Dorians

Dorians, Dorian Invasion.According to Greek myth, it had been the will of Zeus that Heraclēs should rule over the country of Perseus at Mycenae and Tiryns. After Heracles' death, however, these cities came into the hands of the descendants of Pelops, and at the time of the Trojan War Agamemnon ruled at Mycenae. The Greeks believed as historical fact the legend that two generations after the Trojan War, c.1100 BC, there was an invasion into Greece from the north by a new, Greek-speaking people known as Dorians (for the name see DORUS). They accompanied the sons of the hero Heracles (see AEGIMIUS), who were returning to the Peloponnese to claim their father's inheritance, first the city of Tiryns and then, by conquest, the whole Peloponnese. By this legend many historical facts were explained and the Dorian invasion may also account for a historical fact of which the Greeks themselves were scarcely aware, that the cities and civilization of Mycenaean Greece were destroyed in successive attacks in the twelfth century BC, to be succeeded by migrations overseas to the coast of Asia Minor from c.1050 to 950, and by poverty and deprivation in Greece itself. There is no archaeological evidence for the identity of the people who destroyed the Mycenaean culture, and no positive signs of an influx of new people. This makes sense if the invaders were of related Greek stock from the fringes of the Mycenaean world. It has also been argued that there was in fact no Dorian invasion, that different groups of Greeks had been present in Greece since the beginning of Mycenaean culture, and that the destructions were caused by spasmodic raids or local uprisings of a suppressed population. However, a strong sense of discontinuity following the destructions as well as the legends themselves tell in favour of the essential historicity of the Dorian invasion.