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The Dorians (Greek: Δωριεῖς, Dōrieis, singular Δωριεύς, Dōrieus) were one of three populations into which the ancient Greeks considered the population of Hellenes to have been divided. The Hellenes spoke Greek and were considered to be the Greeks, although the ancient Greek sources did recognize non-Hellenic populations residing among them.

The Dorians were not one of the latter. Herodotus gave the earliest historical expression of a three-fold division:^[1] "... those who dwell in our land are called Ionians, Aeolians and Dorians." General names inherited from earlier times were considered to be in one of these three groups, from the earliest literature; for example, the Achaeans (also known as Danaans, Δαναοί, and Argives, Ἀργεῖοι) were primarily Ionians and Aeolians.

The three groups are seldom described by abstract concepts in the ancient sources. The Dorians are almost always simply referenced as just "the Dorians," as they are in the earliest literary mention of them in the Odyssey,^[2] where they are already in Crete. Herodotus does use the abstract ethnos^[3] with regard to them, the Greek word from which English ethnic comes, which appears in the modern concept of ethnic group.

The meaning of the abstract in ancient Greek depends on the context. It is often translated as "tribe", "race" or "people." The Dorians do not fit any of those English categories. No racial distinctions are ever portrayed; they are Hellenes along with the other two groups, nor were they a tribe. They were diverse in way of life and social organization, varying from the urbane city of Corinth known for its ornate style in art and architecture to the military state of Sparta. The identity included hill tribes as well, but they were not united into a single tribe.

And yet all the Hellenes knew what localities were Dorian and what not. Dorian states at war could more likely than not (but not always) count on the assistance of other Dorian states. Dorians were distinguished by the Doric Greek dialect and by characteristic social and historical traditions. Traditional accounts place their origins in the north, north-eastern mountainous regions of Greece, ancient Macedonia and Epirus, whence obscure circumstances brought them south into the Peloponnese, to certain Aegean islands, parts of the coast of Asia Minor and Magna Graecia and Crete. Mythology gave them an eponymous founder, Dorus son of Hellen, the mythological patriarch of the Hellenes.

In the fifth century BC, Dorians and Ionians were the two most politically important Greek ethne, whose ultimate clash resulted in the Peloponnesian War. The degree to which fifth-century Hellenes self-identified as "Ionian" or "Dorian" has itself been disputed.^[4] The fifth- and fourth-century literary tradition through which moderns view these ethnic identifications was profoundly influenced by the social politics of the time. Also, according to E.N. Tigerstedt, nineteenth-century European admirers of virtues they considered "Dorian" identified themselves as "Laconophile" and found responsive parallels in the culture of their day as well; their biases contribute to the traditional modern interpretation of "Dorians".^[5]

When allowances have been made for the sometimes multiple lenses through which history is viewed, modern readers have also to align the literary sources with the archaeological record, if this is possible.

Contents 1 The Dorian identity 1.1 Name of the Dorians 1.2 The tradition of Herodotus 1.3 The tradition of Thucydides 1.4 The tradition of Pausanias 1.5 The tradition of Diodorus Siculus 1.6 Distinctions of language 1.7 Other cultural distinctions 2 The scholarly concept of Dorian invasion 2.1 Kretschmer's external Greeks 2.2 Greek origin in Greece 2.3 Destruction at the end of Mycenaean IIIB 2.4 Invasion or migration? 3 Post-migrational distribution of the Dorians 4 Notes 5 Bibliography 6 See also 7 External links

In Classical Greece, "Dorian" applied to a fairly consistent group of peoples.

A man's name, Dōrieus, occurs in the Linear B tablets at Pylos, one of the regions invaded and subjected by the Dorians. Pylos tablet Fn867 records it in the dative case as do-ri-je-we, *Dōriēwei, a third or consonant declension noun with stem ending in w. An unattested plural, *Dōriēwes, would have become Dōrieis by loss of the w and contraction, but in the tablet, which is concerned with contribution of grain to a temple, it is simply a man's name.^[6] Whether it had the ethnic meaning of "the Dorian" is unknown.

Julius Pokorny derives Dorian from dōris, "woodland" (which can also mean upland).^[7] The dōri- segment is from the o-grade (either ō or o) of Indo-European *deru-, "tree". Dorian might be translated as "the country people", "the mountain people", "the uplanders", "the people of the woods" or some such appellation, which is eminently suitable to their reputed origin.

A second popular derivation was given by the French linguist, Émile Boisacq, from the same root, but from Greek doru, "spear" (which was wood); i.e., "the people of the spear" or "spearmen", emphasizing the warrior ferocity of the upland Dorians.^[8]

The Dorians are mentioned by many authors and inscriptions. The chief classical authors to relate their origins are Herodotus, Thucydides and Pausanias. The customs of the Spartan state and its illustrious individuals are detailed at great length in such authors as Plutarch.

Herodotus himself was from Halicarnassus, a Dorian colony on the southwest coast of Asia Minor (in modern Turkey); following the literary tradition of the times he wrote in Ionic Greek, being one of the last authors to do so. He described the Persian Wars, giving a thumbnail account of the histories of the antagonists, Greeks and Persians.

Herodotus mentions that the "people now called the Dorians" were neighbors of the Pelasgians of Thessaly.^[9] The women had a distinctive dress, he said, a tunic (plain dress) not needing to be pinned with brooches.^[10] They were immigrants to the Peloponnesus;^[11] the people they displaced gathered at Athens under a leader Ion and became identified as "Ionians".^[12] Most conspicuous among the Dorians as related by Herodotus were the people later known as Lacedaemonians, or Spartans, one of whose archaic legendary kings was named Dōrieus. The military Spartans, under another of their kings, Leonidas, included the famous band of 300 soldiers who sacrificed themselves nearly to a man to delay the Persian army at the Battle of Thermopylae.

Herodotus' list of Dorian states is as follows. From northeastern Greece were Phthia, Histiaea and Macedon. In central Greece were Doris (the former Dryopia) and in the south Peloponnesus,^[13] specifically the states of Lacedaemon, Corinth, Sicyon, Epidaurus, Troezen and Hermione.^[14] Overseas were the islands of Rhodes, Cos, Nisyrus and the Anatolian cities of Cnidus, Halicarnassus, Phaselis and Calydna.^[15] There is no mention of the Dorians in Crete.

Thucydides professes little of Greece before the Trojan War except to say that it was full of barbarians and that there was no distinction between barbarians and Greeks. The Hellenes came from Phthiotis.^[16] The whole country indulged in and suffered from piracy and was not settled. After the Trojan War, "Hellas was still engaged in removing and settling."^[17]

Some 60 years after the Trojan War the Boeotians were driven out of Arne by the Thessalians into Boeotia and 20 years later "the Dorians and the Heraclids became masters of the Peloponnese."^[17] So the lines were drawn between the Dorians and the Aeolians (here Boeotians) with the Ionians (former Peloponnesians).

Other than these few brief observations Thucydides names but few Dorians. He does it make clear that some Dorian states aligned or were forced to align with the Athenians while some Ionians went with the Lacedaemonians and that the motives for alignment were not always ethnic but were diverse. Among the Dorians was Lacedaemon of course,^[18] Corcyra, Corinth and Epidamnus,^[19] Leucadia, Ambracia,^[20] Potidaea,^[21] Rhodes, Cythera, Argos, Carystus,^[22] Syracuse, Gela, Acragas (later Agrigentum), Acrae, Casmenae.^[23]

He does explain with considerable dismay what happened to incite ethnic war after the unity during the Battle of Thermopylae. The Congress of Corinth formed prior to it "split into two sections." Athens headed one and Lacedaemon the other.

For a short time the league held together, till the Lacedaemonians and Athenians quarreled, and made war upon each other with their allies, a duel into which all the Hellenes sooner or later were drawn.^[24]

He adds: "the real case I consider to be ... the growth of the power of Athens and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon...."

The Description of Greece by Pausanias relates that the Achaeans of the Peloponnesus were driven from their lands by Dorians coming from Oeta, a mountainous region bordering on Thessaly.^[25] They were led by Hyllus, a son of Hercules^[26], but were defeated by the Achaeans. Under other leadership they managed to be victorious over the Achaeans and remain in the Peloponnesus, a mythic theme called "the return of the Heracleidae."^[27] They had built ships at Naupactus in which to cross the Gulf of Corinth.^[28] This invasion is viewed by the tradition of Pausanias as a return of the Dorians to the Peloponnesus, apparently meaning a return of families ruling in Aetolia and northern Greece to a land in which they had once had a share. The return is described in detail: there were "disturbances" throughout the Peloponnesus except in Arcadia, and new Dorian settlers.^[29] 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 of Asia Minor.

Main article: Doric Greek

The Doric dialect was spoken along the coast of the Peloponnese, in Crete, southwest Asia Minor, various cities of Southern Italy and Sicily. A close relationship between Doric, North-Western Greek and ancient Macedonian has been postulated. In later periods other dialects predominated, most notably the Attic, upon which the Koine or common Greek language of the Hellenistic period was based. The main characteristic of Doric was the preservation of Indoeuropean [aː], long <α>, which in Attic-Ionic became [ɛː], <η>. Tsakonian Greek, a descendant of Doric Greek and source of great interest to linguists, is extraordinarily still spoken in some regions of the Southern Argolid coast of the Peloponnese, on the coast of the modern prefecture of Arcadia.

Culturally, in addition to their Doric dialect of Greek, Doric colonies retained their characteristic Doric calendar revolving round a cycle of festivals of which the Hyacinthia and the Carneia were especially important.^[30]).

The Dorian mode in music also was attributed to Doric societies and was associated by classical writers with martial qualities.

The Doric order of architecture in the tradition inherited by Vitruvius included the Doric column, noted for its simplicity and strength.

The ancient tradition is that the descendants of Heracles, exiled after his death, returned after some generations in order to reclaim land their ancestors had held in Mycenaean Greece, the mythic theme of the "return of the Heracleidae". The exact descent differs from one ancient author to another, the salient point being that in each case a traditional ruling clan traced its origin, thus its legitimacy, to Heracles.

After the Greek Dark Ages, much of the population of the Peloponnesus spoke Dorian; the evidence of Linear B (and Homer, such as it is) is that they spoke Achaean before. The palaces of Mycenaean civilization were burnt, and never rebuilt. Whether these data demonstrate that a Dorian population entered the Peloponnesus from outside of it and displaced some of the previous population there, changing the main dialect from Mycenaean to Doric, is now debated, especially by archaeologists.

The modern conception of the "Dorian invasion" that was remarked upon by Greek historians derives from the history of Karl Otfried Müller's Die Dorier (1824), reinforced by linguistic studies of Paul Kretschmer. It explains in part the presence of substrate elements in ancient Greek as well as a tradition of relict populations of non-Greek-speaking Pelasgians existing in pockets among the Greek speakers, in mountainous and rural Arcadia and in inaccessible coasts of the far south. Kretschmer proposed that Greek evolved outside of Greece and that the main dialect groups also evolved outside of Greece and were brought in by invasions, which isolated some Pelasgian speakers in relict populations until Classical times. The Dorian invasion was the last of these waves of people. The handbooks of Greek history from then on spoke of Greeks entering Greece. As late as 1956 J.B. Bury's History of Greece (3rd edition) wrote of an

"...invasion which brought the Greek language into Greece."

The weakness in this theory^[31] is that it requires an invaded Greece and its mirror image where Greek evolved and continued to evolve into dialects contemporaneously with the invaded Greece. However, although the invaded Greece was amply represented by evidence of all sorts, there was no evidence at all of its hidden mirror.

The decipherment of Linear B brought a closer study of the evolution of the Greek language and the theory that it actually came into existence in Greece. Bands of warriors entered Greece, it is true, but not as Greeks. When they came to predominate, Proto-Greek evolved in Greece from their language, which took elements from the pre-Greek there. For example, the word for cypress is pre-Greek, and yet it evolved into dialectical forms. The proto-Greeks could only have encountered it in Greece.^[32] Wherever the Dorians were coming from, it was not outside Greece.

Meanwhile the archaeologists were encountering what appeared to be a wave of destruction of Mycenaean palaces. Indeed, the Pylos tablets recorded the dispatch of "coast-watchers", to be followed not long after by the burning of the palace, presumably by invaders from the sea. Carl Blegen wrote

"the telltale track of the Dorians must be recognized in the fire-scarred ruins of all the great palaces and the more important towns which ... were blotted out at the end of Mycenaean IIIB."^[33]

Blegen follows Furumark in dating Mycenaean IIIB to 1300-1230 BC. Blegen himself dated the Dorian invasion to 1200 BC. One may also note that at approximately this time Hittite power in Anatolia collapsed with the destruction of their capital Hattusa and that the late 19th and the 20th dynasties of Egypt also suffered invasions of the Sea Peoples.

Blegen admitted that in the sub-Mycenaean period following 1200

"the whole area seems to have been sparsely populated ..."

Chadwick later went so far as to write:

"...where were all the Dorians during the Mycenaean period? And why were they content to wait in the wings until the time was right for their intervention?"

The very question answers itself: the Dorians were waiting in the wings, archaeologically out of sight in northwest Greece. The problem is that there are no traces of any Dorians anywhere until the start of the Protogeometric period about 1050 BC. Changes in material culture, such as the introduction of iron, new weapons, and changes in burial practices from Mycenaean group burials in tholos tombs to individual burials and cremation, are associated with the culture of the Dorians.

It is more likely that the Mycenaean civilization went into decline, and the Dorians moved south more gradually into the power vacuum this created; another theory postulates the Dorians were local people the Mycenaeans had originally subjugated around 1900. This was a time of great upheaval in the eastern Mediterranean (see Sea Peoples), and the disruption of long-distance trade, as well as civil war and natural disaster, are possible explanations for the destruction of the Mycenaeans. At the same time, there were other population movements such as the colonization of islands in the Aegean sea and the west coast of Asia Minor.

Putting all the evidence together obtains the following view. While the Mycenaeans were rising to power and speaking the initial East Greek, the hill people were speaking the initial West Greek in relative isolation, ruled by families distantly related to the dynasties of the south. When these dynasties destroyed each other through incessant warfare, chaos ruled the Aegean for a few generations. Finally the families of the north decided to expand southward, subjugating or subordinating some people and displacing others. They spread Doric into its classical distribution, where it evolved even further into subdialects.

Though most of the Doric invaders settled in the Peloponnese, they also settled on Rhodes and in Asia Minor, where in later times the Dorian Hexapolis (the six Dorian cities) would arise: Halikarnassos (Halicarnassus) and Knidos (Cnidus) in Asia Minor, Kos, and Lindos, Kameiros, and Ialyssos on the island of Rhodes. These six cities would later become rivals with the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The Dorians also invaded Crete. These origin traditions remained strong into classical times: Thucydides saw the Peloponnesian War in part as "Ionians fighting against Dorians" and reported the tradition that the Syracusans in Sicily were of Dorian descent.^[34] Other such "Dorian" colonies, originally from Corinth, Megara, and the Dorian islands, dotted the southern coasts of Sicily from Syracuse to Selinus. (EB 1911).

• Hall, Jonathan M. (2000). Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521789990. 
• Hall, Jonathan M. (2006), "Dorians: Ancient Ethnic Group", in Wilson, Nigel, Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece, New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, pp. 240-242, ISBN 0-415-97334-1
• Müller, Karl Otfried, Die Dorier (1824) was translated by Henry Tufnel and Sir George Cornewall Lewis and published as The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, (London: John Murray), 1830, in two vols.
• Drews, Robert (1993). The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe CA. 1200 B.C.. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.  Five editions between 1993 and 1995.
• Pomeroy, Sarah B.; Stanley M. Burstein; Walter Donlan; Jennifer Tolbert Roberts (1999). Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195097424. 

• Greek Dark Ages
• Sparta
• Ancient Greek dialects
• Doric Greek

• Meriam-Webster Online Dictionary
• The Dorians, University of Minnesota Ancient Greek Civilizations site
• Encyclopaedia Britannica 1911: "Dorians"
• S.W.J. Lamberts, THE ETHNICITY OF THE SEA PEOPLES
• George Hinge, Scythian and Spartan Analogies in Herodotos’ Representation
• The Dorians, Pan-Macedonian site
• Efi Pandermali-Poulaki, Olympus, Pan-Macedonian site