PREFACE
Sir Arthur Evans’ renewed campaign of excavation in Crete has again attracted considerable public attention to the remarkable disclosures of the last twenty years. Sir Arthur Evans himself is at present engaged in compiling in three big volumes the consecutive story of Minoan civilization as revealed by his own excavations. The present writer is convinced that the story of Cretan discovery is such as to appeal to the imagination of a wide public who have no specialist interest in archæology. The story has all the interest of adventure and exploration. This book is an attempt to meet what such a public wants. I have tried to give a general picture of the world which existed in the Mediterranean four thousand years ago, and of the amazing process by which it has been revealed, so that it can be understood by those totally unacquainted with classical study, and I have tried to give it in one hour’s reading. For those who want to go further I give references to other books. It must be understood that this book does not aim at an exact account of the archæological position as it exists to-day. With new excavations being carried out this very year, and with new material in the hands of the excavators, as yet unpublished and undigested, any attempt to be strictly up to date would merely mean the progressive and indefinite postponement of the book. The broad lines of the discovery of Minoan civilization are clear, and in the writer’s opinion, even because a new campaign of excavation is now started, ought to be presented now in a form to be easily understood. The results of the discoveries of this spring, for instance, add important details to our knowledge—some of which I have incorporated—but do not affect fundamentals.
Some of the substance of the following chapters was published in 1920 and 1921 in Discovery, to the Editor of which I am grateful for permission to re-publish them. In a somewhat different form the substance was also published by me in 1914-1915 in the National Home Reading Magazine.
It is to my friend Dr. Ronald Montagu Burrows that I, in common with thousands, owe my interest in Crete. He died on May 14, 1920, before his time. He was incredibly, challengingly young and vigorous both in appearance and in activity, and at fifty-two was producing work at the top of his brilliant form. His work was a mixture of youth and maturity such as one does not often find. In 1907, when he first published his Discoveries in Crete, men were confused by the avalanche of discovery in Crete which had been going on since the opening of the century. Burrows’s achievement—for which scholars and the intellectual public have ever since been grateful—was to give a comprehensive and interpretive account of the whole revelation and to place it in its perspective. Before that even scholars as a whole had not seen wood for trees.
Dr. Burrows’s own excavations at Pylos and Sphacteria and at Rhitsona were typical of him. He cleared up the narrative and established the good faith of the historian Thucydides. Scholars had in vain tried to find any trace of the fortifications said by Thucydides to have been erected there by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian war. Only a few months before Burrows first went out—he was then a young man who did not know the difficulty of what he attempted—a celebrated geographer, Dr. Grundy, had explored the site and reported that there was no trace of the fortifications. Burrows discovered substantial remains hidden away under the brushwood, and succeeded in proving that they fully corresponded with Thucydides’s account.
I am grateful to Professor R. S. Conway and to Sir Arthur Evans for reading my manuscript and helping me with suggestions; but neither must be held responsible for anything that appears in the book.
1922.