Did the Dorian Invasion Really Happen?

If you read any book about ancient Greek history written before the 1970s, there’s one event that will probably be discussed at length that any book about Greek history written after the 2000s will probably tell you never even happened at all. The event I’m talking about is, of course, the so-called “Dorian invasion.” The story goes that, in around the twelfth century BCE, a warrior people from the north known as the Dorians invaded mainland Greece and conquered large areas of it, replacing the peoples who had been there before and eventually becoming the ancestors of many Greeks, including the Spartans.

This narrative of the Dorian invasion was largely cobbled together in the nineteenth century by German philologists using vague and contradictory tales recorded in various ancient Greek sources as evidence in order to explain the distribution of Classical Greek dialects. In the twentieth century, white supremacists and Nazis exploited the narrative in order to portray northern Europeans as the true Greeks while denying the Greekness of actual Greek people. In the mid-twentieth century, however, scholars began to question the evidence supporting the narrative and, by the end of the twentieth century, most scholars came to accept that the Dorian invasion was a figment of the scholarly imagination.

A little background history

Sometime around 1600 BCE or thereabouts, the Mycenaean civilization arose in mainland Greece. The people of this civilization spoke an archaic form of the Greek language and wrote using a writing system known as Linear B. They built large cities with fortified citadels. Some of the most important Mycenaean citadels were Mycenae, Pylos, Tiryns, Thebes, Athens, Orchomenos, and Gla.

Then, sometime around 1200 BCE or thereabouts, the Mycenaean civilization collapsed. Most of the major Mycenaean citadels—including the great citadel of Mycenae itself—were burned. At least one clay tablet with writing on it in Linear B that was recovered from the burned archive in the ruins of Pylos mentions the people of the city preparing their defenses. Unfortunately, the tablet does not say who these defenses were meant to protect against.

Linear B writing was totally forgotten in Greece and, for roughly four hundred years, we have absolutely no written records. In around the eighth century BCE, the Greeks adopted the Phoenician alphabet, adapting it to their own language to create the Greek alphabet. It is after this point that we start to get written records again.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a clay tablet with writing on it in Linear B, recovered from the archive of the Mycenaean city of Pylos

By the time of our earliest written records, there were several different dialects of the Greek language spoken throughout Greece. In the southern and western Peloponnesos—the region of Greece where many of the most important Mycenaean cities had been located—people spoke the Doric dialect, which is closely related to the dialects of Greek that were spoken in northwest Greece.

Meanwhile, people in the region of Achaia in the northern Peloponnesos spoke the Achaian dialect, which was similar to the Doric dialect. People throughout most of the Aegean Islands and along most of the west coast of Asia Minor south of Smyrna spoke the Ionic dialect, which was markedly different from the Doric dialect in many ways. People in the region of Attike around Athens spoke the Attic dialect, which is closely related to the Ionic dialect.

Somewhat bizarrely, the dialect that is most closely related to Mycenaean Greek is Arkado-Kypriot, which was spoken in the region of Arkadia in the central Peloponnesos, which was mountainous, landlocked, and sparsely populated, but also on the island of Kypros, which is located over a thousand kilometers away in the eastern Mediterranean off the southern coast of Asia Minor.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the dialects that were spoken in Greece during the Classical Period

Early poetic sources about the myth of the return of the Herakleidai

The ancient Greeks regarded native speakers of the Doric dialect, the Ionic dialect, the Achaian dialect, the Arkado-Kypriot dialect, and so forth as distinct ethno-linguistic groups and they told many different stories about how these groups supposedly originated.

One of the main stories the ancient Greeks told that pertains to the Dorians was the myth of the return of the Herakleidai (i.e., the descendants of Herakles). The oldest surviving source that mentions this myth is the ancient Spartan lyric poet Tyrtaios, who lived in around the middle of the seventh century BCE. As I discuss in this article I wrote in January 2021, Tyrtaios is one of the very few ancient Spartan authors who have any surviving works. Tyrtaios’s Fragment 2 has survived to the present day through Papyrus Oxyrhynchus xxxviii.2824, a papyrus fragment discovered in Egypt dating to the late first or early second century CE. The fragment reads as follows, as translated by M. L. West:

“. . . let us obey [the kings, who are]
nearer the line [of the gods].
For fair-crowned Hera’s husband, Kronos’s son himself,
Zeus, gave the sons of Herakles this state.
Under their lead we left windswept Erineos
and came to Pelops’ broad sea-circled land.”

The basic outline of the myth that Tyrtaios is referencing here can be gleaned from later sources. The myth holds that Herakles was the rightful heir to the throne of the kingdom of Tiryns, which ruled the region of the Argolid in the Peloponnesos. The goddess Hera, however, ensured that the throne passed to Herakles’s cousin Eurystheus instead. After Herakles died, Eurystheus forced his descendants—who are known as the Herakleidai—to flee from the Peloponnesos.

The Herakleidai found refuge in the village of Trikorythos in Attike. When Eurystheus tried to attack Trikorythos, the Herakleidai and the Athenians defeated his army and Eurystheus himself died in the battle. The Herakleidai thereafter tried to return to the Peloponnesos to reclaim their rightful territories and possessions, but, following the death of Eurystheus, Atreus had claimed the title of king of Mykenai. He confronted the Herakleidai with his armies at the isthmus of Corinth.

To prevent outright war, the Herakleidai agreed to hold a single combat between their leader, Hyllos, and Echemos, the king of Tegea. Echemos killed Hyllos and, as a result, the remaining Herakleidai promised that they would not return to the Peloponnesos for either fifty or a hundred years (depending on the version of the story). The Herakleidai settled for the intervening time in the region of Histiaiotis in Thessalia in northern Greece. Tyrtaios’s poem seems to more specifically say that they settled in a place called Erineos.

When the time of the Herakleidai’s exile came to an end, the third-generation descendants of the ones who had taken part in the failed invasion led by Hyllos returned to the Peloponnesos and conquered it, dividing up the lands of the Peloponnesos among themselves.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a Roman marble statue unearthed in Tivoli, Italy, depicting the hero Herakles carrying his infant son Telephos (who was one of the Herakleidai), dating to the first or second century CE, based on a Greek original dating to the fourth century BCE

Herodotos and the myth of the Dorian wandering

The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BCE) wrote two major passages in his book The Histories that some scholars have interpreted as describing the supposed Dorian invasion. These interpretations, however, are highly problematic, especially since the two passages are probably not even describing the same event at all.

First, Herodotos writes in his Histories 1.56 that the Dorians had not always lived in the Peloponnesos, but had moved around and lived in various parts of Greece before eventually settling in their current home. Here is what he says, as translated by A. D. Godley:

“He found by inquiry that the chief peoples were the Lakedaimonians among those of Doric, and the Athenians among those of Ionic stock. These races, Ionian and Dorian, were the foremost in ancient time, the first a Pelasgian and the second a Hellenic people. The Pelasgian race has never yet left its home; the Hellenic has wandered often and far. For in the days of king Deukalion it inhabited the land of Phthia, then the country called Histiaian, under Ossa and Olympos, in the time of Doros son of Hellen; driven from this Histiaian country by the Kadmeans, it settled about Pindos in the territory called Makedonian; from there again it migrated to Dryopia, and at last came from Dryopia into the Peloponnese, where it took the name of Dorian.”

In this passage, Herodotos is talking about how the Dorians supposedly migrated from northern Greece into the Peloponnesos. His account, however, is extremely vague. He is probably imagining some kind of invasion, since migrations in the ancient world usually involved some element of violent invasion. There is nothing in Herodotos’s account, however, to suggest that he believed that the Dorians exterminated, drove out, or totally replaced the people who were living in the Peloponnesos before them.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble bust of the Greek historian Herodotos, based on an earlier Greek original

Herodotos and the return of the Herakleidai

Later, in his Histories 9.26, Herodotos references the myth of the return of the Herakleidai. He portrays a group of Tegeans as boasting about how their king Echemos is said to have slain Hyllos during the Herakleidai’s first attempt to return to the Peloponnesos shortly after the death of Eurystheus. Here is what he portrays them as saying (mostly in Godley’s translation, but with a few minor edits of my own):

“We, among all the allies, have always had the right to hold this position in all campaigns, of the united Peloponnesian armies, both ancient and recent, ever since that time when the Herakleidai after Eurystheus’ death attempted to return to the Peloponnese. We gained because of the achievement which we will relate.”

“When we marched out at the Isthmus for war, along with the Achaians and Ionians who then dwelt in the Peloponnese, and encamped opposite the returning exiles, then (it is said) Hyllos announced that army should not be risked against army in battle, but that that champion in the host of the Peloponnesians whom they chose as their best should fight with him in single combat on agreed conditions.”

“The Peloponnesians, resolving that this should be so, swore a compact that if Hyllos should overcome the Peloponnesian champion, the Herakleidai should return to the land of their fathers, but if he were himself beaten, then the Herakleidai should depart and lead their army away, not attempting to return to the Peloponnese until a hundred years had passed.”

“Then our general and king Echemos, son of Phegeus’ son Eeropos, volunteered and was chosen out of all the allied host; he fought that duel and killed Hyllos. It was for that feat of arms that the Peloponnesians granted us this in addition to other great privileges which we have never ceased to possess, namely that in all united campaigns we should always lead the army’s second wing.”

In response to this, in the next chapter (i.e., Histories 9.27), Herodotos portrays a group of Athenians as boasting of how they helped the Herakleidai to defeat Eurystheus and his armies. They declare, once again mostly in Godley’s translation:

“These Tegeans say that they killed the leader of the Herakleidai at the Isthmus. Now when those same Herakleidai had been rejected by every Greek people to whom they resorted to escape the tyranny of the Mycenaeans, we alone received them. With them, we broke the pride of Eurystheus and vanquished those who, at the time, held the Peloponnesos [τοὺς τότε ἔχοντας Πελοπόννησον].”

In this passage, Herodotos says nothing about migration or population change at all. For Herodotos, the Dorian migration and the return of the Herakleidai seem to be two entirely separate events. The Dorians were a people who originally lived in the north of Greece who migrated into the south, while the Herakleidai were a faction from the Peloponnesos who were exiled and later returned in order to reclaim their ancestral territories.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Side A of an Attic red-figure kylix painted by Ottos sometime around 510 BCE depicting King Eurystheus, whom the Herakleidai killed with the aid of the Athenians, hiding in a pithos as Herakles presents him with the Erymanthian boar

Thoukydides and the Dorians

There are other ancient Greek sources from later periods that some scholars have also interpreted as describing the supposed Dorian invasion. The Athenian historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c.  400 BCE) states in his Histories of the Peloponnesian War 1.12 that the period after the Trojan War was one of great chaos and instability and that there were many invasions and revolutions during this time. He briefly mentions that this was the time when the “Dorians and Herakleidai became masters of the Peloponnesos.” He writes, as translated by Richard Crawley:

“Even after the Trojan war, Hellas was still engaged in removing and settling, and thus could not attain to the quiet which must precede growth. The late return of the Hellenes from Ilion caused many revolutions, and factions ensued almost everywhere; and it was the citizens thus driven into exile who founded the cities. Sixty years after the capture of Ilion, the modern Boiotians were driven out of Arne by the Thessalians, and settled in the present Boiotia, the former Kadmeis; though there was a division of them there before, some of whom joined the expedition to Ilion.”

“Twenty years later, the Dorians and the Herakleidai became masters of Peloponnesos; so that much had to be done and many years had to elapse before Hellas could attain to a durable tranquillity undisturbed by removals, and could begin to send out colonies, as Athens did to Ionia and most of the islands, and the Peloponnesians to most of Italy and Sicily and some places in the rest of Hellas. All these places were founded subsequently to the war with Troy.”

Here, Thoukydides explicitly identifies the Herakleidai who killed Eurystheus and seized control of the Peloponnesos as “Dorians.” This represents an apparent conflation of two myths that seem to have originally been separate.

As you may recall, the Herakleidai were said to have originally come from the Argolid, which is in the Peloponnesos. When the Herakleidai returned to conquer the Peloponnesos, they were not a new and foreign people coming down from the north, but rather a faction who had been exiled from the Peloponnesos itself who were returning to reclaim power from a rival faction.

Unlike Herodotos, Thoukydides does not say that the Dorians were foreigners in the Peloponnesos. The natural assumption based on what Thoukydides himself tells us is that the Dorians are simply the Herakleidai; they originally came from the Peloponnesos, were exiled, and later returned to reclaim power.

ABOVE: Third-century CE Roman mosaic of the ancient Athenian historian Thoukydides, based on traditional iconography

Plato and the Dorians

The Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 429 – c. 347 BCE) portrays an unnamed “Athenian stranger” in his Laws 682d-e as telling a story about the origins of the Dorians that differs drastically from the stories told by Herodotos and Thoukydides.

According to Plato, when the Greek soldiers returned from the Trojan War, they found that the young men in their home country had turned against them, so they fled, abandoning their former lands and adopting the new name “Dorians.” He writes, as translated by R. G. Bury:

“Now during this period of ten years, while the siege lasted, the affairs of each of the besiegers at home suffered much owing to the seditious conduct of the young men. For when the soldiers returned to their own cities and homes, these young people did not receive them fittingly and justly, but in such a way that there ensued a vast number of cases of death, slaughter, and exile. So they, being again driven out, migrated by sea; and because Dorieus was the man who then banded together the exiles, they got the new name of ‘Dorians,’ instead of ‘Achaeans.’”

Pay close attention to the discrepancies here. Herodotos says that the Dorians were originally an ethnic group in the region of Phthia in Thessalia in northern mainland Greece. Plato, on the other hand, makes it sound like the Dorians were actually soldiers from various cities, mostly in southern Greece, who fought at Troy and, when they returned home, discovered that they were not welcome. Where Herodotos gives the Dorians a single origin, Plato implies that they were actually of diverse backgrounds.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a Roman marble portrait head of Plato, based on an earlier Greek original

Pausanias and the Dorians

Over four hundred years after Plato’s death, at a time when Greece was ruled by the Roman Empire, the Greek travel writer Pausanias (lived c. 110 – c. 180 CE), wrote another account of the Dorians in his book The Guide to Greece 5.1.1. Pausanias doesn’t say precisely where the Dorians supposedly came from. Instead, he simply tells us that they weren’t originally from the Peloponnesos and that, when they arrived in the Peloponnesos, they forced the native Achaians to flee. He writes, as translated by W. H. S. Jones and H. A. Ormerod:

“Of the races dwelling in Peloponnesos the Arkadians and Achaians are aborigines. When the Achaians were driven from their land by the Dorians, they did not retire from Peloponnesos, but they cast out the Ionians and occupied the land called of old Aigialos, but now called Achaian from these Achaians. The Arkadians, on the other hand, have from the beginning to to the present time continued in possession of their own country.”

As far as I am currently aware, Pausanias is the earliest author to explicitly say that the Dorians as a collective group arrived as foreign invaders in the Peloponnesos and violently drove out the original inhabitants en masse. Pausanias’s account, however, is extremely late, since it was written well over a thousand years after the time when the Dorian invasion is traditionally said to have taken place. Moreover, he doesn’t give us very many details.

ABOVE: First page of an illustrated manuscript of Pausanias’s Guide to Greece from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana

The birth of the myth of the Dorian invasion

In the nineteenth century, western European scholars began trying to tie all these fragmentary and contradictory stories about the Dorians together to create a single, coherent narrative. The scholars in question were very familiar with stories of “barbarous” Germanic peoples from northern Europe migrating south into the Roman Empire in late antiquity. The notion of “barbarous,” warlike northerners migrating south to conquer the civilized, effete southerners was therefore very much on scholars’ minds.

At the time, western Europeans were also in the midst of conquering and colonizing countries all over the world. In the Americas, people of mostly western European descent were in the midst of killing and driving out Indigenous peoples so that people of mostly western European descent could settle on their lands. Scholars therefore tended to think of migrations in terms of population replacement—imagining that it was normal whenever a new group moved into an area for them to completely wipe out the peoples who were living there before.

In 1824, the German philologist Karl Otfried Müller (lived 1797 – 1840) published a book titled Die Dorier (i.e., The Dorians), in which he argued that all the classical Hellenic ethno-linguistic groups originated in northern Greece and migrated into southern Greece at different times, thereby resulting in the familiar distribution of the different dialects of the Greek language that existed during the Classical Period.

According to Müller, the Achaians were the first group to migrate south. They supposedly conquered most of southern Greece and founded the great civilization described in the Homeric epics. Then, the Ionians migrated south and conquered some areas, leaving Achaian population pockets behind in other areas. Finally, the Dorians migrated south and conquered some areas, leaving Achaian and Ionian population pockets in other areas.

ABOVE: Portrait of the German scholar Karl Otfried Müller painted in 1838

Fallmerayer’s hypothesis that modern Greeks are not really Greeks

Around the same time that Müller was writing, another German writer named Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (lived 1790 – 1861) began promoting his own hypothesis. Fallmerayer’s hypothesis is not strictly a part of the myth of the Dorian invasion, but it is worth discussing here because it is often tied in with it in later sources.

Like many northwestern Europeans at the time, Fallmerayer was convinced that the ancient Greeks must have physically looked like conventionally “beautiful” northern European people—tall and slender, with straight blond hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and narrow facial features. When he traveled to Greece and found that most Greek people were actually black-haired, dark-eyed, relatively dark-complexioned, and not generally extraordinarily beautiful according to northern European standards at the time, he was horrified.

Fallmerayer refused to believe that the ancient Greeks could have looked like modern Greeks, so he hypothesized that modern Greeks are not, in fact, real Greeks at all, but rather barbarous half-breeds born from the race-mixing of various Arvanitic, Vlachic, Slavic, and Turkish peoples. In 1830, Fallmerayer published his book Geschichte der Halbinsel Morea während des Mittelalters. He declares on page three of the introduction to the first volume:

“Das Geschlecht der Hellenen ist in Europa ausgerottet. Schönheit der Körper, Sonnenflug des Geistes, Ebenmaß und Einfalt der Sitte, Kunst, Rennbahn, Stadt, Dorf, Säulenpracht und Tempel, ja sogar der Name ist von der Oberfläche des griechischen Kontinents verschwunden…. auch nicht ein Tropfen echten und ungemischten Hellenenblutes in den Adern der christlichen Bevölkerung des heutigen Griechenlands fließet.”

Here is my own literal English translation of this passage:

“The race of Hellenes has been totally exterminated in Europe. [Their] beauty of the body, brilliance of the spirit, harmony and simplicity of custom, art, competition, city, village, majestic columns and temples, yes even their name is vanished from the face of the Greek continent… Not even a drop of true and unmixed Hellenic blood flows through the veins of the Christian population of present-day Greece.”

I discuss the reasons why Fallmerayer’s claims are wrong and racist in this article I published in February 2020. Unfortunately, despite their falsity, Fallmerayer’s arguments have had a significant influence on later white supremacist writings and continue to exert some disturbing influence even today.

ABOVE: Photograph taken in around 1860 of the German author Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, who is known for promoting the hypothesis that modern Greeks have absolutely no relation to the ancient Greeks

A revised “Dorian invasion” model

Over the course of the nineteenth century, it became increasingly apparent to philologists that the Greek language belongs to the Indo-European language family and that it is derived from Proto-Indo-European—a language that was almost certainly not spoken in Greece. This led many philologists to increasingly believe that the Greek language—and, by extension, the Greek people—must have originated someplace entirely outside of Greece.

In 1909, the German philologist Paul Kretschmer (lived 1866 – 1956) published a paper titled “Zur Geschichte der griechischen Dialekte” in the journal Glotta. In this paper, Kretschmer significantly revised Karl Otfried Müller’s hypothesis about the origins of ancient Greek dialects, arguing that the classical Hellenic ethno-linguistic groups did not originate in Greece at all, but rather somewhere along the way between the Proto-Indo-European homeland in central Asia and Greece.

According to Kretschmer, the Pelasgians (i.e., the supposed original indigenous inhabitants of Greece) were not Hellenes, but rather speakers of a non-Indo-European language. Kretschmer therefore maintained that the Hellenic tribes came to Greece through a series of three separate invasions over the course of the second millennium BCE.

Kretschmer argued that, first, the Ionians came to Greece sometime around 2000 BCE. Next, he argued that the Achaians came to Greece sometime around 1600 BCE. Finally, he argued that the Dorians came to Greece in an invasion around 1200 BCE. Kretschmer maintained that, with each of these supposed invasions, the population of Greece gradually became more Hellenic and less Pelasgian.

ABOVE: Portrait of the German philologist Paul Kretschmer, who promoted a hypothesis that there were no less than three separate Hellenic invasions of Greece

Madison Grant and the hypothesis of the Dorians as “Nordic”

All the hypotheses about the origins of the Greeks proposed by western European scholars in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were implicitly (if not explicitly) motivated by some form of racial ideology. It was not long before popular white supremacist authors took these hypotheses and used them to promote racist agendas.

The myth of the Dorian invasion was particularly seized upon by Madison Grant (lived 1865 – 1937), an American author, eugenicist, and professional advocate of so-called “scientific racism.” In 1916, Grant published his book The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History, which is possibly the most influential work of white supremacist propaganda ever written.

In a chapter titled “The Mediterranean Race,” Grant gives a description of his own eclectic version of the so-called “Dorian invasion.” According to Grant, the Achaians originally entered Greece as “Nordic” invaders from northwestern Europe, but they interbred with the native Pelasgians, whom he claims belonged to the “Mediterranean race” and, as a result of this supposed “race mixture,” their civilization declined and became degenerate.

Then, he asserts, in the twelfth century BCE, new groups of “Nordic” invaders came to Greece from northwestern Europe—the Dorians, Aiolians, and Ionians—replenishing the supposed “purity” of Hellenic blood. He writes:

“About the time that the Achæans and the Pelasgians began to amalgamate, new hordes of Nordic barbarians, collectively called Hellenes, entered from the northern mountains and destroyed this old Homeric-Mycenæan civilization. This Dorian invasion took place a little before 1100 B.C. and brought in the three main Nordic strains of Greece, the Dorian, the Æolian and the Ionian groups, which remain more or less distinct and separate throughout Greek history. It is more than probable that this invasion or swarming of Nordics into Greece was part of the same general racial upheaval that brought the Umbrians and Oscans into Italy.”

“Long years of intense and bitter conflict follow between the old population and the newcomers, and when the turmoil of this revolution settled down, classic Greece appears. What was left of the Achæans retired to the northern Peloponnesus, and the survivors of the early Pelasgian population remained in Messenia serving as helots their Spartan masters. The Greek colonies in Asia Minor were founded by refugees fleeing from these Dorian invaders.”

Grant goes on to explain the remaining history of ancient Greece according to white supremacist reasoning, claiming that the Classical Greeks were blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned “Nordics” and that this was how they managed to achieve so many great things.

Grant asserts that ancient Greek civilization ultimately declined as a result of “race-mixing” between the “Nordic” Hellenes and the “Mediterranean” Pelasgians. He further incorporates a version of Fallmerayer’s hypothesis of “racial discontinuity,” claiming that modern Greeks—who, as I have previously mentioned, generally tend to have dark hair, dark eyes, and dark complexions—are not “pure” Greeks, but rather degenerate half-breeds who scarcely even resemble their ancient ancestors. He writes:

“It is not possible to-day to find in purity the physical traits of the ancient race in the Greek-speaking lands and islands, and it is chiefly among the pure Nordics of Anglo-Norman type that there occur those smooth and regular classic features, especially the brow and nose lines, that were the delight of the sculptors of Hellas.”

In other words, according to Madison Grant, the true Greeks are not native Greek people, but rather English people.

Basically everything Madison Grant says about the ancient Greeks is nothing but racist nonsense cooked up in Grant’s own racist imagination on the basis of absolutely no evidence whatsoever. The so-called “Nordic” and “Mediterranean” races are constructs invented by white supremacists like Grant with no meaningful basis in biological reality. There’s also very little evidence to support the hypothesis that Greek people came to Greece through any kind of invasions.

Even if Greek people did come to Greece through invasions, there’s no evidence to suggest that the earliest Greeks would have physically resembled the stereotype that Grant gives for what “Nordic” people are supposed to look like. Moreover, the homeland of the original speakers of the Proto-Indo-European language is generally agreed to have been in the steppes north of the Black Sea, not northwestern Europe.

Since the “Nordic” and “Mediterranean” races have no meaningful biological basis, there obviously couldn’t be any kind of biologically meaningful “race-mixing” between them and there’s certainly no scientific evidence to suggest that such imaginary “race-mixing” would have been harmful.

ABOVE: Photograph of the white supremacist author Madison Grant, who used the myth of the Dorian invasion in his book The Passing of the Great Race to argue that the ancient Greeks were members of the supposed “Nordic race”

The Nazis and the Dorians

Unfortunately, despite the fact that almost nothing Madison Grant says in The Passing of the Great Race is rooted in any kind of biological or historical reality, it is difficult to overstate just how wildly influential the book became on later white supremacist movements. Notably, Adolf Hitler read the book and quoted it frequently in his speeches. Indeed, he loved it so much that, in the early 1930s, he personally wrote an adoring fan letter to Grant in which he unreservedly declared that The Passing of the Great Race was his “Bible.”

The Nazis consciously incorporated Grant’s ideas into their official ideology. Textbooks used in German schools during the Nazi Era repeat Grant’s claims that, in the twelfth century BCE, “Nordic” invaders from northwestern Europe flooded into Greece. They assert that these “Nordic” invaders became the Classical Greeks, but, eventually, as a result of “race mixture,” their blood became sullied and impure, resulting in the supposed downfall of classical civilization.

The belief that modern Greeks are somehow not real Greeks and that Greece rightfully belongs to blond-haired, blue-eyed, pale-skinned “Nordic” people was common among Nazi officials and Nazi soldiers. Moreover, the Nazis actively used this very delusion to justify the many appalling war crimes that they committed against Greek people during World War II. The Nazis effectively saw themselves as latter-day “Dorians” and believed that the atrocities they committed against native Greek people were simply things that they needed to do in order to “reclaim” Greece in the name of the so-called “Nordic race.”

ABOVE: Map from a German textbook published in 1939 showing the supposed path of the “Dorian migration” from northern Europe to Greece

Challenging the myth of the Dorian invasion

Despite the pride of place that the idea of the Dorian invasion took in white supremacist retellings of ancient Greek history, by the mid-twentieth century, classics scholars found themselves increasingly questioning the idea. The literary evidence to support the hypothesis was extremely shaky and the archaeological evidence was flat-out nonexistent.

By the 1950s, archaeologists had been desperately searching for decades to find evidence to support the hypothesis of the Dorian invasion, but, despite all their searching, they came up with absolutely nothing. Indeed, in many cases, the archaeological evidence seemed to actively go against the theory of a Dorian invasion.

A major turning point in the study of Bronze Age Greece came on 1 July 1952, when an English amateur philologist named Michael Ventris announced on BBC radio that he had discovered that Linear B, the Mycenaean writing system, was a form of Greek. John Chadwick, a professor of the classics at the University of Cambridge, soon began collaborating with Ventris to decipher individual Linear B texts. In 1956, Ventris and Chadwick coauthored a book titled Documents in Mycenaean Greek.

Although Ventris died shortly before the book was published, Chadwick survived and, later in his career, became the leading critic of the “Dorian invasion” theory of Greek philology. In 1976, Chadwick published a paper titled “Who Were the Dorians?” in the journal Parola del Passato. In this paper, Chadwick radically and convincingly argues that there were no “Hellenic invasions” whatsoever.

Instead, Chadwick argues that the speakers of an Indo-European language ancestral to Greek probably arrived in Greece in around the late third millennium BCE. Over time, these people developed the Greek language and Greek culture inside Greece itself, making Greece the original Greek homeland. He maintains that the Greek ethno-linguistic groups known to have existed in the Classical Period did not come to Greece through a series of separate “invasions,” but rather emerged in Greece itself as a result of dialectal and cultural variations tied to region and status.

Regarding the Dorians, Chadwick argues that they did not come to Greece as invaders from the outside. Instead, he argues that speakers of Doric dialects of the Greek language made up the lower classes of the Peloponnesos during the Mycenaean Era. He holds that, in around the twelfth century BCE, Doric-speakers who were already living in the Peloponnesos rose up and destroyed the Mycenaean citadels. In other words, according to Chadwick, there was never a Dorian invasion from the outside, but rather a Dorian uprising from the inside.

Not all scholars necessarily endorse Chadwick’s hypothesis of a Dorian uprising, but his arguments played a significant role in disrupting the formerly accepted hypothesis of multiple Greek invasions.

ABOVE: Photograph of the classics scholar John Chadwick from his biography on the University of Cambridge website

Conclusion

Nowadays, there are very few classicists who genuinely believe that there was ever a Dorian invasion. Rebecca Futo Kennedy, a professor of the classics at Denison University, describes the story of the Dorian invasion as “long debunked” in an article titled “The Dorian Invasion and ‘White’ Ownership of Classical Greece?” which she published on her blog “Classics at the Intersections” in January 2018.

Jonathan M. Hall, a professor of classics and history at the University of Chicago, devotes an entire section of the second edition of his book A History of the Archaic Greek World: ca. 1200-479 BCE to an in-depth analysis of the historicity of the Dorian invasion. He ultimately concludes on page fifty-one:

“There can be little doubt that the collapse of the political and economic system centered on the Mycenaean palaces provoked a climate of instability and insecurity and that some people – whether for reasons of safety or economic necessity – decided to abandon their former homes and seek a living elsewhere. But it is also clear that the developed literary narrative for the Dorian migration is the end product of a cumulative synthesis of originally independent traditions. As such, it need not reflect a dim and hazy memory of a genuine single movement of a population from north to south, even if it captures the general instability and mobility of this period. Rather, it seeks to establish a common identity for a plethora of communities whose pedigrees were undoubtedly far from uniform in origin.”

Even those scholars who do still believe that there was a Dorian invasion of some kind admit that there is very little evidence to support this belief. Robert Garland, an emeritus professor from Colgate University who believes that there probably was some kind of Dorian invasion, makes a rather startling admission in his book Ancient Greece: Everyday Life in the Birthplace of Western Civilization, which was published by Sterling in 2008. He writes on page four:

“The archaeological evidence for the invasion is, however, negligible. No distinctively Dorian pottery has come to light, and the only artifacts that may be attributed to an invader are an iron sword and a long bronze dress pin. It has been suggested by way of explanation that the Dorians were a pastoral people whose lifestyle did not encourage the production of pottery and other artifacts.”

This is, of course, a rather clumsy attempt at rationalization. There isn’t really any good reason to think that the sword and dress pin mentioned by Garland were actually left by invaders.

Furthermore, the supposition that maybe the Dorians haven’t left any trace in the archaeological record because they were a pastoral people doesn’t really hold up, since if the Dorians were really so primitive as to leave no archaeological traces behind, it’s hard to fathom how they could have conquered the Mycenaeans, who did, after all, have enormous highly fortified stone citadels, bronze armor, and bronze weapons.

The reasonable conclusion here seems to be that Dorian invasion simply did not happen. It’s a story that hangs on because of its prominence in older works about Greek history and in contemporary white supremacist propaganda, but isn’t actually based on any kind of solid evidence.