Of the wealth of material which has been brought to light much, of course, still waits, and perhaps may long wait, for interpretation.
Continuing The Origin of Greek Alphabet Discovered,
Today is our final installment from James Baikie and then we begin the second part of the series with David G. Hogarth.
Previously in The Origin of Greek Alphabet Discovered.
Such, then, have been the outstanding results of the excavation of the ancient palace of the Cretan Sea-Kings, so far as it has yet proceeded. Of the wealth of material which has been brought to light much, of course, still waits, and perhaps may long wait, for interpretation. The facts are there, but the significance of them is not always easily discerned. But, at least, the importance of the supreme fact can not be questioned; the emergence of this magnificent relic of a civilization, so great and so advanced as to fill the mind with wonder, so curiously corroborating the ancient legends as to the greatness and power of the House of Minos, and yet so absolutely lost as to have left no trace of itself, save in romantic story, until the patience and skill of present-day explorers restored its relics to the light of day to tell, though as yet only imperfectly, their own tale of splendor and disaster.
The interpretation and coordination of the immense body of material gathered by Dr. Evans must for long be the work of scholars. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that when the Minoan script has at length yielded up its secrets we shall be able to comprehend clearly those historical outlines of the rise and magnificence and fall of a great monarchy and culture, which at present have to be cautiously and sometimes precariously inferred from the indications afforded by scraps of potsherd and fragments of stone or metal. And then the actual story of the House of Minos will appeal to all. Today, perhaps, the main impression left on the ordinary student by this resurrection is one of sadness. Here was a kingdom so great and so imposing, a civilization so highly advanced and so full of the joy of living. And it has all passed away and been forgotten, with its vivid life and its hopes and fears; and we can only wonder how life looked to the men and women who peopled the courts of the vast palace, and what part was played by them in the fragments of old legend that have come down to us.
The pathos of this aspect of his discoveries has not been missed by the explorer. Writing of the restoration of the Queen’s apartment of the palace, a restoration rendered necessary by the decomposing action of wind and rain on the long- buried materials, Dr. Evans says: “From the open court to the east, and the narrower area that flanks the inner section of the hall, the light pours in between the piers and columns just as it did of old. In cooler tones it steals into the little bathroom behind. It dimly illumines the painted spiral frieze above its white gypsum dado, and falls below on the small terra-cotta bath-tub, standing much as it was left some three and a half millenniums back. The little bath bears a painted design of a character that marks the close of the great ‘ Palace Style.’ By whom was it last used? By a Queen, perhaps, and mother for some ‘Hope of Minos’ — a hope that failed.”
Thus, it is abundantly evident that the civilization of Minoan Crete had varied and perfectly adequate means of expressing itself. The old Cretan tradition that the Phoenicians did not invent the letters of the alphabet, but only changed those already existing, is amply justified; for this seems to have been precisely what they did. The Phoenician mind, if not original, was at all events practical. The great stumbling-block in the way of the ancient scripts was their complexity — a fault which the Minoan users of the Linear Script, Class B, had evidently already begun to recognize and endeavor to amend. What the Phoenicians did was to carry the process of simplification farther still, and to appropriate for their own use out of the elements already existing around them a conveniently short and simple system of signs. The position which they came to occupy, after the Minoan empire of the sea had passed away, as the great carriers and middle men of the Mediterranean, gave their system a spread and a utility possible to no other system of writing; and so the Phoenician alphabet gradually came to take its place as the basis of all subsequent scripts. Unquestionably it was a great and important service which was thus rendered by them; but, all the same, the beginnings of European writing must be traced not to them, but to their predecessors, the Minoans, and the clay tablets of Cnossos, Phaestos, and Hagia Triada are the lineal ancestors of all the written literature of Europe.
The scholar of the old fashion, who quoted with impartiality from his Homer, his Horace, his Vergil, and his Bible, must be a little befogged by the terrific dust which the archeologist’s spade has been raising during a generation past. When Grote wrote the history of Greece, what was not literature was not knowledge, and the Hellenist troubled himself no more about a civilization before Agamemnon than about a civilization in the Garden of Eden. Man had, no doubt, been producing things many and strange in the Nile Valley and in Mesopotamia for unnumbered generations, but what had a classical scholar to do with those? Hellenic culture sprang into the world, like an Athene from the head of Zeus, by some miraculous effect of the favorable conditions of the Promised Land upon gifted but undeveloped tribes that had been wandering over Asiatic and European steppes since they left the original seat of the Aryans. But nowadays what is come to this comfortable doctrine? Every six months The Times prints from two to three columns of matter concerning ancient cultures of the near East, which Greek literature never mentioned at all, Minoan and Danubian and Hittite; and the writers of the articles evidently regard these cultures as having something, if not everything, to say to the origin of Hellenic civilization. Fuller accounts of the discoveries, which prompt these articles, appear in specialist periodicals or highly technical books, which, if the old-fashioned scholar consults them, give him information usually provisional and often contradictory. As a plain man, he wants to know where he stands. Evidently the old limitations of his knowledge are no longer those of everyone else. But what does the expansion imply? Has the bottom been knocked out of his settled beliefs on the origin of that civilization which matters before all others to an Hellenist? In a word, what does all this recent archeological discovery amount to?
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