Internal evolution and Indo-Europeans
One of the major academic controversies about the Minoans concerns their relationships to the Near Eastern civilizations. Before the 1970s, it was widely assumed that the origins of the Minoan civilization lay in the Near East.
With the appearance of Renfrew’s (1972) Emergence of Civilisation this interpretation was reversed, and it was asserted that the origins of the Cretan palaces were a local development, unrelated to the Near East. In Aegean archaeology, Renfrew’s general interpretation has not been entirely discarded (cf. e.g. Barrett & Halstead 2004). Yet I would argue that the actual archaeological evidence and philological analysis which has grown progressively since has largely confirmed the original diffusionist interpretation.Indeed, the interpretation of the evidence has gone much further, and contradicted the fundamental claims about the economy advanced by Renfrew (1972: 476ff.), which were the basis of his entire project. Among these was Renfrew’s rejection of migrations, a view which is widely forgotten today when Bennet (2007: 184) concludes that “Immigration, not internal growth, presumably accounts for much of’ what led to the Cretan palaces. Renfrew also stressed the importance of internal trade within the Aegean world as the decisive motor of growth, while dismissing the importance of trade with the Levant. Yet Shelmerdine and Bennet (2008: 307) note that the Mycenaean administrative “texts show almost no sign of interaction among” the various Mycenaean polities, refuting Renfrew’s argument; by contrast, the links with the Levant are universally recognized. Similarly, Renfrew’s analysis disputed the similarity of the state economic systems of the Aegean to those of the Near East, yet this interpretation is routinely contradicted by scholars working with the material who suggest that the two systems shared many basic principles (cf.
e.g. Bennet 2007: 190). In any case, students of religion have generally recognized the links with the Near East (e.g. Dietrich 1974; Lopez-Ruiz 2010) and are thus in line with the general trend of the archaeological and philological evidence (although not all the archaeologists).Renfrew (1987) was also responsible for an interpretation which eventually led to placing the origins of the Indo-Europeans in Anatolia and related them to the development of agriculture. From there, they will allegedly have moved into Greece where the Greek language developed. This argument is quite difficult to follow for many reasons (among the most important being that neither DNA nor potsherds can be related to the speakers of a family of languages; there are also no texts until millennia later so the language issue is ultimately impossible to solve and therefore irrelevant). Various different arguments have since been proposed. Originally, preferences for the arrival of the Greeks ranged from the third millennium to the end of the second, or later. However, the Linear B texts (written in Greek) confirm that the Indo-Europeans were present in the second millennium. Yet on the other hand, the archaeological evidence for an arrival of the Indo-Europeans in the third millennium is far weaker than widely assumed; Pullen (2008: 40) notes that the various arguments about the interpretation of the archaeological material “have not yet had the impact they should”.
To me, it seems more reasonable to allow that the Indo-Europeans came out of the steppe (cf. e.g. Mallory 1999) in a series of waves, one of which reached Greece and Anatolia in the early second millennium BCE; others led them into India at the same time. Later arrivals are correctly viewed as “infiltrations” as more Indo-Europeans arrived, gradually changing the makeup of the population. The nature of the original population is difficult to identify: the earliest waves will have come from the east, but there were certainly many different population groups in the east, using different types of pottery and building different types of architecture.
There is a break in the Middle Helladic II period (roughly contemporary with the era of the earliest palaces in Crete, ca. 1900-1700 BCE) when there are few settlements on the mainland. When life resumes, this leads straight into the era of the Mycenaean citadels: there is virtually no cultural break between the Middle Helladic III and the Late Helladic I (beginning ca. 1600 BCE) associated with the citadels - which bear no comparison to what was known elsewhere and previously. And those citadels emerged where populations began to coalesce during Middle Helladic II. Whoever the Mycenaeans and their predecessors were, it would be reasonable to assume that the Mycenaeans arrived at some time (well before the appearance of their citadels) in the cultural vacuum of Middle Helladic II.
In this article I have referred to the Mycenaeans as “Greeks” since the language they used was effectively Greek (but apparently an east Greek dialect). More cautious scholars prefer to reserve the designation “Greek” for those peoples who appear after the Dark Ages when we are certain that there was a consciousness of a “Hellenic” identity.