rganized and
productive, to a period so remote that its origins were more distant
from the age of Pericles than that age is from our own. We have
probably to deal with a total period of civilization in the AEgean
not much shorter than in the Nile Valley.[*]

[Footnote *: Hogarth, 'Authority and Archaeology,' p. 230.]

The estimate in Hogarth's last sentence, which was published in
1899, before Evans's great discoveries in Crete, was one that must
have seemed extravagant to those who, while familiar with the great
antiquity of Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, had been accustomed
to think of Greek civilization as having its beginning not so very
long before the First Olympiad. It has been fully justified, however,
by the event, and it may now be accepted as an established fact that
the earliest civilization of Greece meets the two great ancient
civilizations of Babylon and Egypt on substantially equal terms.
In antiquity it appears to be practically contemporary with them;
in artistic merit it need not shrink from comparison with either
of them.

In the earlier stages of the discussion which followed on the
discoveries, it was assumed, perhaps somewhat hastily, that such
a culture could not have been indigenous, resemblances to Egyptian
and Mesopotamian work were pointed out, and it was suggested that
the impulse and the skill which gave rise to the art of Mycenae were
not native but borrowed, the Phoenicians being generally held to
be the medium through which the influence of the East had filtered
into the AEgean area. As time has gone on, however, the Phoenicians
have gradually come to bulk less and less in the view of students
of the AEgean problem. It is no longer held that they contributed
anything original to the development of Mycenaean culture, and even
as middlemen the tendency is to allow them an influence far smaller
than was once held to be theirs. It has become manifest that, in
at least the case of Crete and Egypt, communication need not have
been through Phoenician media at all, but was far more probably
direct. And with regard to the whole question of the debt owed
to the East by this early European civilization, it is probable
that the AEgean gave quite as much as it borrowed, and that its
artists were sufficiently great to have originated their own culture.
Mycenaean, and still more the great Minoan art of which Mycenaean has
proved to be only a decadent phase, needed no Oriental crutches.
With re