249. Ægean Civilization
On the island of Crete, almost equidistant from Asia, Africa, and Europe, there began to grow up with the introduction of bronze, about 3000 B.C., a civilization most of whose elements were imported, but which added to them and molded the whole of its mass with unusual originality. Three great periods, named the Early, Middle, and Late “Minoan” after the legendary Cretan king Minos, are distinguishable in the abundant remains which excavation has brought to light; each of these is divisible into three sub-periods designated I, II, III. At some sites, such as Knossos, the remains of successive sub-periods are separated by layers of packed-down earth deposited when an old settlement was obliterated and serving as floor for the next occupation. Underneath the Bronze Age deposits were thick strata from the Neolithic, with unpainted pottery. With the Early Minoan, about 3000 B.C., painted pottery as well as bronze came in, to be followed by the potter’s wheel and a system of hieroglyphic writing unrelated to the Egyptian. In the Middle Minoan the pottery became polychrome, palaces were built, art took a remarkable naturalistic turn in pottery and fresco painting and carving, and the hieroglyphics evolved into a linear, probably syllabic, script. The beginning of the Late Minoan, from the sixteenth to the fourteenth century B.C., saw the culmination of Cretan civilization. Then something violent happened, the palaces were destroyed, and after a brief decadence Minoan culture passed out at the arrival of the first of the historic Greeks, at the opening of the Iron Age, about 1250 B.C.
The Minoans left no chronology of their own and their writing is unread. But datable Egyptian objects found in Cretan strata of identified period, and Cretan objects characteristic of particular periods found at datable Egyptian sites as the result of trade, have made possible an indirect but positive chronology for Minoan culture. The second sub-periods of Early, Middle, and Late Minoan respectively were contemporary with the Sixth, Twelfth, and Eighteenth Dynasties on the Nile. From 2000 B.C. on, Minoan dates are therefore reliable within a century and sometimes less. Industry, commerce, games, a light, practical style of architecture, above all a graceful realistic art, flourished particularly from Middle Minoan III to Late Minoan II. There was evidently considerable wealth, a leisure class, and life was prevailingly peaceful and surrounded with charm.
The Minoans were a Caucasian people of Mediterranean race. Their language is unknown, but seems to have been distinct from the later Greek, and therefore probably non-Indo-European. When their home power crumbled, a fragment appears to have taken refuge in Asia and founded the Philistine cities which for a time pressed the tribal Hebrews and which gave their name to Palestine.
A related culture appears in the ruins of the successive cities of Troy; on the islands of the Ægean Sea; and in mainland Greece, where it has been called Mycenæan, after the citadel and town attributed to Agamemnon. Ægean perhaps is the name least likely to confuse, for this larger culture of which the Cretan Minoan was long the most illustrious representative. The [table] outlines the principal correlations.
The thirteenth century brought the Greeks, then a rude, hardy, and at first non-maritime people, fighting their way south and wrecking or sapping the Ægean civilization. Culture lost its bloom, life became hard, the outlook contracted. Art shriveled into crude geometric ornamentation, the forms became childishly inept, intercourse with the Orient sank to a minimum, and when trade and foreign stimulation revived they were at first in Phœnician hands. It is not until the seventh century that true history begins in Greece, and in the main only to the sixth that the rudiments of that characteristic Hellenic philosophy, literature, and art can be traced, which were released after the Persian wars early in the fifth century. Yet the half thousand and more years of dark ages between Ægean and classic Greek civilization did not entail a complete interruption. The Greek often enough smote the Mycenæan or Minoan. More often, perhaps, he settled alongside him, possibly oppressed him, but learned from him. He choked out Ægean culture, but nourished his own upon it. The Homeric poems, composed in Greek during this period of retrogression, picture a civilization essentially Ægean; and along with them much other cultural tradition must have been passed on.
At any rate, when Greek culture reëmerged, it was charged with Oriental elements and influences, but perhaps even more charged with Ægean ones. Its games, its unponderous architecture, its open city life, the free quality of its art, its political particularity, its peculiar alert tenseness and feeling for grace, had all flourished before on Greek soil. Their flavor is un-Asiatic and un-Egyptian of whatever period. We have here another instance of the tenacity of the attachment of cultural qualities to the soil; of the faculty, at once absorptive and resistive, that for thousands of years, however inventions might diffuse and culture elements circulate, succeeded in keeping China something that can fairly be called Chinese, India Indian, Egypt Egyptian, the Northwest and Southwest of America Northwestern and Southwestern respectively; in a degree even kept Europe, so long culturally dependent on the Orient, always European.