Editing Dorians (section)

==Origin==
Accounts vary as to the Dorians' place of origin. One theory, widely believed in ancient times, is that they originated in the mountainous regions of [[Greece]], such as [[Macedonia (ancient kingdom)|Macedonia]] and [[Epirus]], and obscure circumstances brought them south into the [[Peloponnese]], to certain [[Aegean Sea|Aegean islands]].

===Peloponnesian dialect replacement===
The origin of the Dorians is a multifaceted concept. In modern scholarship, the term has often meant the location of the population disseminating the Doric Greek dialect within a hypothetical [[Proto-Greek]] speaking population. The dialect is known from records of classical northwestern Greece, the [[Peloponnesus]] and [[Crete]] and some of the islands. The geographic and ethnic information found in the [[Western culture|West]]'s earliest known literary work, the ''[[Iliad]]'', combined with the administrative records of the former [[Mycenaean Greece|Mycenaean]] states, prove to universal satisfaction that East Greek (Ionian) speakers were once dominant in the Peloponnesus but suffered a setback there and were replaced at least in official circles by West Greek (Doric) speakers. A historical event is associated with the overthrow, called anciently the ''Return of the Heracleidai'' and by moderns the [[Dorian Invasion]].

This theory of a return or invasion presupposes that West Greek speakers resided in northwest Greece but overran the Peloponnesus replacing the East Greek there with their own dialect. No records other than Mycenaean ones are known to have existed in the [[Bronze Age]] so a West Greek of that time and place can be neither proved nor disproved. West Greek speakers were in western Greece in classical times. Unlike the East Greeks, they are not associated with any evidence of displacement events. That provides circumstantial evidence that the [[Doric Greek|Doric dialect]] disseminated among the Hellenes of northwest Greece, a highly-mountainous and somewhat-isolated region.

===Dorian invasion===
The [[Dorian invasion]] is a modern historical concept attempting to account for:
* at least the replacement of dialects and traditions in southern Greece in pre-classical times
* more generally, the distribution of the Dorians in [[Classical Greece]]
* the presence of the Dorians in Greece at all

On the whole, none of the objectives has been met, but the investigations served to rule out various speculative hypotheses. Most scholars doubt that the Dorian invasion was the main cause of the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization. The source of the West Greek speakers in the Peloponnese remains unattested by any solid evidence.

===Post-migrational distribution of the Dorians===
[[File:Lato - Prytaneion 01.jpg|thumb|Dorian site of [[Lato]] on the island of Crete]]
Though most of the Dorians settled in the Peloponnese, they also settled on [[Rhodes]] and [[Sicily]] and in what is now Southern Italy. In Asia Minor existed the [[Doric Hexapolis|Dorian Hexapolis]] (the six great Dorian cities): [[Halikarnassos]] (Halicarnassus) and [[Knidos]] (Cnidus) in [[Asia Minor]], [[Kos]], and [[Lindos]], [[Kameiros]], and [[Ialyssos]] on the island of Rhodes. The six cities would later become rivals with the [[Ionia]]n cities of Asia Minor. The Dorians also settled [[Crete]]. The 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 [[Syracuse, Italy|Syracusans]] in Sicily were of Dorian descent.<ref>{{cite web| url = http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/thucydides/thucydides-passages.php?pleaseget=7.57| title = 7.57| access-date = 12 November 2006| archive-date = 24 March 2007| archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20070324003505/http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/thucydides/thucydides-passages.php?pleaseget=7.57| url-status = dead}}</ref> Other such "Dorian" colonies, originally from Corinth, Megara, and the Dorian islands, dotted the southern coasts of Sicily from Syracuse to Selinus. Also [[Taranto|Taras]] was a Spartan colony.<ref name=EB1911>{{Cite EB1911 |wstitle=Dorians |volume=8 |page=425}}</ref>