Dorians

The Dorians (Ancient Greek: Δωριεῖς Dōrieis, singular Δωριεύς Dōrieus) were one of the four ancient Greek tribes (the others three were that of the Achaeans, that of the Ionians and that of the Aeolians).

The Dorians were distinguished by their language, by their society and by their historical tradition. Traditional accounts place their place of origin in the northern regions of ancient Greece, from where unknown circumstances led them south into the Peloponnese region, to certain islands in the southern part of the Aegean Sea, and to the southern coast of Asia. Minor. For some time their irruption was considered as an invasion that destabilized the Mycenaean States, destroying their cultural forms and replacing them with those of the invaders. Indro Montanelli points out that the Dorians introduced racist criteria in Greece. Their area of historical domain places them in the Peloponnese and in classical times, with the development of Spartan culture, the apical example of Dorian society and culture.

Mythology attributed this name to the eponymous founder, Doro, son of Helen, mythological patriarch of the Hellenes.

The Dorian identity

The name of the Dorians

A man's name, Dōrieus, receives a brief mention on Linear B tablets at Pylos, one of the regions invaded and conquered by the Dorians. The Pilos tablet Fn867 records it in the dative case as do-ri-je-we, *Dōriēwei. An unconfirmed plural, *Dōriēwes, would have become Dōrieis, through loss of the w and contraction, but on the tablet it is just a male name. Fn867 deals with the contribution of grain to a temple. Whether this means "the Dorian" or had the original meaning of the proper name "Dorio".

Julius Pokorny derives 'dorio' from Doris, "forest" (which can also mean "high land"). The Dori segment would be from the o-grade of Indo-European *deru-, "tree". Dorio could be translated as "the people of the field", "the people of the mountain", "the mountaineers", "the people of the woods", or some similar name, which eminently fits with its reputed origin.

The tradition of Herodotus

Herodotus himself was from Halicarnassus, a Dorian colony on the southwestern coast of present-day Turkey, who carried on the literary tradition of his time and wrote in Ionian Greek, being one of the last authors to do so. He described the medical wars, giving a brief account of the history of the protagonists, Greeks and Persians.

Herodotus mentions that the "people now called Dorians" were neighbors of the Thessalian Pelasgians. The women had a characteristic dress, he said, a tunic (a flat dress) that did not need to be fastened with brooches. They were immigrants in the Peloponnese. Among them were the people, later known as the Lacedaemonians, one of whose kings was named Dorieus.

The tradition of Pausanias

Another main source on Dorian identity is Pausanias's Description of Greece. He relates that the Achaeans of the Peloponnese were driven from their lands by the Dorians who came from Eta, a mountainous region bordering Thessaly, led by Hilo, a son of Heracles, but they were defeated by the Achaeans. Under another leader, they managed to defeat the Achaeans and remain in the Peloponnese, an event they called "the return of the Heraclids". They had built ships at Naupactus with which to cross the Gulf of Corinth. Pausanias' tradition sees this invasion as a return of the Dorians to the Peloponnese, apparently meaning a return of the ruling families in Aetolia and northern Greece to a land in which they had previously been and possessed. The return is described in detail: there were "riots" throughout the Peloponnese, except Arcadia, because of the arrival of the new Dorian colonists. 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. from Asia Minor.

Language distinctions

The Doric dialect was spoken along the Peloponnese coast, in Crete, and in southwestern Asia Minor. A close relationship has been postulated between Doric, Northwestern Ancient Greek, and the ancient Macedonian language. In later periods, other dialects predominated, notably Attic, on which Koine or the common Greek language of the Hellenistic period was based. The main characteristic of the Doric was the preservation of the Indo-European [un:], <α> long, which in Attic-Ionian became [ε:], <η>. Tsakonian, a descendant of Doric Greek and a source of great interest to linguists, is surprisingly still spoken in some regions of the southern Argolis coast of the Peloponnese, on the coast of the modern prefecture of Arcadia.

Other cultural distinctions

Some authors attribute to the Dorians the introduction of pedophilia in Ancient Greece. Some have postulated that this took place at the time of their original migration and others that much later, around 630 BC. C., beginning in Crete and extending to Sparta and the rest of the Greek city-states. According to Erich Bethe

What the Dorians brought was the love of the Ephebo as an honorable and recognized institution. The dorians strictly regulated the loving relationship between man and boy and treated it as a very important, very public arrangement with an honorable seriousness under the protection of family, society, state and religion... In Esparta, Crete and Thebes... the education of the ruling class rested on the pederasty, [and was directed toward] the sandy and the male virtue, which manifested itself mainly in the war.

There is a Doric order of architecture and a Doric mode of music (see also guitar chord roots). The column was characterized by its simplicity and strength, the music by its martial qualities. The Doric column is widely used in the early 21st century, particularly in government buildings and other large buildings.

Culturally, in addition to their Doric dialect of Greek, these colonies retained their characteristic Doric calendar, which revolved around a cycle of festivals of which the Hyacinthia and Carnea festivals were especially important (EB 1911).

The concept of the Doric invasion

It is unquestionable that a Doric-speaking population entered the Peloponnese and other parts of Greece from outside and displaced part of the previous population, changing the main dialect from Mycenaean to Doric. However, the timing of these migrations is disputed. Traditionally they are made to coincide with the destructions of the Mycenaean palaces, around 1200 B.C. C. The ancients referred to these events as the return of the Heraclids; that is, the ruling families, distantly related to the families of Mycenaean Greece, returned to claim a piece of their ancestral land, using a Dorian army to do so. Other authors, such as Rubinsohn, have argued that the irruption of the Dorians occurred some two centuries later; on the other hand, John Chadwick thinks he can see in the Linear B tablets a cohabitation of the Dorians with the Mycenaeans.

Post-migration distribution of the Dorians

Although many of the Doric invaders settled in the Peloponnese, they also settled in Rhodes and in Asia Minor, where the Doric Hexapolis (the six Dorian cities) would rise in later times: Halicarnassus and Cnidus in Asia Minor, Cos and Lindos, Camiros and Ialisos on the island of Rhodes. These six cities would later become rivals to the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The Dorians also settled in Crete.

These origin traditions remained strong in classical times: Thucydides viewed the Peloponnesian War in part as "Ionians fighting Dorians" and recounted the tradition that the settlers of Syracuse in Sicily were descendants of the Dorians. Putative Doric colonies, originally from Corinth, Megara, and the Doric islands, dot the southern coast of Sicily from Syracuse to Selinunte.