Dorian invasion

• 1. Introduction

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  The Dorian invasion was, in February 1941, invoked by Adolf Hitler as evidence of Aryan supremacy. He declared his belief that the Aryan race had reached its apogee through its supposed conquest of Greece and Italy. The Dorians were a real ethno-linguistic group in classical Greece, concentrated in the southern Peloponnese, Crete, Sicily and the Dodecanese. Whether they arrived there by conquest was a question that had divided scholars for over a century by the time Hitler spoke.

  How did a story about a migration that may never have happened acquire such staying power? Why did it find such a warm reception in the political culture of ancient Sparta and in the racial theories of twentieth-century Germany? And what does the archaeological record actually reveal about the end of the Greek Bronze Age?

• 2. Foundation and Power

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  Tyrtaeus, a Spartan poet of the seventh century BCE, left the earliest surviving account of the Dorian myth. He wrote of the Spartans as Dorians who had arrived in Laconia from Erineus, in the district of Doris, led by the Heracleidae. In that telling, Zeus and Hera had granted the land of Sparta to those descendants of Heracles. The two royal dynasties of Sparta, the Agiad and Eurypontid lines, both maintained their claim of Heraclid descent well into the classical period.

  Sparta used the myth to assert its right to territory in both Laconia and Messenia. In 457 BCE, Sparta invoked Dorian kinship to justify the Tanagra campaign. It sent troops to fight on behalf of Doris against an incursion from Phocis, an ally of Athens. The historian Nigel Kennell has called Sparta's version of the invasion myth 'drastically underwritten'. He suggests it was likely a Laconian invention, with only a tenuous connection to wider Greek understanding of the Dorians.

  Messenia had its own version of the story. In the Messenian telling, the Dorians had killed the Heraclid Kresphontes, who had been allotted the Messenian kingdom after the initial Heraclid contest. After Epaminondas of Thebes restored Messenian independence in 370 BCE, the new Messenian tribal groupings received the names of Heracles's descendants. They did not receive the traditional names of the Dorian tribal groups. The scholar Nino Luraghi reads this as a deliberate move to sever the perceived link between Messenia and Sparta. Sparta, he wrote, was considered 'the quintessence of Dorianism'.

  During the Peloponnesian War, Sparta invoked a shared Dorian heritage to consolidate its allies against Athens. The war ended at the close of the fifth century BCE. The most complete surviving accounts of the myth belong to Diodorus Siculus, a historian of the first century BCE. The Bibliotheca, a mythological compendium from the first or second century CE, also preserves the narrative.

  Around the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian, Sparta launched a campaign to reassert itself as the quintessential Dorian city. Efforts at that time included reviving what were considered primordial Doric cultural forms. They extended even to a deliberate 'hyperdoricisation' of the city's own dialect.

• 3. Müller and the Scholars

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  Karl Otfried Müller published The Dorians in 1824. He argued that the Dorians were a northern, Indo-European people who had invaded and subjugated the Peloponnese. He described them as a 'young race', superior in individual character, political organisation and language. His student Ernst Curtius called them 'northern mountaineers', stronger than coastal peoples because of what he saw as their vigour born from comparative underdevelopment.

  In 1870, Alexander Conze proposed that Geometric pottery was the work of Dorian invaders. He considered those invaders to be a Germanic people from northern Europe. This became the dominant scholarly interpretation of that pottery style for the rest of the nineteenth century. Early objectors noted that Geometric pottery showed continuity with Mycenaean styles. It had also originated in Attica, a region the mythological tradition did not associate with the invasion. A rival hypothesis held that Geometric pottery was a 'peasant style' predating Mycenaean culture. Another suggested it had arrived from the Near East via the Phoenicians.

  In 1893, Karl Julius Beloch attempted a different synthesis. He argued that the Dorians had been indigenous to Mycenaean Greece, differentiating from other Greeks only in the eighth century BCE. The scholarly community largely rejected this. Eduard Meyer dismissed the invasion as 'one of the few indubitably certain facts of earlier Greek history'.

  Carl Blegen began excavating the Mycenaean site of Pylos in Messenia in 1939 and concluded it had been destroyed by the Dorians. He adjusted his dating of Troy VIIa, the site he identified as the Trojan War setting. That adjustment was made to bring the date into alignment with his Dorian invasion theory. In 1962, he wrote that 'the fire-scarred ruins of all the great Mycenaean palaces' were 'the telltale track of the Dorians'.

  During the 1960s, Soviet historians adapted the Dorian invasion to fit a Marxist view of history. They framed it as the mechanism by which Greek culture transitioned from primitive communism to a slave-based mode of production. The invasion became linked with the Sea Peoples, mentioned in Egyptian and Near Eastern sources. Those peoples were believed to have destroyed several sites at the end of the Bronze Age. In 1954, Manolis Andronikos denied that the invasion had occurred at all; this was considered 'drastic' by John Myres.

  Robert Drews defended the hypothesis as late as 1988. He argued that the Dorians had conquered Greece by mastering new modes of warfare that the Mycenaean states failed to counter.

• 4. Germans as New Dorians

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  From 1794 onwards, Friedrich Schlegel promoted a Romantic, idealised view of Sparta as a definingly Dorian society. For Schlegel, Sparta represented a racial and cultural ideal: successful social integration and respect for the rights and dignity of women. This admiration of Sparta was to become a persistent feature of German nationalist ideology.

  Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germans developed the Dorian invasion within what historians call the Sonderweg hypothesis. The German nation was imagined to have a preordained historical path and a superior racial status. Developments in Indo-European studies showed linguistic connections between German, Greek and Sanskrit. German was therefore considered especially closely tied to Greek, and German culture a continuation of ancient Greek civilisation. Germans, under this framework, were the 'new Dorians'.

  Müller extended his theories into a 'Dorian way of life' grounded in honour, liberty and patriotism. He saw this as a cultural programme, not merely an archaeological thesis. He associated the god Apollo with tranquillity, harmony and clarity, and argued that Apollo had originally been a Dorian deity. He contrasted Apollo with Dionysus, whom he believed had entered Greek religion from Thrace and embodied opposite qualities. These ideas influenced the composer Richard Wagner. Wagner used Müller's view of the Dorians as a vehicle for his belief in German enmity toward its neighbours, especially France and Italy.

  Müller saw Dorian culture as prefiguring the hierarchical, autocratic, militarised state of Prussia. His interpreters described this as 'a quasi-permanent temptation' in German intellectual culture. Hermann Müller argued in 1844 for the Nordic origin of Dorian, and so classical Greek, civilisation. This view became standard in German historiography and held that position until the mid-twentieth century.

  By the 1930s, the association between Müller, Prussian militarism and ancient Sparta had grown far beyond anything Müller himself had written.

• 5. Aryan Dorians

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  Hans Günther was an early supporter of the Nazi Party and a major influence on its racial theories. In 1929, he published Racial History of the Hellenic and Roman Peoples. He argued that both the Greeks and Romans belonged to the Nordic race. Günther cited passages in Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus about the mythical Hyperboreans. He treated these as genuine memories of a Dorian origin in the far north.

  He also adduced the Greek word iris, which means both 'rainbow' and the iris of the eye. He interpreted this as proof that the original speakers of Greek had had blue eyes rather than brown. In 1930, Alfred Rosenberg, later condemned as a Nazi war criminal, described the Dorians as one of several waves of Aryan invaders into Greece.

  During the period of Nazi rule from 1933 to 1945, German classicists universally portrayed the Dorians as Aryan conquerors. Richard Wolin's phrase for this portrayal is 'fearless Aryan conquerors'. Nazi theorists cast the invasion as having 'saved' Greece from the 'contamination' of Asiatic races. The work of Fritz Schachermeyr, a prominent Nazi historian and adherent of race theory, was particularly influential in entrenching these views in German-speaking scholarship.

  A 1940 work published in Leipzig argued for 'indisputable connections' between protohistoric sites in northern Italy and those of Prussia and Scandinavia. The racialised view of the Dorians promoted in Nazi Germany found echoes in other countries. Ioannis Koumaris, a German-trained anthropologist who held a professorship at the University of Athens, agreed with the Nazi primacy of race in historical events. He argued, however, that the Dorian migrations had been 'local movements' within a heterogeneous Greek population.

  Even scholars who opposed the Nazi regime rarely challenged the underlying assumption that an invasion had occurred. Charles Picard wrote in 1935 that the Dorian invasion had been 'no bad thing'. It had, he added, 'allowed Greek art to cross the mirages of the Asian spirit'. Critics such as Gustave Glotz portrayed the Dorians as barbaric and destructive forces, not as civilising conquerors. But neither Glotz nor most of his contemporaries questioned whether an invasion had occurred at all.

  After the downfall of Nazi Germany in 1945, the word 'Aryan' largely disappeared from scholarly writing. The underlying paradigm of heroic, migrating invaders, however, persisted into the 1960s in both mainstream historiography and explicitly right-wing works.

• 6. The Evidence Turns

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  The decipherment of the Mycenaean Linear B script in 1952 removed one of the hypothesis's foundational assumptions. Linear B showed that Greek speakers had lived in the Peloponnese since the Bronze Age. This left the Dorian invasion with no language to have introduced.

  The art historian Robert Cook had long considered the association between the Dorians and Geometric pottery an uncomfortable fit with the evidence. In 1903, Hans Dragendorff had challenged it, arguing that Geometric pottery was simply a development of Mycenaean styles. Bernhard Schweitzer demonstrated this conclusively in a 1917 work, and it became the scholarly consensus. Cook's 1962 article called the Dorian invasion 'not a subject that is worth much study'. He considered the invasion probably did take place, but that it had left no trace in the material record.

  From the 1960s onwards, new archaeological discoveries pushed the chronological horizons of cultural changes back into the Mycenaean period. Artefacts once attributed to the Dorian invaders were shown not to have arrived suddenly or simultaneously. Vincent Desborough, in 1964, demonstrated a chronological inconsistency at the heart of the invasion theory. Widespread burial in cist graves dated to around 1100 BCE, but the Mycenaean palace destructions had occurred around 1180 BCE. The artefacts supposed to mark the Dorian arrival came decades after the events they were meant to explain.

  In 1978, Klaus Kilian proposed the name 'Dorian Ware' for a class of non-wheel-made pottery at Tiryns. He found it in post-destruction layers and attributed it to the invaders. The same pottery was subsequently found in pre-destruction layers, and is now considered to have been of local Mycenaean manufacture. Paul Cartledge, in 1979, noted that no material-culture innovations were any longer attributed to the Dorians. His conclusion was direct: 'the Dorians, archaeologically speaking, do not exist'.

  In 1982, Annie Schnapp-Gourbeillion called the Dorian invasion 'a spectre haunting historians of ancient Greece'. She wrote that the evidence could support at best 'a series of violent but limited raids'. It could not sustain a theory of large-scale invasion followed by settlement. By the 1990s, most scholars in the field regarded the Dorian invasion as a myth.

  Adherents remained into the 1990s and beyond, including Birgitta Eder, Nicholas Hammond and Theodore Cressy Skeat. Leonard Palmer defended the theory as late as 1980 on linguistic grounds. He cited it as the only available explanation for the distribution of West Greek dialects in the classical period.

• 7. Collapse and Continuity

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  Modern archaeologists now describe the Dorian invasion as a 'scholarly mirage'. The collapse of Mycenaean palatial civilisation is better explained by factors internal to those societies: social conflicts, climate change and technological shifts. The breakdown of the palaces' own socio-economic model was also central. Whether the events at the end of the Bronze Age should even be treated as a single, interconnected collapse is itself now questioned.

  Where population movements occurred at the end of the Bronze Age, the evidence suggests they ran away from the Mycenaean centres. They did not flow toward the southern Peloponnese. The population of the areas previously thought to have been settled by Dorian invaders appears to have declined sharply. Most regions of Greece lay outside the control of palatial states in the Mycenaean period and experienced continuity in population and culture.

  Cultural and linguistic change did occur between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. It happened at different times, at different speeds and in different regions. Iron-working, cist graves and cremation are now known to predate the palatial destructions. They also originated in regions such as Attica and Euboea. Those were areas the mythological tradition never associated with a Dorian invasion.

  Oliver Dickinson has written that the myths of the Dorian invasion are 'likely to have little relevance to what actually happened'. He cites the long gap between the supposed events and the surviving retellings. Later politics and ideology, he argues, distorted any historical core those retellings may have contained. Modern scholarship explains the ancient narrative as a rationalising myth, generated through a process of ethnogenesis by Peloponnesian communities whose cultural forms gradually converged.

  Halicarnassus was considered a Dorian city into the Hellenistic period, spanning 323-30 BCE. Yet it used Ionic for its official inscriptions from the fifth century BCE and may never have widely spoken the Doric dialect at all.