The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and Upanishads v2.c41.s6.17

v2.c41.s6.17

⁵ Cf. Lang, *Homer and his Age*, p. 99; Keith, JRAS. 1912, p. 473, n. The ethnic question discussed by me there still remains unsolved. Leaf (*Homer and History*, p. 37) adopts the impossible view that the Greek mainland was occupied by neolithic peoples speaking a Greek dialect of which Arcadian may be a descendant, who were first dominated over by Minoan and next by Hellenic Achaeans; Peake (*The Bronze Age and the Celtic World*, chap. ix) makes the mainland population of eastern Alpine, the Cretan of Mediterranean (pp. 28 ff.) stock, while the Minoan overlords are 'Prospectors', of a blend of Mediterranean and eastern Alpine stocks, who may be of Sumerian origin and akin to the Etruscans. The Achaeans are a small body of intrusive Nordics, while no place is left for an earlier Greek-speaking population. Evans again (JHS. xxxii. 281 ff.), by insisting on the continuity of Minoan and Mycenaean culture, brings down any real influence of the Hellenic influx to the period of dipylon culture, which is clearly too late, and has provoked the equally impossible suggestion (T. W. Allen, JHS. xxxiii. 115) that the Minoans must have been Achaeans. It is much more probable that early Greeks took a substantial part in developing Mycenaean civilization under Minoan influence, and that the epic reflects this Greek civilization, not memories of the Minoan epic. See against G. Murray's traditionalist theory of the *Iliad*, J. T. Sheppard's able analysis, *The Pattern of the Iliad* (1922); Bury, CAH. ii. 502 ff.