Who Were the Greeks?

Who Were the Greeks? by John L. Myres, first delivered as the 1927 Sather Lectures, confronts a deceptively simple question: how can we define the Greeks as a people and a civilization? Myres rejects both timeless ethnic myths and romanticized self-descriptions, proposing instead a multi-disciplinary reconstruction that tests Greek traditions against modern evidence. Drawing on comparative philology, physical anthropology, prehistoric archaeology, religion, and folk memory, he offers both a portrait of Greek identity and a research agenda for its further clarification. The book argues that Greek civilization emerged not as an isolated miracle but as the most successful synthesis in a series of cultural experiments around the Aegean. Classical Greece stands on Minoan and Mycenaean foundations, combining rupture with continuity. Myres situates this achievement within larger phases of world history, each defined by human control of water and movement: river-valley irrigation cultures, the maritime “lake-land” of the Mediterranean, and, eventually, the oceanic expansions of modernity. The Greeks, he contends, were master navigators of the second phase, creating institutions and ideas Rome later protected and transmitted. Organized around the evidence for common environment, descent, language, belief, and material culture, the book builds toward an account of nation-making that fuses these strands. Myres also underscores what remains unknown, calling for systematic, coordinated excavations rather than chance-driven digs. Folk genealogies and myths, he insists, must be treated as structured clues to migration and memory, not dismissed as fictions. The result is both a historical synthesis and a methodological manifesto. Who Were the Greeks? moves the study of Greek origins away from heroic narrative and toward applied historical science, demonstrating how identity can be reconstructed through evidence, comparison, and disciplined imagination. Its framework—braiding environment, movement, language, and belief—remains a model for approaching broader questions of cultural identity: not simply “who were they?” but also “who are we, and what are we becoming?” This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1930.