Sulle piste dei Dori: Ipotesi a confronto tra linguistica, archeologia e storia

The fall of the Mycenaean palatial civilization, that spoke and wrote already a Greek dialect (handed down by the Linear B tablets), the presumed arrival in Greece of invaders, the Dorians, who sank the Hellas in the so-called "Dark Ages", the legends born to explain, in myth, this event (the return of the Heracleides), the new language system and the new hierarchies of the archaic Greece, "daughter" of these traumatic events, are the salient features of the so-called "Dorian issue". The volume deals with the problems of historical interpretation related to this dawning era of the ancient Greece, comparing the most important hypothesis proposed so far by scholars on the subject. The reader will be in front of the theories by now "classic" of eminent specialists, such as John Chadwick (who collaborated with Michael Ventris to the procedure of deciphering of the Linear B writing), and the assumptions inherent in the most recent hypothesis about the arrival of the Dorians in Greece. Using instruments that are mainly linguistic, without neglecting historical and archaeological elements, according to a criterion of scientific rigor that does not ignore the needs of the non-specialist readers, the Author tries to outline the salient features of a long and difficult process that led to the birth of archaic Greece, in the transition, even symbolic, from the syllabic writing like the Aegean handwritings to the Greek alphabetical writing of Phoenician kind and from the civilization of the Mycenaean palaces to that of the 'polis'. The book is accompanied by extensive comparative chronologies, grouped in a special section to help the readers in order to orient themselves within the framework history examined, and an extensive bibliography, useful study repertoire in order to provide for further researches.