also the official language of Cyprus (nominally alongside Turkish ) and the British Overseas Territory of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (alongside English ). Because of
25410-557: Was also used in Ancient Greek. Greek has occasionally been written in the Latin script , especially in areas under Venetian rule or by Greek Catholics . The term Frankolevantinika / Φραγκολεβαντίνικα applies when the Latin script is used to write Greek in the cultural ambit of Catholicism (because Frankos / Φράγκος is an older Greek term for West-European dating to when most of (Roman Catholic Christian) West Europe
25575-535: Was diverse and closely related to other varieties of Greek, and may not have originated from a single proto-dialect. The ancient Greeks considered the Dorians to have migrated to the Peloponnese from central Greece, led by the descendants of the hero Heracles (the Heracleidae ), around the end of the age of heroes (roughly the Late Bronze Age or the late second millennium BCE), shortly after
25740-417: Was emphasised, and the newly-founded tribes of Messenia were given the names of Heracles's descendants rather than the traditional names of the Dorian tribal groups of the region. Nino Luraghi interprets this as a means of breaking the perceived links between Messenia and Sparta: the latter was considered, in his words, "the quintessence of Dorianism". Sparta used the myth of the Dorian invasion to justify
25905-504: Was fundamentally Germanic in nature, and that Nazi Germany, which modelled its militarism and state-organised militarised training of boys on Sparta, represented the best of classical Greek virtues. The Dorians were also imagined as having invaded Italy: a 1940 work published in Leipzig argued for "indisputable connections" between protohistoric sites in northern Italy and those of Prussia and Scandinavia. The work of Fritz Schachermeyr ,
26070-574: Was in Thessaly , central Greece. He goes on to expand in mythological terms, giving some of the geographic details of the myth: 1.56.2-3 And inquiring he found that the Lacedemonians and the Athenians had the pre-eminence, the first of the Dorian and the others of the Ionian race. For these were the most eminent races in ancient time, the second being a Pelasgian and the first a Hellenic race: and
26235-421: Was incompatible with the Greek myths of the Dorian invasion and of the Heracleidae. However, he also noted that no material-culture innovations were any longer attributed to the Dorians, writing that "the Dorians, archaeologically speaking, do not exist". By the early 1980s, the reality of the Dorian invasion was widely doubted in scholarship. In 1978, Carol G. Thomas wrote that Chadwick's linguistic argument
26400-486: Was incompatible with the mythological tradition, and would imply that the Dorian invasion was a post facto ethnogenesis myth created in the Iron Age. Noel Robertson wrote in 1980 that the veracity of the invasion was widely doubted, and that the only remaining evidence for it was the Greek mythical tradition, which he considered to be better explained as a later innovation. In 1982, Annie Schnapp-Gourbeillion called
26565-516: Was made of wood); i.e., "the people of the spear" or "spearmen." In this case the country would be named after the people, as in Saxony from the Saxons. However, R. S. P. Beekes doubted the validity of this derivation and asserted that no good etymology exists. It sometimes happens that different derivations of an Indo-European word exploit similar-sounding Indo-European roots. Greek doru , "lance,"
26730-640: Was no true ethnic component in fifth-century Greek culture, in spite of anti-Dorian elements in Athenian propaganda. At the other extreme John Alty reinterprets the sources to conclude that ethnicity did motivate fifth-century actions. Moderns viewing these ethnic identifications through the 5th and 4th century BC literary tradition have been profoundly influenced by their own social politics. Also, according to E. N. Tigerstedt , nineteenth-century European admirers of virtues they considered "Dorian" identified themselves as " Laconophile " and found responsive parallels in
26895-458: Was the work of Dorian invaders, whom he considered to be a Germanic people from northern Europe. This view became the most popular scholarly interpretation of Geometric pottery for the remainder of the nineteenth century, though early objections noted the continuity between Mycenaean and Geometric styles and that Geometric pottery originated in Attica, which was not affected by the Dorian invasion in
27060-580: Was under the control of the Frankish Empire ). Frankochiotika / Φραγκοχιώτικα (meaning 'Catholic Chiot') alludes to the significant presence of Catholic missionaries based on the island of Chios . Additionally, the term Greeklish is often used when the Greek language is written in a Latin script in online communications. The Latin script is nowadays used by the Greek-speaking communities of Southern Italy . The Yevanic dialect
27225-673: Was written by Romaniote and Constantinopolitan Karaite Jews using the Hebrew Alphabet . In a tradition, that in modern time, has come to be known as Greek Aljamiado , some Greek Muslims from Crete wrote their Cretan Greek in the Arabic alphabet . The same happened among Epirote Muslims in Ioannina . This also happened among Arabic-speaking Byzantine rite Christians in the Levant ( Lebanon , Palestine, and Syria ). This usage
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