ge of the Ptolemies; but the Greek inscriptions on the statues of
Rameses II at Abu-Simbel, in Nubia, give conclusive proof that the art
of writing was widely disseminated among the Greeks at least three
centuries before the age of Alexander. This carries us back towards the
traditional age of Homer.

The Cretan inscriptions belong to a far older epoch, and are written in
two non-Grecian scripts of undetermined affinities. Here, then, is
direct evidence that the Aegean peoples of the Mycenaean Age knew how to
write, and it is no longer necessary to assume that the verses of the
_Iliad_ were dependent on mere verbal transmission for any such period
as has been supposed.

But even were direct evidence of the knowledge of the art of writing in
Greece of the early day altogether lacking, none but the hardiest
sceptic could doubt, in the light of recent archaeological discoveries
elsewhere, that the inhabitants of ancient Hellas of the "Homeric Age"
must have shared with their contemporaries the capacity to record their
thought in written words. We have seen that Oriental archaeology has in
recent generations revolutionized our conceptions of the antiquity of
civilization. We have seen that written documents have been preserved in
Mesopotamia to which such a date as 4500 B.C. may be ascribed with a
good deal of confidence; and that from the third millennium B.C. a flood
of contemporary literary records comes to us both from Egypt and
Mesopotamia. But until recently it had been supposed that Hellas was
shut out entirely from this Oriental culture. Historians have found it
hard to dispel the idea that civilization in Greece was a very late
development, and that the culture of the age of Solon sprang, in fact,
suddenly into existence, as it seems to do in the records of the
historian. But the excavations that have given us a knowledge of the
Mycenaean Age have proved conclusively, not alone that civilization
existed in Greece in an early day, but that this civilization was
closely linked with the civilization of Egypt. Not only have antiquities
been found in Crete that point to Egyptian inspiration, but quite
recently Professor Petrie has found at Tel el-Amarna Mycenaean pottery.
The latter find has a peculiar significance, since the date of the Tel
el-Amarna collection is definitely fixed between the years 1400 and 1370
B.C.

It is demonstrated, then, that as early as the beginning of the 14th
century B.C. the Mycenaean civ