Dorian Invasion - The Term "invasion"

The Term "invasion"

The first widespread use of the term "Dorian invasion" appears to date to the 1830s. A popular alternative was the "Dorian migration." For example, in 1831 Thomas Keightly was using "Dorian migration" in Outline of History; by 1838 in The Mythology of Ancient Greece and Italy he was using "Dorian invasion".

Neither of those two words exactly fit the return, as they imply an incursion from outside a society to within; but the Dorians were not outside of either Greece or Greek society. William Mitford's History of Greece (1784–1810) described a "Dorian conquest" followed by "a revolution in Peloponnesus so complete that, except in the rugged province of Arcadia, nothing remained unaltered."

In 1824 Karl Otfried Müller's Die Dorier was published in German and was translated into English by Tufnel and Lewis for publication in 1830. They use such terms as "the Doric invasion" and "the invasian of the Dorians" to translate Müller's "Die Einwanderung von den Doriern" (literally: "the migration of the Dorians"), which was quite a different concept.

On one level the Einwanderung meant no more than the Heraklidenzug, the return of the Heracleidae. However, Müller was also applying the sense of Völkerwanderung to it, which was being used of the Germanic migrations. Müller's approach was philological. In trying to explain the distribution of tribes and dialects he hypothesized that the aboriginal or Pelasgian population was Hellenic. His first paragraph of the Introduction asserts:

"The Dorians derived their origin from those districts in which the Grecian nation bordered toward the north upon numerous and dissimilar races of barbarians. As to the tribes which dwelt beyond these borders we are indeed wholly destitute of information; nor is there the slightest trace of any memorial or tradition that the Greeks originally came from those quarters."

Müller goes on to propose that the original Pelasgian language was the common ancestor of Greek and Latin, that it evolved into Proto-Greek and was corrupted in Macedon and Thessaly by invasions of Illyrians. This same pressure of Illyrians drove forth Greeks speaking Achaean (includes Aeolian), Ionian and finally Dorian in three diachronic waves, explaining the dialect distribution of Greek in classical times.

In 1902, K. Paparigopoulos, calling the event the "Descent of the Heraclidae", stated that the Heraclidae came from Thessaly after being kicked out by the Thessalians living in Epirus.