Water is the birthplace of civilisation, as of life itself, and the original home of the Ægean or Mycenæan civilisation is probably to be found in the island of Crete. It is crammed with remains of pre-Hellenic culture. It is a big stepping-stone from Greece to Asia Minor, Karpathos and Rhodes lying between. It is in the line of communication with Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt on the East, and with Sicily and the coastlines of the Western Mediterranean. The earliest Greek tradition looks back to Crete "as the home of divinely inspired legislation and the first centre of maritime dominion." And, what is of the highest moment to remember, so far as the origin of the art of navigation in Ægean waters goes, there can be no question between the old claims on behalf of the Phœnicians and the present claims on behalf of Crete. The Syrian seaboard is harbourless and unsheltered; the men who first braved the "unvintaged wine dark" waters (how fine are all the Homeric sea-words) were island-dwellers, shooting forth from snug creek and harbour on quick and sudden enterprise, and growing bolder and bolder as they sailed by the rising and setting of the stars and the recurring moon. "The early sea-trade of the inhabitants of the island world of the Ægean gave them a start over their neighbours, and produced a higher form of culture, which was destined to react on that of a vast European zone, nay, even upon that of the older civilisations of Egypt and Asia." (Evans, Address, B. Assoc., p. 530.) For the diffusion of culture throughout the Ægean was followed by expeditions to the East. While Cyprus yielded the metal to which it has given its name, the gold of Asia Minor was poured into the lap of the pre-Hellenes, and moulded into forms of beauty through which their own artistic skill challenged comparison with that of the Oriental. In his comment on the source of the Mycenæan civilisation Mr. Frazer aptly remarks that "the existence at this early date of a great maritime power in Crete, which by its central position between Greece and the empires of the East was well fitted to receive and amalgamate the characteristics of both, is just what is needed to explain the rise and wide diffusion of a type of civilisation like the Mycenæan, in which Oriental influences seem to be assimilated and transmuted by a vigorous and independent nationality endowed with a keen sense of its own for art. The spade will probably one day decide the question of priority between Argolis and Crete, but in the meantime the probability appears to be that the Mycenæan civilisation rose in Crete and spread from it as a centre, and that it was not until the Cretan power was on the wane that the palmy days of Tiryns and Mycenæ began." (Commentary on Pausanias, vol. iii. p. 151.) The Mycenæan civilisation perished in a great catastrophe. Somewhere near the middle of the twelfth century b.c. the Dorian invaders in their southward march reached the walls of Tiryns and Mycenæ, and sacked and gave those cities to the flames. Then began for Greece "the long dark ages, the mediæval epoch, out of which she emerges only in the Homeric Renaissance." The flower of the survivors of that dread time sought a new home east of the Ægean on the isles and shores of Ionia. There these exiles from Argolis laid the foundation of a culture whose influence will abide while the world stands, because Ionia remains the fatherland of all who hold dear what man has reached in art and literature, in science and philosophy.
The fall of Mycenæ gave Phœnicia her opportunity, and she was quick to seize it in establishing depôts throughout the Ægean, and in securing the overlordship of the Mediterranean. But through her lack of political unity, and her dependence on mercenary aid when troubles came, finally she succumbed to the strong arm of the reinvigorated Greek. Between their rise and decline the Phœnicians had put the alphabet into, practically, its present form, and secured its adoption by the Greeks. But if they did not derive it from the Egyptian hieratic, whence came it?
No definite answer is forthcoming, and perhaps never will be. Canon Rawlinson is not alone in thinking that it will probably never be settled whether the Phœnician characters are modifications of the Egyptian or the Hittite or of Cypriote, or mere abbreviated forms of a picture-writing peculiar to the Phœnicians. That opinion was expressed before the discovery of the Cretan pictographs and linear signs, and these have not settled the question. The Phœnicians came under various influences, and their adaptive character readily took the impress of their surroundings. Probably they had a long history before they appear in Syria. As Semites, they were presumably familiar with cuneiform. The Tyrian quarter at Memphis was one of many settlements where the Egyptian characters would be in use, or, at least, familiar. And when the Phœnicians came into the Ægean they found an ancient script whereby intercourse was facilitated along the Mediterranean, a script of which so pliant a people, eager for trade, would avail themselves. In view of all these probabilities, Mr. Evans remarks that it is at least worth while weighing "the possibility that the rudiments of the Phœnician writing may after all have come in part at least from the Ægean side. The more the relics of Mycenæan culture are revealed to us, the more we see how far ahead of their neighbours on the Canaanite coasts was the Ægean population in arts and civilisation." The spread of their commerce led them to seek plantations in the Nile Valley and the Mediterranean outlets of the Arabian and Red Sea trade. The position was the reverse of that which meets our eye at a later date. It was not Sidon that was then planting mercantile settlements on the coasts and islands of Greece." (Jo. Hellen. Stud., p. 368.) Whether, per contra, a Semitic element had been introduced into the Ægean is uncertain, but could this be proved, the presence of similarities between the respective scripts would have easy explanation. Putting together, however, what is no longer conjectural, it would seem that the Phœnician alphabet was a compound from various sources, the selection and modification of the several characters being ruled by convenience, and that, primarily and essentially, commercial. Like all business people immersed in many transactions, their method was brevity, and so they aimed as near "shorthand" as they could. They got rid of surplus signs, of the lumber of determinatives and the like, and invented an alphabet which if it was not perfect (as no alphabet can be, because the letters are not revised from time to time to represent changes in sound), was of such signal value as to have been accepted by the civilised world of the past, and to have secured, with but slight modifications, a permanence assured to no other invention of the human race. Therefore, the debt that we owe these old traders is in nowise lessened because the current theory of derivation of our alphabet is doubted. This theory as to the nature of the service rendered by the Phœnicians has corroboration in an ancient Cretan tradition recorded by Diodôros, a contemporary of Julius Cæsar and Augustus, to which Mr. Evans makes reference in the reprint of his essay. According to that tradition, the Phœnicians had not invented written characters, but had simply "changed their shapes." In other words, they had not done more than improve on an existing system, which is precisely what recent evidence goes to show. "We may infer from the Cretan contention recorded by Diodôros that the Cretans claimed to have been in possession of a system of writing before the introduction of the Phœnician alphabet. The present discovery on Cretan soil both of a pictographic and a linear script dating from times anterior to any known Phœnician contact thus affords an interesting corroboration of this little regarded record of an ancient writer." (Cretan Pictographs, p. 372.)
CHAPTER X
GREEK PAPYRI
The Greeks succeeded to the sovereignty of the sea after they had driven the Phœnicians from the Ægean. They were skilful shipbuilders and navigators, and their maritime enterprise, in which, as has been shown, they preceded the Phœnicians, took a new lease of life from the eighth century b.c. Their factories and colonies were planted from east to west, from Odessa to Marseilles, where, as their farthermost point, we find them settled 600 b.c. The assistance given by Ionians and Carians to Psammetichus, the first king of the twenty-sixth dynasty (666 b.c.) in his war with the Assyrians was rewarded by the assignment of permanent settlements in Egypt, and in the reign of his son, Necho II., the cities of Sais and Naucratis (about both of which Herodotus has much to say, ii. 97, 135, 169, 178, &c.) was full of Greek colonists, to whose commercial and intellectual activity the then prosperous state of Egypt was mainly due. The footing which they obtained there was secured when, three hundred years later, Alexander the Great marked his conquest in the founding of the city which bears his name. It is well to keep these facts in mind, because in our assessment of the debt of the civilised world to Greece we are apt to forget that it was not wholly intellectual, but also social and industrial. And these facts have bearing on our immediate subject in explaining the spread of the Greek alphabet, or, more precisely, the Western or Chalcidian form of it, whence the Latin, and through it the alphabets of Europe and America, are derived. Although the name was limited to the districts in the south of Italy, in the larger sense of the term Græcia Major corresponds to Greater Britain. As with the area of our home islands compared with that of our colonies, so was it with Hellas and her expansion along the sea whose waters laved the coasts of the civilised world. And the spread of the English language and the English alphabet over half the civilised globe may be compared with "the diffusion of Hellenic culture and Hellenic scripts throughout the Mediterranean region, originating in the pre-Christian centuries various derived alphabets—Iberian, Gaulish, Etruscan, Latin, and Runic, followed at a later time by the Mæso-Gothic, Albanian, &c." (Taylor, ii. 125.)
Palæography, or the decipherment of documents, and Epigraphy, or the decipherment of inscriptions, have been indispensable keys to the history of the alphabet. But the materials with which each has to deal would demand a volume, and, moreover, reference to them here has warrant only in their immediate bearings on the development and diffusion of alphabets. But, as with the Papyrus Prisse and the Book of the Dead, there is a deep interest attaching to some of the venerable records. They are, in the modern phrase, and in the best sense of it, "human documents." Such are the Greek papyri, the oldest-known specimens of which are found in Egypt, and have a range of a thousand years, i.e. from the third century b.c. to the seventh century a.d., so that, as Mr. Kenyon remarks in his monograph on the subject, "we may fairly say that we know how men wrote in the days of Aristotle and Menander, but we have not yet got back to Pindar and Æschylus, much less to Homer or (if a less contentious name be preferred) Hesiod." The use of papyrus as a writing material stretches back in Egypt to a remote antiquity; but we cannot be certain that it was used by the Greeks before the early part of the fifth century b.c., while "with the Arab conquest of Egypt (640 a.d.) the practice of Greek writing on papyrus received its death-blow." By far the larger number of documents thus far discovered are non-literary, dealing with official and commercial matters, as tax-collectors' receipts (although many of these are scratched on potsherds, or ostraca, literally "oyster shells," whence ostracize, the inscribing of the name of a person obnoxious to the state on a shell), acknowledgments of repayment of dowry after divorce, wills, reports of public physicians on autopsy, house-keeping bills, surety deeds, registration of title to inheritance, wedding and dinner invitations, of which last here is an example eighteen hundred years old: "Chæron requests your company at dinner at the table of Lord Serapis in the Serapæum to-morrow, the 15th, at 9 o'clock" (i.e. about 3 p.m.). Then there are domestic letters, one, touching human hearts across the centuries, from a father to his son: "Tell me anything I can do for you. Good-bye, my boy;" and another crudely written, and with faulty spelling and grammar, from a boy to his father. "Theon to his father Theon, greeting: It was a fine thing of you not to take me with you to Alexandria. I won't write a letter or speak to you, or say good-bye to you, and if you go to Alexandria I won't take your hand, nor ever greet you again. That is what will happen if you won't take me.... Send me a lyre, I implore you; if you don't, I won't eat, I won't drink. There, now!"
The first discovery of Greek papyri was made at Herculaneum in 1752. They consist of above eighteen hundred charred rolls, which were enclosed in a wooden cabinet, and doubtless formed a portion of the library of one Lucius Piso Cæsonius, in the ruins of whose villa they were found. The condition of the papyri made the unrolling and decipherment of them a very tedious operation, and the work is not even yet completed. "They are written in small uncial letters, and possess little beyond palæographic value, comprising worthless treatises on physics, music, rhetoric, and kindred subjects by Philodemus and other third-rate philosophers of the Epicurean school." A quarter of a century later some rolls of papyrus were found in Egypt, probably in the Fayum. Of these only one, containing a list of peasants employed in the corvée, survived destruction by the natives, and it was not till 1820 that the discovery of a number of rolls on the site of the Serapeum at Memphis supplied the key to knowledge of Greek writing of the second century b.c. Since then, at varying intervals, the finds have increased in number and importance. The earliest known examples, dating from the third century b.c., were discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1889 in a number of mummy cases at Gurob. Most of these papyri were non-literary—wills, petitions, and such-like documents—but two valuable relics came to light in fragments of Plato's Phædo and the lost Antiope of Euripides. Then followed the discovery of another lost work, Aristotle's Αθηναίων Πολιτεία; of the Mimes of Herodas—an almost unknown writer of the Alexandrian age—part of another oration of Hyperides; a long medical treatise, and fragments of Homer, Demosthenes, and Isocrates. The Mimes, two thousand years old, are as young as yesterday. "Though," Mr. Whibley remarks in a charming paper upon these recovered treasures, "they have survived the searching test of time, they have been unseen of mortal eyes for countless centuries. The emotions which Herodas delineates are not Greek, but human, and no preliminary cramming in archæology is necessary for their appreciation. As the world was never young, so it will never grow old. The archæologist devotes years of research to compiling a picture of Greek life, and the result is Charicles—a cold and unrelieved mass of 'local colour.' There is no proportion, no atmosphere, no background; all is false save the details, and they merely overload the canvas. Herodas presents not a picture, but an impression, and one mime reveals more of life as it was lived two thousand years ago, than the complete works of Becker, Ebers, and the archæologists." (Nineteenth Century, Nov. 1891, p. 748.) Here is one scene by which Mr. Whibley justifies his appreciation. The dramatis personæ are Metriche, a grass-widow; Threissa, her maid; and Gyllis, an old lady.