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Introduction
The remarkable archeological discoveries of the last few years have naturally aroused vast enthusiasm among scientists. As a noted writer recently expressed it: “If the Elizabethan age was the period of the discovery of new worlds, a period bright with all the romance and fascination of man’s adventure into the unknown, our own age may be defined as the period of the resurrection of ancient worlds. The romance of the explorations which have given back to us the buried civilizations of Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Crete, and Asia Minor has in its own way been almost as thrilling as that which marked the discoveries of Columbus, Cortez, and Pizarro.”
In a field such as this, where one discovery follows constantly upon the heels of another, it is not easy to select the date of one particular discovery as marking a climax above others. But our scientific friends urge upon us that the real epoch-making achievement has been the establishment of the fact that Greek culture originated in Crete, and that even the alphabetical writing of the Greeks came to them not from the Phoenicians but from the Cretans. Mr. Arthur Evans showed this in 1905 by his book telling of his Cretan explorations. King Minos and his palace at Cnossus in Crete have for our generation taken the place of Cadmus of Thebes or Cecrops of Athens as the earliest sources of European civilization.
To the account of Evans’s explorations taken from Mr. Baikie’s “Sea-Kings of Crete,” we add the resume of the new knowledge of Greece by Mr. Hogarth, himself one of the most distinguished scholars and explorers in this field.
These selections were written in the first decade of the twentieth century.
The selections are by James Baikie. and David G. Hogarth. We begin with James Baikie.
The resurrection of the prehistoric age of Greece, and the disclosure of the astonishing standard of civilization which had been attained on the mainland and in the isles of the Aegean at a period at least 2,000 years earlier than that at which Greek history, as hitherto understood, begins, may be reckoned as among the most interesting results of modern research into the relics of the life of past ages. The present generation has witnessed remarkable discoveries in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, but neither Niffur nor Abydos disclosed a world so entirely new and unexpected as that which has been revealed by the work of Schliemann and his successors at Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns, and by that of Evans and the other explorers — Italian, British, and American — in Crete. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian discoveries traced back a little farther streams which had already been followed far up their course; those of Schliemann and Evans revealed the reality of one which, so to speak, had hitherto been believed to flow only through the dreamland of legend. It was obvious that mighty men must have existed before Agamemnon, but what manner of men they were, and in what manner of world they lived, were matters absolutely unknown, and, to all appearances, likely to remain so.
But now the dark gulf of time that lay behind the Dorian conquest is beginning to yield up the unquestionable evidences of a great, and splendid, and almost incredibly ancient civilization, which neither for its antiquity nor for its actual attainment has any cause to shrink from comparison with the great historic civilizations of Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley; and while the process of disentangling the historic nucleus of the legends from their merely mythical and romantic elements can not yet be undertaken with any approach to certainty, it is becoming continually more apparent, not only that in many cases there was such a nucleus, but also what were some of the historic elements around which the poetic fancy of later times drew the fanciful wrapping of the heroic tales as we know them.
It is not yet possible to trace and identify the actual figures of the heroes of prehistoric Greece: probably it never will be possible, unless the as yet untranslated Cretan script should furnish the records of a more ancient Herodotus, and a new Champollion should arise to decipher them; but there can scarcely be any reasonable doubt that genuine men and women of Aegean stock filled the roles of these ancient romances, and that the wondrous story of their deeds is, in part at least, the record of actual achievements.
In this remarkable resurrection of the past the most important and convincing part has been played by the evidence from Crete. The discoveries which were made during the last quarter of the nineteenth century by Schliemann and his successors at Mycenae, Tiryns, Orchomenos, and elsewhere, were quite conclusive as to the former existence of a civilization quite equal to, and in all probability the original of, that which is described for us in the Homeric poems; but it was not until the treasures of Cnossos and Phaestos began to be revealed in 1900 and the subsequent years that it became manifest that what was known as the Mycenaean civilization was itself only the decadence of a far richer and fuller culture, whose fountain-head and whose chief sphere of development had been in Crete. And it has been in Crete that exploration and discovery have led to the most striking illustration of many of the statements in the legends and traditions and have made it practically certain that much of what used to be considered mere romantic fable represents’, with, of course, many embellishments of fancy, a good deal of historic fact.
“The first King known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos,” says the great Athenian historian. The Minoan empire, like that of England, rested upon sea-power; its great Kings were the Sea-Kings of the ancient world — the first Sea-Kings known to history, over lords of the Aegean long before “the grave Tyrian trader” had learned “the way of a ship in the sea,” or the land-loving Egyptian had ventured his timid squadrons at the command of a great Queen so far as Punt. And so the fortifications of their capital and palace were not of the huge gypsum blocks which they knew so well how to handle and work. They were the wooden walls, the long low black galleys with the vermilion bows, and the square sail, and the creeping rows of oars, that lay moored or beached at the mouth of the Kairatos River, or cruised around the island coast, keeping the Minoan peace of the Aegean.
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