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For the Dorian Mode in music, see Dorian Mode ; for the "Moesha" character see Dorian Long . .]] The Dorians (, the other three being the Achaeans , the Ionians and the Aeolians . They were distinguished by the Doric Greek dialect and by characteristic society and historical traditions. Traditional accounts place their origins in the north, north-eastern mountainous regions of Greece, ancient Macedonia and Epirus , whence obscure circumstances drove them south into the Peloponnese , to certain Aegean islands, parts of the coast of Asia Minor and Magna Graecia . Late mythology gave them an Eponym ous founder, Dorus son of Hellen , the Mythological Patriarch of the Hellenes . By classical times, in the fifth century, Dorians and Ionians were the two most numerous and politically important Greek ''" and found responsive parallels in the culture of their day as well; their biases contribute to the traditional modern interpretation of "Dorians". When allowances have been made for the sometimes multiple lenses through which history is viewed, modern readers have also to align the literary sources with the archaeological record, if this is possible. THE DORIAN IDENTITY In Classical Greece, "Dorian" applied to a fairly consistent group of peoples: there are lists in Thucydides VII.57-58 and Herodotus VIII.43. Ethnicity is identified in common customs, Religious Cults , tribal names, and dating systems and calendars. Name of the Dorians
The tradition of Herodotus The Dorians are mentioned in passing by many authors and inscriptions but the two chief classical authors to relate their origins are Herodotus and Pausanias . Thucydides ' remarks on "Dorians" (I.12.3, III.92) are offered in the fifth-century context of the war that he is describing. The customs of the Sparta n state and its illustrious individuals are detailed at great length in such authors as Plutarch . Herodotus himself was from Halicarnassus , a Dorian colony on the southwest coast of Asia Minor (in modern Turkey ), who followed the literary tradition of the times and wrote in Ionic Greek , being one of the last authors to do so. He described the Persian Wars , giving a thumbnail account of the histories of the antagonists, Greeks and Persians. Herodotus mentions that the "people now called the Dorians" were neighbors of the ns, or Spartans, one of whose archaic legendary kings was named Dōrieus. The Spartans, under another of their kings, Leonidas , comprised the famous band of 300 soldiers who sacrificed themselves nearly to a man to delay the Persian army at the Battle Of Thermopylae . The tradition of Pausanias Another major source on the Dorian identity is the '', and new Dorian settlers.2.13.1 Pausanias goes on to describe the conquest and resettlement of Laconia , Messenia , Argos and elsewhere, and the emigration from there to Crete and the coast of Asia Minor . Distinctions of language See Also: Doric Greek The Doric dialect was spoken along the coast of the Peloponnese , in Crete , southwest Asia Minor , various cities of Southern Italy and Sicily . A close relationship between Doric, North-Western Greek and Ancient Macedonian has been postulated. In later periods other dialects predominated, most notably the Attic , upon which the Koine or common Greek language of the Hellenistic period was based. The main characteristic of Doric was the preservation of Indoeuropean [aː], long <α>, which in Attic-Ionic became [ɛː], <η>. Tsakonian Greek , a descendant of Doric Greek and source of great interest to linguists, is extraordinarily still spoken in some regions of the Southern Argolid coast of the Peloponnese, on the coast of the modern prefecture of Arcadia. Other cultural distinctions The Dorians are also credited with the introduction of formalized Pederasty into the Greek arena. Some have postulated this to have taken place at the time of their original migration, others much later, around 630 BC, starting in Crete and spreading to Sparta and the rest of the Greek city states. According to Erich Bethe, What the Dorians brought was boy-love as a publicly recognized and honorable institution. The Dorians strictly regulated the love relationship between man and boy and treated it as a very important arrangement very publicly with honorable earnestness under the protection of the family, society, the state, and religion. . . . In Sparta, Crete, and Thebes. . . . the education of the ruling class, resting on pederasty, directed towards Arete and manly virtue, which principally manifested itself in war.Erich Bethe, "Die dorische Knabenliebe: ihre Ethik une ihre Idee," Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 62; 1907 pp441, 444 The Doric Order of architecture and a Dorian Mode in music (see also Guitar Chord roots). The column was noted for its simplicity and strength, the music for its martial qualities. The Doric column is still widely used today, particularly in government buildings and other large edifices. See the Doric Order . Culturally, in addition to their Doric dialect of Greek, these colonies retained their characteristic Doric Calendar revolving round a cycle of festivals of which the Hyacinthia and the Carneia were especially important (''EB'' 1911). THE SCHOLARLY CONCEPT OF DORIAN INVASION The ancient tradition is that the descendants of Heracles, exiled after his death, returned after some generations in order to reclaim land their ancestors had held in Mycenaean Greece, the mythic theme of the "return of the Heracleidae ". The exact descent differs from one ancient author to another, the salient point being that in each case a traditional ruling clan traced its origin, thus its legitimacy, to Heracles. After the Greek Dark Ages , much of the population of the Peloponnesus spoke Dorian; the evidence of Linear B (and Homer, such as it is) is that they spoke Achaean before. The palaces of Mycenaean civilization were burnt, and never rebuilt. Whether these data demonstrate that a Dorian population entered the Peloponnesus from outside of it and displaced some of the previous population there, changing the main dialect from Mycenaean to Doric, is now debated, especially by archaeologists. Kretschmer's external Greeks The modern conception of the "Dorian invasion" that was remarked upon in passing by Greek historians derives from the history of Karl Otfried Müller 's ''Die Dorier'' (1824), reinforced by linguistic studies of Paul Kretschmer . It explains in part the presence of substrate elements in ancient Greek as well as a tradition of relict populations of non-Greek-speaking Pelasgians existing in pockets among the Greek speakers, in mountainous and rural Arcadia and in inaccessible coasts of the far south. Kretschmer proposed that Greek evolved outside of Greece and that the main dialect groups also evolved outside of Greece and were brought in by invasions, which isolated some Pelasgian speakers in relict populations until Classical times. The Dorian invasion was the last of these waves of people. The handbooks of Greek history from then on spoke of Greeks entering Greece. As late as 1956 J.B. Bury's ''History of Greece'' (3rd edition) wrote of an :"...invasion which brought the Greek language into Greece." The weakness in this theoryA survey of the problems connected with the historicity of the "Dorian invasion" and the impossibility of constructing a narrative of events from the sources may be found in chapter 3 of J.M. Hall, ''A History of the Archaic Greek World ca. 1200-479 BCE.'' (Blackwell) 2007. is that it requires an invaded Greece and its mirror image where Greek evolved and continued to evolve into dialects contemporaneously with the invaded Greece. However, although the invaded Greece was amply represented by evidence of all sorts, there was no evidence at all of its hidden mirror. Greek origin in Greece The decipherment of Linear B brought a closer study of the evolution of the Greek language and the theory that it actually came into existence in Greece. Bands of warriors entered Greece, it is true, but not as Greeks. When they came to predominate, Proto-Greek evolved in Greece from their language, which took elements from the pre-Greek there. For example, the word for Cypress is pre-Greek, and yet it evolved into dialectical forms. The proto-Greeks could only have encountered it in Greece.John Chadwick, ''The Mycenaean World'', Chapter 1. Wherever the Dorians were coming from, it was not outside Greece. Destruction at the end of Mycenaean IIIB Meanwhile the archaeologists were encountering what appeared to be a wave of destruction of Mycenaean Palaces . Indeed, the Pylos tablets recorded the dispatch of "coast-watchers", to be followed not long after by the burning of the palace, presumably by invaders from the sea. Carl Blegen wrote :"the telltale track of the Dorians must be recognized in the fire-scarred ruins of all the great palaces and the more important towns which ... were blotted out at the end of Mycenaean IIIB.""The Mycenaean Age", in ''Lectures in Memory of Louise Taft Semple'', First Series, 1961–1965, Princeton University Press, 1967. Blegen follows Furumark in dating Mycenaean IIIB to 1300-1230 BC. Blegen himself dated the Dorian invasion to 1200 BC. One may also note that at approximately this time Hittite power in Anatolia collapsed with the destruction of their capital Hattusa and that the late 19th and the 20th dynasties of Egypt also suffered invasions of the Sea Peoples . Invasion or migration? Blegen admitted that in the sub-Mycenaean period following 1200 :"the whole area seems to have been sparsely populated ..." Chadwick later went so far as to write: :"...where were all the Dorians during the Mycenaean period? And why were they content to wait in the wings until the time was right for their intervention?" The very question answers itself: the Dorians were waiting in the wings, archaeologically out of sight in northwest Greece. The problem is that there are no traces of any Dorians anywhere until the start of the Protogeometric Period about 1050 BC. Changes in Material Culture , such as the introduction of iron, new weapons, and changes in burial practices from Mycenaean group burials in Tholos Tomb s to individual burials and cremation, are associated with the culture of the Dorians. It is more likely that the Mycenaean civilization went into decline, and the Dorians moved south more gradually into the power vacuum this created; another theory postulates the Dorians were local people the Mycenaeans had originally subjugated around 1900. This was a time of great upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean (see Sea Peoples ), and the disruption of long-distance trade, as well as civil war and natural disaster, are possible explanations for the destruction of the Mycenaeans. At the same time, there were other population movements such as the colonization of islands in the Aegean sea and the west coast of Asia Minor. Putting all the evidence together obtains the following view. While the Mycenaeans were rising to power and speaking the initial East Greek, the hill people were speaking the initial West Greek in relative isolation, ruled by families distantly related to the dynasties of the south. When these dynasties destroyed each other through incessant warfare, chaos ruled the Aegean for a few generations. Finally the families of the north decided to expand southward, subjugating or subordinating some people and displacing others. They spread Doric into its classical distribution, where it evolved even further into subdialects. POST-MIGRATIONAL DISTRIBUTION OF THE DORIANS Though most of the Doric invaders settled in the Peloponnese, they also settled on saw the Peloponnesian War in part as "Ionians fighting against Dorians" and reported the tradition that the Syracusans in Sicily were of Dorian descent. 7.57 Other such "Dorian" colonies, originally from Corinth, Megara, and the Dorian islands, dotted the southern coasts of Sicily from Syracuse to Selinus. (''EB'' 1911). LEGENDARY ORIGINS According to legend, the Dorians were named for the minor district of Doris in northern Greece. Their leaders were mythologized as the Heracleidae , the sons of the hero Heracles , and the Dorian incursion into Greece in the distant past was justified in the mythic theme of the "''Return'' of the Heracleidae".--> NOTES SEE ALSO BIBLIOGRAPHY
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