represented were the ships by means
of which the Egyptians and Cretans maintained their intercourse.
Mr. Hall, on the other hand, maintains that this is impossible,
and that the boats of the pre-dynastic ware are merely small
river-craft, totally unfitted for seafaring work.[*] In his 'Oldest
Civilization of Greece' he roundly asserts 'that these boats were
the ships which plied between Crete and Egypt some 4,000 years
B.C. Nothing can ever prove'; and he therefore believes that the
communication was kept up by way of Cyprus and the Palestinian
coast. But the evidence either way is of so extremely slight a
character, and the delineations in question are so rude, that it
might as well be said that nothing can ever prove that these boats
were _not_ the ships which plied between Crete and Egypt. It does
not seem obvious why the voyage between Crete and Egypt should be
impossible to navigators who could accomplish that between Crete
and Cyprus; and if communication were maintained by way of Cyprus,
it seems strange that that island should show practically no trace of
having been influenced by Minoan civilization until a comparatively
late date. 'It was not till the Cretan culture had passed its zenith
and was already decadent that it reached Cyprus.'[**] That the Homeric
Greeks were by no means daring navigators does not necessarily
imply that an island race, whose whole tradition throughout its
history was of sea-power, should have been equally timid. When
it is remembered in what type of vessel the Northmen risked the
Atlantic passage, one would be slow to believe that even in immediately
post-Neolithic times the Cretans could not have evolved a type of
boat as adequate to the run between Crete and the Nile mouths as
the 'long serpents' were to face the Atlantic rollers.

[Footnote *: 'Egypt and Western Asia,' p. 129.]

[Footnote **: H. R. Hall, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical
Archaeology, vol. xxxi., part v., p. 227.]

But however the case may stand with regard to the pre-dynastic
period, there can be no question that by the end of the Third Dynasty
even Egypt had developed a marine not inadequate to the requirements
of the Cretan passage. We know that Sneferu, the last King of the
Third Dynasty, sent a fleet of forty ships to the Syrian coast
for cedar-wood, and that in his reign a vessel was built of the
very respectable length of 170 feet. Coming farther down, we know
also that Sahura of the Fifth Dynasty s