The Dorian Succession
According to Google AI, the Dorian invasion is traditionally dated to circa 1100 BCE, aligning with the end of the Late Bronze Age and the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization. Many modern historians believe this movement of northern Greek tribes actually occurred in waves spanning roughly 1200 to 1100 BCE, triggering the Greek Dark Ages.
As exemplified in the Wikipedia article linked above, academics continue to bicker over the details and even the historicity of this migration, yet it seems impossible to find any account in tradition or in modern research that does not return in broad arcs to the geographical grounding in the traditional account of the Greeks. Nor can I justify any doubt whatsoever that Heracles was a real person. I would date him all the way back to the late Pleistocene or early Holocene epoch in keeping with a literal reading of Plato, in which the Strait of Gibraltar is already called the Pillars of Heracles when “This power [the Atlantians] came forth out of the Atlantic Ocean” circa 9,400 BCE. Heracles was a buff dude of legendary renown, people. Get over it. He survives in the sort of mystical legends that the uneducated survivors of natural catastrophes would preserve over many generations in campfire talk before anyone had the wherewithal to write them down. His relation to the Spartans is a matter of legend in such accounts, and I don’t see how the veracity of that claim is of any historical value regardless of the conclusions we draw after investigating it. Maybe Heracles was a Dorian, maybe he wasn’t. It seems likely that he was. That’s my bet. Besides, the more trusted modern versions of these narratives pick up with the Spartans as the slaveowners of the Helots, who are generally associated with the defeated Mycenaeans. We can plainly see the cat in factually accessible history and we can plainly see the canary. We see oceans to the south and far-ranging continents to the north. It’s not hard to figure out which direction the Dorians arrived from.
This migration is treated here because some clarification was needed in endnote 63 of the 3rd Edition of The Way of Ages in which geographical influences on cultural stability and longevity are discussed. As illustrated in the animation above, while the Dorian culture both supplanted and enslaved the Mycenaean culture in the Peloponnese, the Mycenaeans were succeeded by three main cultures: The Dorian culture represented by the Spartans, the Ionian culture represented by the Athenians and the Aeolean culture which occupied Aetolia, Locris, Corinth, Elis and Messenia. The Aeoleans of Thessaly fled the influx of Dorians to Lesbos and what then became Aeolis in Asia Minor. These points were clarified in the 4th Edition of The Way of Ages.
