Migrations

In the absence of contemporary documents, we rely on the writings of later Greeks and on modern archaeologists for information about the earlier Iron Age. The first key events are two roughly contemporary waves of migrations within the Aegean basin. The first is the so-called Dorian Invasion, recorded by later Greek historians. Greece would be divided into regions speaking different dialects of the Greek language: Dorian, Ionic, Aeolic, and others. The Dorian dialect predominated in southern Greece: the Peloponnesus, the islands of the south Aegean, including Crete, and the south coast of Aegean Anatolia. The other main dialect, the Ionian, was spoken in Athens, on the islands of the central Aegean, and in Ionia, the central zone of Aegean Anatolia. Later Greeks believed that the Dorian dialect speakers had migrated southwards into Greece at the end of the Bronze Age, fighting en route to their new lands. Several writers tied the Dorian Invasion to the fall of Troy, another firm fact for the ancient Greeks; Thucydides, for example, dated the Dorian Invasion to ca. 1120 BC (as measured in our calendrical system), eighty years after the Achaean capture of Troy. Archaeology has provided little confirmation of this story, although excavators have searched for it with eagle eyes. But migrations are difficult to trace in the material record. Nomads do not always oblige us by scattering distinctive objects along their trail. On the other hand, the dialects could well have developed spontaneously in the different regions without notable inmixture of new people. In sum, the reality behind the Dorian Invasion remains elusive.

In contrast, the second of the early migrations can be observed in the archaeological record. During the eleventh century BC, Greeks from mainland Greece migrated eastwards across the Aegean to the shores of Anatolia. This coastal zone and the islands immediately offshore, known collectively as East Greece, were divided into three regions marked by different dialects: Aeolis, Ionia, and Doris, from north to south. The heartland of ancient Greece thus embraced all shores of the Aegean Sea. Today the region is divided between the modern countries of Greece and Turkey (Figure 12.1).

At a later time, especially from the mid-eighth to the later sixth centuries BC, various Greek cities sent colonizing missions by sea to more distant shores. Motives for these journeys varied. Commercial interests, such as the search for minerals and other raw materials, would be important. Other factors provoking this flood of emigration from the Greek homeland included the rapid expansion of the population in the eighth century BC and the competition for land to grow

Figure 12.1 Greece and the Aegean basin

Food, and the availability of an outlet for dissidents in the competition for political power among the aristocrats struggling to gain control of the governments of city-states. Usually the daughter cities would maintain strong sentimental ties to their founders, although in time they became autonomous in government and economy. Two destinations in particular attracted the Greeks, South Italy and Sicily in the west, and the Black Sea and its approaches in the north. Scattered colonies were founded elsewhere, in Libya, Egypt, the Levant, and on the south coast of Anatolia. The earliest settlers headed west, founding colonies first in the Bay of Naples: at Pithekoussai on the small island of Ischia, ca. 760 BC, then at Cumae on the adjacent mainland, and Naxos on Sicily (see Figure 19.1). The Italian peninsula from Naples south and the eastern two-thirds of the island of Sicily, together known as Magna Graecia (Latin term), or West Greece, would eventually become an integral part of the Greek world, containing several important cities. These colonies survived because the local peoples, based in the interior, did not challenge the coastal Greeks. Other parts of Italy were less hospitable, however, and the Greeks avoided them. The lands north of Naples belonged to the powerful Etruscans, and western Sicily had already been staked out by the Phoenicians, as had much of North Africa and Mediterranean Spain.