Draft talk:Dorian invasion

Specialisms

@UndercoverClassicist: Is this your specialism? It's most certainly not mine. However, Cline (who was a professor of mine) did note that our article on the Dorian invasion sucks, so I wanted to take a stab or something at it. If you're interested in working on a rewrite I'd be happy to. Ifly6 (talk) 18:25, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi -- yes, it is, and yes, he's completely right. It basically needs the same treatment as Marian Reforms -- to disentangle the historiographical/mythological narrative from the "real" archaeology. The challenge is that we've got multiple strata here:

The ancient mythical narrative (in Thucydides et al) that becomes an important foundational myth for (especially) Spartan royalty.
The modern myth, which is heavily tied up in C19th racialist archaeological pseudoscience, that the people of Greece were replaced by nebulous northern Europeans/"Aryans" after the Late Bronze Age.
The really ancient myth of the "Sea Peoples" and so on, which basically comes out of Egyptian (and to a lesser extent other Near Eastern) LBA sources, and gets tied into the first two by various modern scholars for various reasons, though it doesn't really have anything to do with either.
The current archaeological discussion of what actually happened c. 1180 BCE, which is much more circumspect about whether these "sea peoples" are really a useful category in the way that Rameses III would like us to believe, much less happy to talk about societal "collapse" rather than "transformation", and generally much less hasty to put all the big social/political changes between c. 1250 and c. 1100 BCE under the same umbrella.

All the sources you note below look good, though I'd also note that a lot of good work on the final LBA in Greece has happened in the last 10-15 years.

I must admit that I have some issues with Cline's general take on the LBA "Collapse": in essence, I think he takes too credulous a view of the catastrophist Near Eastern sources, and downplays -- though does not ignore -- the degree to which the evidence is compatible with a "Collapse" of -- especially -- mainland Mycenaean "civilisation" where we're fundamentally talking about a social change rather than a disaster, and also somewhat too slow to use differential archaeological visibility (plus preservation and publication biases) as a major component of the explanation. However, his work is a pretty good starting point, and certainly a Cline-led article on the "Dorian Invasion" would be much better than what we have now. This one has been on my to-do list for a while, and I'd be very happy to help out with a rewrite. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:49, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Honestly if this is your specific specialism I would much rather let you take the lead. At least with something like an outline and source list? Ifly6 (talk) 20:52, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think you could do worse than the outline above: split it into three macro-sections, one for the "Dorian invasion" qua ancient myth (that is, the Return of the Heraclidae and so on) one for the "Dorian invasion" qua historiographical explanation, and one for the current state of the field regarding the end of the Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean. A full bibliography would be gigantic, unfortunately, but a few sources you don't have so far -- I've starred the key ones I'd start with in each section.

Greek legend

*Hall, Jonathan (2013). "Dorians". In Wilson, Nigel (ed.). Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece. New York: Taylor and Francis. pp. 240f. ISBN 978-1-136-78800-0. (with biblio; also applies to the contemporary picture)
Malkin, Irad (2024). Myth and Territory in the Spartan Mediterranean. esp. ch. 1: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-009-46605-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)

Modern myth

**Gainsford, Peter (7 March 2022). "The Dorian invasion and the Nazis". Kiwi Hellenist. (start here: don't use it directly, but Gainsford knows what he's on about -- follow up what he discusses into academic sources -- plenty of bibliography here too).
*Daniel, John Franklin; Broneer, Oscar; Wade-Gery, H. T. (1948). "The Dorian Invasion: The Setting". American Journal of Archaeology. 52 (1): 107–110. JSTOR 500556. (good for setting out the contours of the orthodoxy c. 1948)
Cook, R. M. (1962). "The Dorian Invasion". Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society. 8: 16–22. JSTOR 44712965. (already in the 1960s, casting major doubts on the story, and coming to a rather unconvincing rescue-effort conclusion)
Chadwick, John (1972). The Mycenaean World. Cambridge University Press. pp. c. 172. (already disavowing the "invasion", partly on the basis of the then-fresh decipherment of Linear B, which really should have killed the whole thing).
Robertson, Noel (1980). "The Dorian Invasion and Corinthian Ritual". Classical Philology. 75 (1): 1–22. JSTOR 267822.
Stiebing, William H. (1980). "The End of the Mycenaean Age". The Biblical Archaeologist. 43 (1): 7–21. JSTOR 3209748.

Contemporary LBA studies

**Voutsaki, Sofia (2000). "Review: The Dorian Invasion". The Classical Review. 50 (1): 232–233. JSTOR 3065393. (a nice, fairly early, concise summary of the problems with the "Invasion" narrative as they appeared 25 years ago or so)
Dickinson, Oliver (2006). The Aegean from Bronze to Iron Age: Continuity and Change. New York: Taylor and Francis. ISBN 978-1-134-77871-3.
Thomas, Carol G.; Conant, Craig (2009). Citadel to City-State: The Transformation of Greece, 1200–700 B.C.E. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. pp. 20ff. ISBN 978-0-253-00325-6.
*Knapp, A. Bernard; Manning, Stuart (2016). "Crisis in Context: The End of the Late Bronze Age in the Eastern Mediterranean". American Journal of Archaeology. 120 (1): 99–149. JSTOR 10.3764/aja.120.1.0099.
*Middleton, Guy D. (2017). Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths. chapters 5–7: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-15149-9.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
Murray, Sarah C. (2017). The Collapse of the Mycenaean Economy: Imports, Trade, and Institutions 1300-700 BCE. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-18637-8.
*Middleton, Guy D., ed. (2020). Collapse and Transformation: The Late Bronze Age to Early Iron Age in the Aegean. Oxford: Oxbow Books. ISBN 978-1-78925-428-0. (** for ch. 16, but basically all the chapters need a read)
Broodbank, Cyprian (2013). The Making of the Middle Sea. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-999978-1.

Thinking on this, I might have more time and energy for this than I thought: how about we shift over to draftspace at Draft:Dorian Invasion? UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:28, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. Moved. Ifly6 (talk) 22:33, 8 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Most of these sources should now be added to the article source list. I've also added some of those cited in Cline 2024 (below) as well, preferring the newer ones. As to most of the Taylor and Francis books, I don't have access to them since they're not available on WP:LIBRARY. Ifly6 (talk) 22:09, 9 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I've got both of them: I'll add a bit from Wilson 2013 (it's got good bibliography as well) on the ancient part of the myth. Dickinson 2006 may not end up being used directly, but I'll have a look there later in the process to see if he has anything we need but can't find elsewhere. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:17, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

You should have some time to work on the text; I'm looking in to recreating that map which shows the ancient legend of the Dorians kinda chilling in central Greece for a while before deciding to couch-surf into the Peloponnese. Ifly6 (talk) 18:19, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Ah, yes -- I saw that in Gainsford's blog and thought it would be an excellent addition, to make clear just how different the Herodotus/Thucydides/Valerius Maximus picture is from the "Aryan Dorians" of C20th imagination. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 18:39, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sources

Other sources noted in Cline 2024:

R Carpenter Discontinuity in Mycenaean Civilisation (Cambridge, 1966)
J A Tainter The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge, 1988)
G Nagy “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XVII, with placeholders that stem from a conversation with Tom Palaima, starting with this question: was Herakles a Dorian?” Classical Inquiries (15 Nov 2019), …
G Nagy “Thinking comparatively about Greek mythology XVI, with a focus on Dorians led by kingly ‘sons’ of Herakles the Kingmaker” Classical Inquiries (8 Nov 2019), …
J M Hall Ethnical Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, 2019)
J M Hall Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago, 2002)
J M Hall “The Dorianisation of the Messenians” in Helots and Their Masters in Laconica and Messenia: Histories, Ideologies, Structures (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2003) ch 6
J M Hall “Dorians” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece (Routledge, 2006)
J M Hall A History of the Archaic Greek World, ca 1000–479 BC (Blackwell, 2007)
I Morris Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece (Blackwell, 2000)
T R Bryce “Change and continuity from Bronze Age to Iron: a review” in A Life Dedicated to Anatolian Prehistory: Festschrift for Jak Yakar (Gilgin Kultur Sanat Sti, 2020)
T G Palaima “Special vs normal Mycenaean: Hand 24 and writing in th service of the king?” Minos 33–34 (1998–99)
J K Papadopolous “Greece in the early Iron Age: mobility, commodities, polities, and literacy” in Cambridge History of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean (Cambridge, 2014) pp 178–95

It was honestly a pain to drag these through two layers of indirection (text → notes → reference list). Very happy that on Wikipedia is can be all done automatically with {{harvnb}}. Ifly6 (talk) 18:27, 7 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Tyrtaeus

Re Tyrtaeus, fragment 2 is there a specific collection for these? Ifly6 (talk) 17:53, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Doric Greek in LB?

Doric Greek is now detected in pre-Iron Age Linear B texts, removing any need to suppose a group of invaders introduced the dialect to the Aegean region

I don't have Cline 2024 to hand, but this sounds shifty: I think he's talking about "Special Mycenaean", a proposed dialect of Mycenaean Greek identified by Ernst Risch, which John Chadwick later suggested may have been the ancestor of the classical Doric dialect, and so could explain the division between Aolic/Ionic and Doric dialects in the classical period. Sadly, Special Mycenaean doesn't exist -- Rupert Thompson and others have shown that the proposed markers of dialect difference simply don't hold up to scrutiny. See Thompson's article here. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:23, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have the book in front of me right now ~~but I think he does claim that, citing Chadwick~~ [this was wrong]. Are there any sources which claim that Thompson's refutation of the special Mycenaean is well accepted? I don't know enough about Linear B or the evolution of archaic Greek to judge for myself. Ifly6 (talk) 20:14, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes -- see for instance Tom Palaima here (along with Thompson, one of the real masters in the field) -- the real killer, as Palaima notes (elsewhere too), is that no scribe consistently uses "normal" or "special" features, but Risch didn't have the palaeographical data necessary to see that. Anna Judson here is also very much in the Thompson camp. However, it's probably more instructive to look at the problem from the opposite perspective: that there are basically no expert sources from the last 15 years which wholeheartedly endorse that "Special Mycenaean" exists, still less that it's a prototypical form of a particular classical dialect. See for instance a very sceptical treatment here and a tentative hedge here, both stopping well short of Chadwick and acknowledging that there's really no good evidence for socially-stratified dialects in LB at all. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 20:24, 10 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I misremembered what Cline cited. Note 6 refers to both Nagy 2019 articles, citing Palaima 2002 as well as a Ruppenstein 2020. The specific passage on p 2 is For instance, linguistic specialists have suggested that some features of the Dorian dialect can already be detected in the language of the Linear B texts used by the Mycenaeans, which is an early version of Greek. Thus, the various dialects may simply have been spoken by different Greek-speaking groups who survived the great Collapse, rather than by invaders coming from farther away. Perhaps my initial reading of that passage was a bit too strong? I'm frankly not sure exactly what characterisation is appropriate. Ifly6 (talk) 04:20, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I am still very circumspect here -- Nagy is a Homerist, not a Mycenologist; Ruppenstein is similarly a dirt-and-soil archaeologist rather than a Linear B philologist/paleographer, which is what you really have to be to get into the weeds of what "Special Mycenaean" is. At the moment, I would cut, or at least comment out, until or unless we can get a stronger framing at first hand (notice how Cline passes the buck to "linguistic specialists", and cites only one). "Some features of the Dorian dialect can be detected in Linear B" is a long way from "a proto-Dorian dialect already existed in the Mycenaean period" -- after all, some features of African-American Vernacular English can be detected in Shakespeare. I think we're likely to end up closer to "there's no need to posit a migration of peoples to explain the changes from Mycenaean to Doric; they are perfectly explicable through ordinary linguistic change from what we now know to have existed in GMyc." UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 06:31, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

That last sentence version you gave seems both reasonable in terms of something that someone would claim and in balance terms. If you want to add it to the lede or something I have no objections. Ifly6 (talk) 18:00, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'd like to leave it until I've got my head around the sources and done the body -- from experience, I find it normally works better to do the body first, with all the nuance and detail, and then condense it down to write the lead. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:17, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Dorians in the classical period

I'm unsure as to the relevance of the Doric Hexapolis or Halicarnassus. The former and other passages seem to relate to just generally Dorian identity in the classical and Roman periods. The latter doesn't seem to have a clear tension set up to be an example of Dorian cities not being stereotypically Dorian (ie if Halicarnassus is Dorian a reader doesn't know why on the first glance).

Perhaps it might be worth while also to split the first section into an Return of the Heracleidae, laying out what the myth was (or something of that sort), and a Development of the myth that goes into how the myth was formed and where. Then the material relating to Sparta is most relevant; something also might be needed to draw in why the Spartans saying they were Dorian invaders was something they wanted to believe. Ifly6 (talk) 16:16, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I think we're going to need a bigger ~~boat~~ article for the mythical section -- it's already getting big enough and we haven't really gotten into the weeds of the actual myth. I'll put a redlink here for Draft:Return of the Heracleidae and start composing that section there -- can then return to the myth section here as a summary of it.

The Hexapolis is doing a couple of things:

This is the first time that anyone uses the idea of being "Dorian/Doric" in inter-polity relations, as opposed to an individual aristocratic family's aetiological narrative -- and potentially one of the first times anyone talks about being Doric at all, depending on how you date it. It's a very relevant step in the story of where this identity comes from and how it is used in ancient times.
Halicarnassus was universally considered "Doric" in ethnicity, despite not actually using the Doric dialect, which is one plank in the argument that the category, even in classical times, was pretty flexible and based more on self-conception than any empirically shared features -- which is a fairly fatal nail in the coffin of the C20th racialised conception of "Dorians" versus proto-Greeks, and also helps to demonstrate that even the ancient Greeks don't conceive of "Dorian-ness" as a particularly strong or defining characteristic, with a couple of notable (Spartan) exceptions.

UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 17:02, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the clarification edited in on Halicarnassus. I'm still somewhat confused as to the relevance of the Hexapolis. Why does it matter, in terms of the Dorian invasion and the story thereof, that six cities later decided that being Doric was important? Did they make the myth? Promote it? Ifly6 (talk) 18:00, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

It's about when/how/where the idea of "Dorians" as a people came about, and what it meant to the Greeks. The basic narrative we're sketching is ethnogenesis-in-place: that the story of a migration develops after the supposed migration took place, in all sorts of different places with no real connection, who imagine themselves to be a community for complicated reasons that have a lot to do with contemporary politics and not a lot to do with any real historical migration. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 19:19, 11 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the explanation. I think that should be made clearer; at least I don't think I picked up on it when reading through. Ifly6 (talk) 03:31, 12 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]