Herodotus: Histories Book I

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Although Greeks may have been living in Asia already in the Bronze Age, the most substantial migrations occurred after the end of the thirteenth century, at the time of the collapse of the Mycenaean world. The almost simultaneous end of the Hittite Empire in 1200 created in Anatolia a power vacuum that allowed the Greeks to settle and prosper on the promontories of the coast and nearby islands. Very little is left archaeologically from this time (or indeed for the entire archaic and classical periods), but in Miletus and Smyrna sub-Mycenaean remains date to the eleventh century. For an early history of the area one must rely mainly on the fragments of seventh- and sixth-century native poets and philosophers, on traditions handed down by fifth-century prose writers, and on later authors such as Aristotle, Strabo, and Pausanias, who used fifth-century authors now lost to us. Herodotus is the most important source of what is known about the Greeks of Asia in the seventh and sixth centuries"--