Here we present the ‘Preface‘, from the extensive English Summary, of the awarded (2013) by the ‘Academy of Athens’ book “«The Greeks: Whence and when?». The mainstream Scientific responses and the present state of Research on the first beginning of the Greek civilisation”, by Theodoros G. Giannopoulos, Crete University Press, 2012.
“The present book is a scientific as well as a writing enterprise. It firstly serves as a full, systematic and intelligible handbook of the long-standing international research on the first beginning of the Greek civilisation. The several different theories formulated so far regarding the “Coming of the Greeks” are thoroughly discussed in chronological “windows”, corresponding to the phases of the Aegean prehistory, in which the arrival of the Indo-European Proto-Greek population in Greece has been suggested to have taken place.
Furthermore, a systematic and comprehensible narrative of the prehistory of the Aegean and of several other areas of Eurasia provides the necessary background for understanding not only the complex, interdisciplinary study of the problem, but also the new research synthesis advanced in the book. This new solution to the Indo-European problem, which significantly revises the cultural time depth of Greece and Europe, is also accompanied by a reassessment of some critical issues concerning the origins of the world’s linguistic and anthropological diversity.”
(Comments on the book taken from: https://www.archaeology.wiki/blog/2013/02/07/t-g-giannopoulos-the-greeks-whence-and-when/)
PREFACE
The present book was conceived and written as a post-doctoral research project following the author’s Ph.D. studies at the University of Heidelberg (completed in 2007 and followed by the publication of the thesis: Die letzte Elite der mykenischen Welt. Achaia in mykenischer Zeit und das Phänomen der Kriegerbestattungen im 12.-11. Jahrhundert v. Chr. [The Last Elite of the Mycenaean World. Achaea in the Mycenaean Period and the Phenomenon of Warrior Burials in the 12th11th Centuries B.C.], Universitätsforschungen zur prähistorischen Archäologie, Band 152, Verlag Dr. Rudolf Habelt, Bonn 2008). Research and writing work took place from January to August 2008 as well as from December 2009 to May 2011 in the libraries of the British, American and German Archaeological Schools at Athens.
I would like to thank Professor Angelos Chaniotis (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton) for his encouraging interest in the book, eventually expressed by his willingness to include it in the publication series “New Approaches to the Ancient World” of the Crete University Press. Although not supervised by him, this book owes much also to my former supervisor in Heidelberg, Professor Joseph Maran, for the quality as well as the wide chronological and geographical horizon of his archaeological lectures and seminars. Furthermore, I am very much indebted to Professor Lord Colin Renfrew for his interest in the book and for his kindly rendering available to me two of his papers, to which I had until then no access. For permission to reproduce images from their publications I should like to thank Professors P. Bellwood, L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, G. Horrocks, J. Mallory, P. Menozzi, C. Renfrew as well as Dr. I. Kilian-Dirlmeier. For the excellent collaboration in the course of the book’s publication I would like to thank Mrs D. Daskalou and Mrs E. Lydaki of the Crete University Press. I am also grateful to my good friends Stella Keramida, Athanassios Skourtis and Spyridon Skourtis
for thoroughly reviewing the text of the extensive English summary.
The book has three main purposes. The first is to approach the old problem of “the Coming of the Greeks” in a twofold way: On the one hand by offering a full, systematic and intelligible handbook of the long-standing international research on the problem. The several different theories formulated so far are arranged in chronological “windows”, corresponding to the phases of the Aegean prehistory, in which the arrival of the Proto-Greek population in Greece has been suggested by different scholars to have taken place. These windows are subsequently examined in reverse chronological order, from the latest to the earliest. On the other hand, this detailed overview results in the formulation of a new proposal for what is described as “the first beginning of the Greek civilisation”, i.e. for the very first occurrence of the Proto-Greek language on the Greek peninsula. This new research synthesis concerns not only the problem of the Greek language and the dispersal of the Indo-European language family but partly also the origins of the other main linguistic groups.
The second purpose of the book is to take advantage of its wide chronological and geographical research framework in order to present a systematic and comprehensible narrative of the prehistory of the Aegean as well as of several other important areas of Eurasia. A systematic overview, which could be helpful to those students and other workers in the field of Greek prehistory, who often feel lost, when they must come into contact with anything that goes beyond the borders of specialisation in a specific period or group of findings. As a result of this wandering in different prehistoric times and cultural areas, several branches of the Eurasian prehistory and of the wider Indo-European problem are dealt with and new views are incorporated in the final synthesis.
The third aim of the book is mainly analysed in its introductory chapter but actually runs across a much greater part of it. It is an attempt to draw a clear line between the mainstream (academic or non-academic) scientific methodologies and approaches on the one side and the dangerous amateurish pseudo-scientific constructs on the other. In Greece, the “Coming of the Greeks” belongs to those scientific topics that in recent years have attracted the interest of a large number of authors moving in the fringes of science or completely outside its borders. Their ideologised and often nationalistic doctrines have managed to reach a broader readership and to create unfavourable conditions for a sober-minded examination of sensitive concepts such as “language”, “ethnicity”, “origins”, “race”. In many passages of the book several popular oversimplifications, misconceptions or deliberate distortions of the phenomena under discussion are contrasted with the mainstream scientific methodologies, while the complex, multi-dimensional nature of the problems is emphasised. What is eventually stressed, is the insight that the quality of scientific research lies rather in the “how” than in the “what”.
Novo Scriptorium 
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