We now know Aegean civilization to have been developed locally from rude neolithic beginnings by an unbroken process of evolution continued throughout the Age of Bronze.
Continuing The Origin of Greek Alphabet Discovered,
our selection by David G. Hogarth.
Previously in The Origin of Greek Alphabet Discovered.
Take first the prehistoric culture of the Aegean, which we never heard of under any other name till a generation ago, nor as Minoan till the last decade. We now know Aegean civilization to have been developed locally from rude neolithic beginnings by an unbroken process of evolution continued throughout the Age of Bronze. But who the Aegean peoples were ethnologically is almost as obscure as ever, and likely to remain so till some happy chance of patient labor brings about the decipherment of the Cretan tablets and the determination of their family of language.
We are no nearer that decipherment. When Mr. Arthur Evans issued the first volume of his Scripta Minoa it was seen how little can be done without the help of a bilingual text, or one in some known alphabetic character. Still, the cumulative effect of the discoveries made in Crete leaves no manner of doubt that Minoan culture can stand comparison with the highest contemporary culture of Egypt or Mesopotamia, and that artistically it was more alive and progressive than either of these. So much has been written about the combination of idealistic aim with realistic execution exemplified in the best Aegean work, whether of the first great Minoan period, con temporary with the Egyptian Middle Empire, or of the second and last, contemporary with the Eighteenth Pharaonic Dynasty, that we will only say this: that, even after the Cnossian ivories, faience figurines, and faience and plaster reliefs, after the Cnossian and Haghia Triadha frescoes, the Haghia Triadha steatite vases and painted sarcophagus, after the finest “Kamares” pottery and the finer intaglios, the Vaphio goblets and the Mycenae dagger blades, one was still not prepared for the bull’s head rhyton, which Mr. Evans has just described in The Times, with its painted transparencies for eyes and its admirable modeling, and the striking contrast between the black polished steatite of the mass and the creamy cameo shell of the inlay work. Let me bear independent witness, so far as one who has seen photographs only can bear it, that the effect is as superbly decorative as it is astonishingly realistic, and that the whole attests, equally with the Mycenaean metallic intarsia work, the preeminence of Aegean artists over Egyptian in the appreciation of color tones.
For actual proof of the probable parentage of the Aegean and the Hellenic cultures we needed more evidence concerning, on the one side, the latest Aegean society, on the other the earliest Hellenic. And more is being gradually collected. Of the first society mainly from Cnossus. Four years ago Mr. Evans let in light on the dark period which followed the destruction of the latest Palace by his exploration of a large and rich cemetery at Zafer Papoura, which contained interments, both of the latest Palace time and of the succeeding epoch. The grave-furniture proved conclusively that Minoan art survived the catastrophe of the Palace practically un affected by any new influence but degenerating into formal ism by its own natural decay. How far down the centuries these tombs take us toward the Hellenic Age is not certain. The Cnossian Palace was ruined about 1400 B.C., as comparison of its latest relics with Cretan products found in Akhenaten’s city at Tell Amarna satisfactorily proves. The tombs illustrate a considerable space of time after that, but not any part of the Age of Iron. The latest vases found in them are identical in style with others found at Ialysus in Rhodes, at Enkomi in Cyprus, and on mainland Greek sites; and these vases, if we may judge by progressive degradation of ornament, were the immediate predecessors of the pottery in certain Cretan graves outside Cnossus, wherein both bronze and iron objects occurred. This stage of transition from bronze to iron is the stage in which the Achaean society depicted in Homer seems to be; and if the Achaeans are those Aqaiusha who attacked the Egyptians in Rameses III.’s day, as scholars are practically unanimous in believing, they had appeared with their incipient knowledge of iron in the Aegean by the twelfth century B.C. It seems probable, therefore, that the Zafer Papoura cemetery was in use for burials nearly down to the close of the Bronze Age in Crete, and that the extra-Cnossian graves of the transitional stage between Bronze and Iron carry on the witness of Minoan survival to a period contemporary with the first appearance of an iron- using race in the Aegean. This last must be regarded as the earliest wave of that northern flood which went to form the historic Hellenic people and introduce the cremation of the dead and the fashion of dress which required the fibula or safety-pin to secure it on the person — a fashion not depicted by earlier Aegean artists, but proved henceforth to be coming in by the increasing occurrence of fibulce all over the Aegean area.
There is some reason, indeed, to think that the history of mainland Greece had been in several respects not the same as that of Crete even in the Aegean Age. If the Peloponnesian prehistoric cities were certainly importing fine Cretan products in the Later Minoan Period, and were almost certainly at that time tributary to Cnossus, the fact that they were even then strongly fortified shows that they had inland enemies; the scantiness and poverty of their earlier remains indicate that they had not enjoyed the same opportunities for cultural development, but had remained comparatively barbarous, when Crete, in the Middle Minoan Period, was in many respects at the height of its artistic achievement; and our continued failure to find any but the rudest and rarest examples of writing on mainland sites seems to argue that their comparative inferiority in civilization continued to the end of the Aegean Age. More than that, this last piece of negative evidence is held to suggest that the Cretan script was never used on the mainland, and perhaps the Cretan language not commonly understood.
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