The Ethnicity of the Sea Peoples - RePub - Erasmus Universiteit ...

with the Heraklids Kresphontes and Aristodemos, led an
army of Dorians to the Pelopponesos, drove out the last
representative of the Pelopids, Teisamenes, the son of
Orestes, and divided the Pelopponesos in three parts, Temenos
himself taking Argos, the sons of Aristodemos
(whose father had been killed by a thunderbolt) receiving
Sparta, and Kresphontes being allotted Messenia.
Apparently, the literary traditions tally very well with
the linguistic evidence, but the missing link to solve the
riddle of the Dorian invasion once and for all is formed by
the archaeological side of the story. Like others before
him, Hall is not able to find archaeological evidence for a
migration from the region of Thessaly to the Pelopponesos
and gets so frustrated that he altogether denounces the
mythical stories as inventions of later date (whether, and if
so, how he revaluates the evidence of the dialects is not
clear). 28 The solution of this problem, however, has been
presented by Birgitta Eder in a thorough study of the archaeological
evidence from the Argolid, Lakonia, and
Messenia from the end of the Late Bronze Age to the Protogeometric
period. As Eder convincingly shows, all three
regions of the Pelopponesos suffer from heavy depopulation
during the Submycenaean period (= dearth of material
evidence) and receive new population impulses at the end
of the Submycenaean and beginning of the Protogeometric
period (= reappearance of material evidence). In the course
of this latter process, there are some traces of discontinuity
in material culture with that of the previous Mycenaean
one in the form of graves for individual burials dug in former
habitation areas (Mycenae and Tiryns), the introduction
of handmade ware with affinities to pottery of middle
Greece (Tiryns and Asine), and the (re)introduction of apsidal
houses. 29 As after the low ebb in material finds from
the Submycenaean period the archaeological culture in the
regions of the Pelopponesos under discussion develops
without a break from the Protogeometric period to the
Classical one and beyond, Eder rightly concludes that this
is the time that the ancestors of the historical Dorians have
arrived – and, we would like to add to this conclusion, that
the ancestors of the historical Dryopes, a distinct ethnic
group inhabiting Asine in the Argolid until the end of the
8th century BC, might be among them! 30
28 Hall 1997: 56-65; 184-5; Hall 2002: 73-89.
29 Eder 1998: esp. 57 (Mycenae); 58-62 (Tiryns); 67-8 (Asine).
30 On the Dryopes, see Strid 1999.
24
Instead of addressing Eder’s archaeological results,
however, Hall energetically persists in his disqualification
of the literary traditions on the return of the Heraklids and
the coming of the Dorians as mere inventions – a very unsatisfactory
point of view for an adherent of what he calls
the “historically positivist” school like myself. 31 And he
puts some venom in this, when he associates the interdisciplinary
method propagated here – in his words the “culture-historical”
approach – with its nationalistically
colored application by Gustav Kossinna and the subsequent
abuse of the latter’s views for the “Blut und Boden”
propaganda of the German Nazi’s. 32 In section 1 above we
have seen how Kosinna’s adagium that “cultural provinces
clearly outlined archaeologically coincide in all periods
with precise peoples or tribes” falls short of explaining the
complexities of reality and that the different categories of
evidence need to be tackled individually.
If, for the sake of argument, we would join Hall in his
rejection of the interdisciplinary method propagated here
notwithstanding its noted shortcomings and deficiencies,
the immediate consequence would be that the phenomenon
of ethnic groups detectable for the historical period did not
exist in protohistorical and prehistorical times – a basically
improbable assumption. The more so, because already in
this early period we are confronted with ethnonyms – those
of the Sea Peoples being at the heart and core of the investigation
we are presently embarking on – , which Hall himself
considered “a vital component of ethnic consciousness”.
33
Homeros and History
An important literary source for the reconstruction of the
early history of the region of Greece and the Aegean is
formed by Homeros’ epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. As
related forms of six from the total of nine ethnonyms of the
Sea Peoples figure in them, the Homeric poems also have a
direct bearing on our topic. 34 The fundamental question is,
however, which period do the Iliad and the Odyssey reflect,
the Late Bronze Age or the Early Iron Age, or both,
31 Hall 2002: 73-89; Hall 1997: 41.
32 Hall 1997: 129; Hall 2002: 38.
33 Hall 2002: 55.
34 Akhaioi-Ekwesh, Danaoi-Denye(n), Lukioi-Lukka, Pelasgoi-
Peleset, Sikeloi-Shekelesh, and Teukros-Tjeker.