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So it was probably the ‘Achaeans’ who spread the late Mycenean pottery all over the Mediterranean.

PLATE IX.

Figs. 16 & 17. LATE MYCENEAN VASES FROM RHODES.

They had become a seafaring nation on a great scale. Of their entry into Crete we have just spoken, of their united campaigns of conquest in Asia Minor, in which the Cretan king has the Argive Agamemnon as his overlord, the Homeric poems tell us, and of their colonizing expansion in the Mediterranean the vase finds among other things give evidence, as they justify conclusions about new localities of manufacture (Troy, Rhodes, Cyprus, etc.).

In the beginning of the first millennium the scene is totally altered. On the coast of Asia Minor and the islands are settled Hellenic races, among which the Aeolians and Ionians are probably descendants of the emigrated Achaeans, while the Dorians represent a new tribe come in from the north, which subdued the Peloponnese and Crete and extended to the south of the Aegean Sea.

These shiftings of population, the so-called Dorian invasion, with which Greek historians begin the history of their country, mark the end of the Bronze Age and of the Mycenean civilization. Iron weapons, only sporadically to be found in the late Mycenean age, take the place of bronze; the Mycenean vase style vanishes all along the line, and gives way to a new style, the Geometric.