The Dorian invasion (or Dorian migration) is an ancient Greek myth and discredited archaeological hypothesis describing the movement of the Dorian people into the Peloponnese region of Greece. According to the myth, the Dorians migrated from central Greece shortly after the Trojan War and populated most of the southern Peloponnese, particularly the regions of Laconia, Messenia and the Argolid. The myth became combined with that of the Return of the Heracleidae, such that the descendants of the hero Heracles were imagined to have led the Dorians and founded the ruling lines of several Dorian cities, including Sparta. The myth probably emerged during the Early Iron Age as part of a process of ethnogenesis between cities claiming Dorian ancestry. In the fifth century BCE, it gained greater prominence through its use to promote unity among Sparta's Peloponnesian allies, and to differentiate Sparta from its rival Athens, believed to be of Ionian heritage.
In 1824, the German antiquarian Karl Otfried Müller published The Dorians, in which he argued that the Dorians were a northern, Indo-European people who invaded Greece and subjugated the Peloponnese. Müller's views gained general scholarly acceptance throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. The Dorians were credited with introducing new forms of material culture and destroying the Mycenaean palaces, though this created conflicts between the interpretative narrative, the mythological tradition, and the archaeological evidence. The Dorians also became associated with the Sea Peoples, believed to have destroyed several Near Eastern sites at the end of the Bronze Age. During the first half of the twentieth century, scholars attempted to find archaeological and linguistic evidence of the Dorian invasion and to trace its route, though these efforts proved largely unsuccessful.
Müller and his successors, such as Ernst Curtius, considered the Dorians to have been racially and culturally superior to the peoples whom they replaced. German nationalists, following Hermann Müller, portrayed the Dorians as belonging to a Nordic race, and so being fundamentally Germanic in character. The Dorian invasion became connected with the romanticisation of ancient Sparta, and was used to assert a special connection between Prussia and ancient Greece. During the Nazi period, the association between the Dorians and the Aryans became a matter of orthodoxy, and high-ranking Nazis, including Adolf Hitler, integrated the Dorian invasion into their pseudoscientific theories of race. Racialised views of the Dorians remained common in scholarship, both inside and outside Germany, until the 1960s.
Although Müller's narrative of the Dorian invasion received early challenges, particularly from Karl Julius Beloch in 1893, it was only rarely questioned until the decipherment of the Mycenaean Linear B script in 1952. Archaeological discoveries in the 1960s demonstrated that the cultural innovations previously ascribed to the Dorians were spread over a long period, often showing continuity from Bronze Age Mycenaean civilisation, and often arose in regions, such as Attica and Euboea, believed to have been unaffected by the invasion. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, academic belief in the Dorian invasion declined, to the point where it was generally accepted as a myth. Modern archaeologists explain the collapse of Mycenaean palatial civilisation through factors including social conflicts, climate change, technological developments and the breakdown of the palaces' socio-economic model. Population movements at the end of the Bronze Age are believed to have been relatively small in scale and generally to have been directed away from, rather than towards, the southern Peloponnese.
Classical period
In the classical period (that is, from ), the Dorians were an ethno-linguistic group, speaking the Doric dialect of Greek, concentrated in the southern Peloponnese, Crete, Sicily and the Dodecanese. Several cultural forms were identified as "Dorian" in classical times, such as the Doric order of architecture, the Dorian mode in music, and the Doric dialect. These were not exclusive to communities considered Dorian, some of which used other linguistic dialects: Halicarnassus, for instance, was considered a Dorian city into the Hellenistic period (323–30 BCE), but used Ionic for official inscriptions from the fifth century BCE and may never have widely spoken Doric. The Doric dialect itself was diverse and closely related to other varieties of Greek, and may not have originated from a single proto-dialect.
The ancient Greeks considered the Dorians to have migrated to the Peloponnese from central Greece, led by the descendants of the hero Heracles (the Heracleidae), around the end of the age of heroes (roughly the Late Bronze Age or the late second millennium BCE), shortly after the Trojan War. The myth appears to have originated in the Argolid or in Sparta at the end of the Early Iron Age, and to have combined earlier mythic traditions concerning the Dorians and the Heracleidae. Two further Dorian migrations were believed to have occurred: the first resulted in the foundation of Doric colonies in the southern Aegean and in Asia Minor, while the second, in the eighth century BCE, established Doric-speaking communities at Cyrene and in Magna Graecia. At least initially, the stories of the Dorian migration and the Return of the Heracleidae formed separate traditions, which were combined by the time of Herodotus (that is, the mid-fifth century BCE) at the latest. By the late fifth century BCE, Greeks considered the Dorian invasion a major turning point in their history, and it was reckoned as the beginning of the main line of historical continuity for Dorian states in the Peloponnese.
The earliest surviving attestation of the myth is in the work of the seventh-century BCE Spartan poet Tyrtaeus. The term used for the Heraclidae's return by Herodotus is , which can mean both "descent" and "return from exile". By the sixth century BCE, the ethnic divisions between the Heracleidae and the Dorians were often elided, such that the Heracleidae and Heracles himself were often imagined to be Dorians, and the Dorian invasion of the Peloponnese to be a homeward journey. Similarly, the term "Return of the Heracleidae" was often used to refer to the Dorian migration into that region. The most complete surviving accounts of the myth are those of the first-century BCE historian Diodorus Siculus and the , a mythological compendium dating to the first or second century CE, but these probably followed earlier sources closely. It was also alluded to by the Theban poet Pindar, who wrote in the early fifth century BCE.
As a foundation myth
The narrative of the Dorian invasion was particularly important in Sparta, where it formed the city's foundation myth. Tyrtaeus wrote of the Spartans as Dorians, who arrived in the land of Laconia from Erineus, in Doris, with the Heracleidae. There, Zeus and Hera granted Sparta to the Heracleidae: the two Spartan royal lines – the Agiad and Eurypontid dynasties – claimed descent from Heracles into the classical period. The version of the invasion narrative used in Sparta seems to have been a pastiche of various myths, with only a tenuous connection to the ancient Greeks' understanding of the Dorians as a people: the historian Nigel Kennell has called it "drastically underwritten" and likely to have developed in Laconia itself. Functionally, the story of the Dorian invasion, in conjunction with the story of the Heracleidae, served to assert Sparta's right to its territory in the Peloponnese, both in Laconia and in Messenia.
In Messenia itself, a version of the myth held that the Dorians had killed the Heraclid Kresphontes, who was allotted the kingdom after the initial Heraclid contest. After the restoration of Messenian independence by Epaminondas of Thebes in 370 BCE, this latter version was emphasised, and the newly founded tribes of Messenia were given the names of Heracles's descendants rather than the traditional names of the Dorian tribal groups of the region. Nino Luraghi interprets this as a means of breaking the perceived links between Messenia and Sparta: the latter was considered, in his words, "the quintessence of Dorianism".
Sparta used the myth of the Dorian invasion to justify the Tanagra campaign of 457, in which they sent troops to fight on behalf of Doris against an invasion from Phocis, an ally of Sparta's enemy Athens. During the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta at the end of the fifth century BCE, Sparta asserted kinship with its Peloponnesian allies through a claim of common Dorian heritage. Around the reign of the Roman emperor Hadrian (), Sparta underwent a campaign of reasserting itself as the quintessential Dorian city, including efforts to re-establish what were considered primordial Doric cultural forms, including the "hyperdoricisation" of its dialect. A reference in the work of the second-century CE geographer Pausanias, where the Messenians appeal to the Spartans on the basis of their shared Dorian ancestry during the Second Messenian War in the seventh century BCE, is unlikely to be historical.
Modern archaeological hypothesis
Origins Early archaeological work in the nineteenth century gave the impression of a substantial break between the Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age in Greece. This was considered to be marked by the introduction of new material culture, specifically bronze violin-bow fibulae, a new sword of the Naue II type, cremation, cist graves, and – of most importance – ironworking. These cultural changes were associated with the arrival of newcomers, and those newcomers named as the Dorians. Destruction layers at Mycenaean palatial sites were then attributed to this putative invasion, even though such destruction went unmentioned in ancient accounts of Dorian origins.See and, on the lack of reference to destruction in the mythical tradition, .
In 1824, Karl Otfried Müller published The Dorians (). He argued that the Dorians were a northern, Indo-European (in German, ) people who invaded Greece and subjugated the Peloponnese. He characterised the Dorians as a "young race", superior in their individual characters, their political organisation, and their language. A student of Müller's, Ernst Curtius, called them "northern mountaineers", stronger than the coastal peoples of Greece due to what he saw as their vigour born of a comparative lack of development and civilisation. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Dorians were imagined as an Aryan people, in line with other similar hypotheses about northern or Aryan invaders in the Near East. Hermann Müller argued in 1844 for the Nordic origin of Dorian (and so classical Greek) civilisation: this view became the standard in German historiography and remained so until the mid-twentieth century.
In 1870, Alexander Conze proposed that the recently identified Geometric style of pottery was the work of Dorian invaders, whom he considered to be a Germanic people from northern Europe. This view became the most popular scholarly interpretation of Geometric pottery for the remainder of the nineteenth century, though early objections noted the continuity between Mycenaean and Geometric styles and that Geometric pottery originated in Attica, which was not affected by the Dorian invasion in the mythological tradition; competing hypotheses developed that Geometric pottery was in fact a "peasant style", originally predating Mycenaean culture, that it represented a mixture of northern-European styles with those of the Mycenaean period, or that it had in fact been brought from the Near East by the Phoenicians. Later, the Geometric style was divided from its earlier manifestation, the Protogeometric, used until the ninth century BCE; the Protogeometric was also argued to be Dorian in origin.