The coming of the Greeks : Indo-European conquests in the Aegean and the… (original 1988; edition 1988)

The subtitle is important: much of the book is about the Hittites and about the Aryan (ie. Indo-Iranian) superstrate in Mitanni and the Levant, which one might not expect in a book about the "coming of the Greeks".

That the successes of the early Hittites and of the Near-Eastern Aryans was due to them being early experts on chariot warfare is a common idea; the same has been suggested of the Aryan conquest of India. Drews's big idea here is that the same accounts for the "coming of the Greeks", ie. the Indo-Europeanization of Greece, and, perhaps, that of Europe beyond. He also accepts Ivanov and Gamkrelidze's placing of the PIE homeland in Armenia, which would put it right around the place of origin of the chariot.

Am I convinced? Well, I'm not really qualified to have much of an opinion, but his arguments for putting the arrival of the Greek language to Greece ca 1600 BC seem strong, and if that's conceded, it'd be downright odd if it wasn't related to the appearance, at that very time, of the chariot in Greece. But he doesn't offer much in the way to support that Indo-European went chariot-borne to the rest of Europe, and if one doesn't affirm that, the connection with the Armenian homeland hypothesis is much weakened: one could equally put the PIE homeland back north of the Caucasus, and assume merely that Anatolian and Graeco-Aryan had gone south in time to be part of the chariot revolution, while the other European branches went west in a more "traditional" manner.