Remarkably little is known about these centuries of Greek history except for the pottery sequences and the extraordinary finds from Lefkandi on the island of Euboia. The actual causes of the fall at the end of the Bronze Age are still in debate, although a current consensus more or less now states that a breakdown in the international relations and trade of the eastern Mediterranean provoked an upsurge of piracy, which destabilized the population such that they either went wandering in search of new homes or relocated as far from the wealthy, pirate-targeted urban centers as possible.
Those Greeks looking for new homes were one part of that movement, including the Sea Peoples recorded in the Egyptian records. The work of Trude Dothan has established that at least some aspects of Philistine culture were originally Mycenaean, later heavily influenced by Cyprus and Egypt (Dothan 1982, passim). More work is necessary, however, to determine how the Greeks related to the other groups of Sea Peoples, and where these wound up in their peregrinations around the Mediterranean. Several of the chapters in Eliezer Oren's (2000) The Sea Peoples and Their World: A Reassessment consider various aspects of this issue.
Likewise, the nature of the early Greek settlements in Cyprus is still in debate. It is generally now accepted that the Greeks arrived in Cyprus in two distinct "waves," one in about 1190 b. c.e. settling the western edge of the island at Maa-Palaikastro, the other settling farther north around 1075. Although originally these settlers were seen as Homeric warrior-pirates, seizing the island and Hel-lenizing it by force, scholars now believe that the Greeks arrived as humble refugees, wives and children in tow, bringing their language with them but in other ways adopting the local culture, including the local goddess Aphrodite.
However, the "two-wave" hypothesis has now come into debate. Most notably, Maria lacovou, in her article "Cyprus at the Dawn of the First Millennium b. c.: Cultural Homogenisation versus the Tyranny of Ethnic Identifications" (in press), argues that there was only one twelfth-century wave and that there is, in fact, no clear evidence for an eleventh-century wave of Greek immigration onto the island. Rather, the minor cultural innovations of the eleventh century were due to the merging of the indigenous and Greek cultures into a new, Iron Age Cypriot society. If her hypotheses are correct, the history of the Hellenization of Cyprus must be reconsidered.
World History
