ece before, let us say, the 6th century
B.C., it would be useless to expect that any events of Grecian history
prior to about the 7th century B.C. could have been transmitted to
posterity with any degree of historical accuracy.

Notwithstanding the allurements of the subject, such conservative
historians as Grote were disposed to regard the problems of early
Grecian history as inscrutable, and to content themselves with the
recital of traditions without attempting to establish their relationship
with actual facts. It remained for the more robust faith of a Schliemann
to show that such scepticism was all too faint-hearted, by proving that
at such sites as Tiryns, Mycenae and Hissarlik evidences of a very early
period of Greek civilization awaited the spade of the excavator. Thanks
to the enthusiasm of Schliemann and his successors, we can now
substitute for the mythical "Age of Heroes" a historical "Mycenaean Age"
of Greece, and give tangible proof of its relatively high state of
civilization. Schliemann may or may not have been correct in identifying
one of the seven cities that he unearthed at Hissarlik as the fabled
Troy itself, but at least his efforts sufficed to give verisimilitude to
the Homeric story. With the lessons of recent Oriental archaeology in
mind, few will be sceptical enough to doubt that some such contest as
that described in the _Iliad_ actually occurred. And now, thanks to the
efforts of a large company of workers, notably Dr Arthur Evans and his
associates in Cretan exploration, we are coming to speak with some
confidence not merely of a Mycenaean but of a pre-Mycenaean Age.

As yet we see these periods somewhat darkly. The illuminative witness of
written records is in the main denied us here. Some most archaic
inscriptions have been indeed found by the explorers in Crete, but these
for the present serve scarcely any other purpose than to prove the
antiquity of the art of writing among a people who were closely in touch
with the inhabitants of Hellas proper. Most unfortunately for posterity,
the Greeks wrote mainly on perishable materials, and hence the chief
records even of their later civilization have vanished. The only
fragments of Greek manuscripts antedating the Christian era that have
been preserved to us have been found in Egypt, where a hospitable
climate granted them a term of existence not to be hoped for elsewhere.
No fragment of these papyri, indeed, carries us further back than the
a