the Hittites
in the time of Ramses II.; perhaps some site in Crete or Egypt
may yet provide us with a bilingual treaty between Tahutmes III.
and the Minoan Sovereign of his time.

After the time of Tahutmes, the evidences of connection between
the two lands grow scanty once more. The fact that the faience of
the time of Amenhotep III. has discarded the old Egyptian tradition
of black upon blue, and now rejoices in splendid chocolates, purples,
violets, reds, and apple-greens, shows that Cretan influence was
still strong. Fragments of Late Minoan pottery found in abundance
on the site of Akhenaten's new capital at Tell-el-Amarna show that
even in the reign of this King, the heretic son and successor of
Amenhotep III., Crete was still trading with Egypt. But before
Akhenaten came to the throne, about 1380 B.C.--possibly twenty
years before that event--the great catastrophe which brought the
Minoan Empire of Knossos to a close had already happened. The Cretan
wares which filtered into Egypt after 1400 B.C. were the products
of the Minoan decadence, when the survivors of the Empire of the
Sea-Kings--a broken and dwindling race--were still trying to maintain
a slowly failing tradition of art under the new masters, perhaps
the Mycenaeans of the mainland, who, driven forth themselves by
the pressure of Northern invaders, had crushed in their turn the
gentler sister civilization of Crete.

The Mycenaean 'stirrup-vases' pictured in the tomb of Ramses III.
(1202-1170 B.C.), and the representations in the tomb of Imadua of
gold cups of the Vaphio type, carry the connection down to the last
dregs of the dying' race; but by the time of Ramses III. the Minoan
kingdom had probably been dead and buried for about two centuries.
In fact, with the rise of the Nineteenth Dynasty in Egypt (1350
B.C.), the name of the Keftiu disappears from the Egyptian records,
and in the place of the men from the back of beyond there appears
a confused jumble of warring sea-tribes, some of them possibly the
men who had overthrown the Minoan Empire, some of them probably
representing the broken fragments of that Empire itself, who unite
in attacks upon Egypt, but are foiled and overthrown. In the record
of the earlier of these invasions, that which took place in the
reign of Merenptah (1234-1214 B.C.), the successor of Ramses II.,
it is difficult to trace any names that have Cretan connections.
The Aqayuasha may conceivably have been Achaeans; but that i