There are many questions about the Doric people that still do not have an answer today, starting with the fundamental question "Who were the Dorians?" of them we only know that they are a mysterious people who at an unspecified moment settled in Greece, and the aura of mystery that revolves around this people has raised quite a few collateral questions.
Were the Dorians of European or Eastern origin? Did they arrive in Greece before or after the fall of the Mycenaean Empire?
The Dorians, as well as Achaeans, Aeolians and Ionians they were one of the great ethnic groups that in ancient times settled in the Greek peninsula giving life, through a long period of transformation and reorganization of their civilizations, villages, cities, in what we know today as the Greek Polis. Of these peoples we have a lot of information related to their presence in Greece, we know their culture, their traditions, we know their history after the eighth century, but what precedes the dark ages is still shrouded in mystery today and essential questions such as who exactly were the Dorians, where did they come from and when did they arrive in Greece? I am still today without a certain answer.
In the past, here on Historicaleye we have already dealt with the origins of Greek civilization, addressing the question in a very broad general discourse, without however going into the merits of individual populations and their history and in this post I want to go to the surface, dig deeper and to deepen the discussion with a targeted focus on the people of the Dorians, one for each of the four great ethnic groups of the Greek world.
Golds in tradition.
According to tradition, the mythical origins of the Doric people date back to the time of the Gods and would be descendants of Doro, the mythical hero of the archaic tradition who according to Apollodorus of Athens , he was the eldest son of Hellen , king of Fria a city of Thessaly, and of the nymph Orseide , elder brother of the gods Aeolus and Suto, and father of Tettamo, Santippe and of all the Doric people. According to the playwright Euripides instead, Doro was the son of Suto , himself son of Apollo , and brother of Acheo , the mythical progenitor of the Achaean people.
From a historical point of view, we know little about the period in which Dorus, or who for him, settled in Greece, since the arrival of the Doric people coincides with the dark ages of the Hellenic Middle Ages. We know that before this dark phase the Mycenaean civilization controlled a large part of the peninsula until following the raids of some oriental peoples known as the peoples of the sea, the Mycenaean civilization disappeared, the cities were abandoned and for three centuries nothing was known. then, the sun returned to dawn on archaic Greece, the villages began to prosper and trade with each other, iron working and pottery production returned to use, temples, palaces and cities began to be built again, giving new life to Greece.
But who were the Dorians really? Where did they come from and when did they actually arrive in Greece?
There are two possible historiographical theories concerning the origins of the Doric civilization, on the one hand there is the migrationist theory which hypothesizes the settlement in Greece of a people ( the Doric one ) from the East, and the anti-migration theory from the other which basically excludes the hypothesis of a migration of peoples and theorizes the Doric presence in Greece already from the themes of the Mycenaean civilization, but let's go in order.
According to the theory of the great migrations, the Doric one was a mixed Greek-Illyrian civilization , coming from the Balkan area, more precisely from the regions of the middle Danube, contributing to the destruction of the Mycenaean civilization, and then expanding into the Peloponnese and Crete.
According to this theory, the Doric people were a warrior people, very primitive, followers of the cult of the mounds, of real savage barbarians, without history or culture, if compared to the more advanced Mycenaean civilization, and their penetration into Greece represented, according to this theory, the last great migratory wave of savage tribes from the north and east, who settled on the Greek peninsula and islands. This theory of "barbarian invasions of the Greek world" starts from the legend of the return of the Heraclids, the mythical sons of Heracles.
This theory was first formulated in the 19th century, but for the historian Martin Bernal , has a purely ideological character and is an attempt to bind Greek civilization to a European tradition, arguing, for its part, that the origins of Greek civilization should be sought in the East, and in the dark ages, Greece was colonized by Egyptians.
This highly controversial theory was first put forward in the book "Black Athens, the Afro-Asiatic Roots of Classical Civilization" .
The starting point of Bernal's theory are the numerous known and documented contacts of the Mycenaean civilization with the Egyptian world from which, it is hypothesized, the Mycenaeans learned the first forms of writing and the techniques of metal and ceramic processing. On the other hand, Bernal criticizes the theory that the Dorians come from the heart of Europe, because this theory has a purely ideological character, and was born in a historical context in which a process of purge and expulsion from Greek civilization of every reference and connection to Anatolian, Middle Eastern, Phoenician-Semitic and Egyptian civilizations , whose aim was to make Greek civilization something typically and exclusively European, and therefore connected to the racial theory that would see a direct connection between the peoples of northern Europe and the Greek world. In short, a theory aimed at including the Aryan people in the genesis of Greek civilization more than a theory aimed at really understanding the origins of Greek civilization.
For Bernal this theory defined as an “Aryan model” it was an ahistorical theory, derived from pseudo-scientific theories of a racist character, very fashionable between the 19th and 20th centuries in the academic world.
Obviously to question a theory it is not enough to criticize it but it is necessary to propose an alternative theory, supported by empirical evidence and sources, in the case of Bernal, the scholar observing that Greek mythology itself was rich in references to archaic founders from the East, from Phenicia and Egypt, proposed a theory that started from the recovery of the ancient model, comparing data from mythology to other historical, archaeological and linguistic sources, to trace a history of the origins of the Dorians, in his aims Bernal aimed to exclude any possible bias of arianocentric matrix , to give research a real scientific imprint. His proposal was accepted by the academic world with many reservations and perplexities, and it must be said that even today it is the source of a heated historiographical debate.
Bernal's studio led to the formulation of a theory according to which the Greeks believed that the Dorian kings were of Mycenaean and foreign origin, probably descendants of political marriages between Mycenaean notables and foreigners aimed at building political and military alliances, while the Doric people, wanting to accept the hypothesis of a Nordic origin, they came not from central Europe but, more likely, from the north-west regions of Greece, more precisely from a region known as Doride , located between Aetolia and the Locride . In support of this hypothesis, the fact that, in the classical era, in this region there were several Doric cities (Erineo, Bois, Citinio, Akyptias).
One of the strengths of Bernal's theory is that in a sense it represents a point of convergence between the migration theory and the anti-migration theory.
Bibliography and sources:
M.Bernal , Black Athens, the Afro-Asiatic roots of classical civilization , https://amzn.to/2OUiwfm
C. Orrieux, P. Schmitt Pantel , Greek History , https://amzn.to/2PoAqq7
C. Mossé, A Schnapp Gourbeillon , History of the Greeks, from its origins to the Roman conquest , https://amzn.to/2z2Ud48