DAVID G. HOGARTH, M.A., F.S.A., F.R.G.S.,
Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and Director of the British School at Athens.
Hon. Treasurer:
GEORGE A. MACMILLAN, Esq.,
Hon. Secretary of the Society for Promoting Hellenic Studies.
Hon. Secretary:
JOHN L. MYRES, Esq., M.A., F.S.A., F.R.G.S.,
Student of Christ Church, Oxford.
The following Appeal has been issued by the Directors:—
The new conditions in which Crete is placed, and the final emancipation of the island from Turkish rule, have, at last, rendered it possible to organise a serious effort to recover the evidences of her early civilisation.
How important are the results which a thorough-going investigation in this field holds out to archæological science may be gathered from what has already been brought to light in far less favourable circumstances. The path of Cretan exploration was opened out by the English travellers Pashley and Spratt. Their exploratory labours have been followed, in more recent years, by the striking discoveries of Halbherr and Fabricius. The great inscription containing the early laws of Gortyna stands alone as a monument of Greek civic legislation. The bronzes of the Idaean cave have afforded a unique revelation of the beginnings of classical Greek art. Further researches, to which English investigation has once more contributed, have brought into relief the important part played by the still earlier civilisation of Mycenae, the wide diffusion of its remains, and even the existence in the island of an indigenous system of sign-writing anterior to the use of the Phœnician alphabet. Additional indications, indeed, have come to light which carry back the chronology of the earlier relics of Cretan culture far beyond the date of Schliemann's great discoveries on the mainland of Greece, and attest an intercourse with Egypt going back to the third and, it may be, even the fourth millennium before our era. We have here in Crete the first stepping-stone of European civilisation.