Fig. 2.—From Ancient Coins (Akerman, J. Y.).
In The Myths of Crete and Pre-Hellenic Europe, Dr. Mackenzie inquires: “By whom were Egyptian beads carried to Britain, between 1500 B.C. and 1400 B.C.? Certainly not the Phœnicians. The sea traders of the Mediterranean were at the time the Cretans. Whether or not their merchants visited England we have no means of knowing.”[16]
The material which I shall produce establishes a probability that the Cretans systematically visited Britain, and further that the tradition of the peopling of this island by men of Trojan race are well founded.
According to the immemorial records of the Welsh Bards: “There were three names imposed on the Isle of Britain from the beginning. Before it was inhabited its denomination was Sea-Girt Green-space; after being inhabited it was called the Honey Island, and after it was formed into a Commonwealth by Prydain, the Son of Aedd Mawr, it was called the Isle of Prydain. And none have any title therein but the nation of the Kymry. For they first settled upon it, and before that time no men lived therein, but it was full of bears, wolves, beavers, and bisons.”[17]
In the course of these essays I shall discuss the Kymry, and venture a few suggestions as to their cradle and community of memories and hopes. But behind the Kymry, as likewise admittedly behind the Cretans, are the traces of an even more primitive and archaic race. The earliest folk which reached Crete are described as having come with a form of culture which had been developed elsewhere, and among these neolithic settlers have been found traces of a race 6 feet in height and with skulls massive and shapely. Moreover Cretan beliefs and the myths which are based upon them are admittedly older than even the civilisation of the Tigro-Euphrates valley: and they belong, it would appear, to a stock of common inheritance from an uncertain culture centre of immense antiquity.[18]
The problem of Crete is indissolubly connected with that of Etruria, which was flourishing in Art and civilisation at a period when Rome was but a coterie of shepherds’ huts. Here again are found Cyclopean walls and the traces of some most ancient people who had sway in Italy at a period even more remote than the national existence of Etruria.[19]
We are told that the first-comers in Crete ground their meal in stone mortars, and that one of the peculiarities of the island was the herring-bone design of their wall buildings. In West Cornwall the stone walls or Giants’ Hedges are Cyclopean; farther north, in the Boscastle district, herring-bone walls are common, and in the neighbourhood of St. Just there are numerous British villages wherein the stone mortars are still standing.
The formula of independent evolution, which has recently been much over-worked, is now waning into disfavour, and it is difficult to believe otherwise than that identity of names, customs, and characteristics imply either borrowing or descent from some common, unknown source.
That the builders of our European tumuli and cromlechs were maritime arrivals is a reasonable inference from the fact that dolmens and cromlechs were built almost invariably near the sea.[20] These peculiar and distinctive monuments are found chiefly along the Western coasts of Britain, the Northern coast of Africa, in the isles of the Mediterranean, in the isolated, storm-beaten Hebrides, and in the remote islands of Asia and Polynesia.