Sometime around 2000 BCE and 1900 BCE, a series of events leads to a large swath of destruction starting from Eastern Anatolia (now Eastern Turkey) to the Aegean Sea.

The destruction, traveling along the traditional trade routes, leaves a series of burnt and destroyed cities in its wake.

The 1900 BCE Near East mass migration refers to the theory that the refugees from this invasion or event caused a mass migration of Indo-European peoples, who would become the Mycenaean Greeks, from their former settlements into south and central Greece displacing the former non-Greek inhabitants of Greece.

Little is known about these non-Greek people, possibly Pelasgians, who were either conquered or absorbed by the Greek migration.

It is clear however that their language used the suffices -nthos, -ssos, -ndos for place names.