Dr. Hall would like to add another century or two to this shorter chronology,[524] and there is much to be said for such a step. I have not, however, ventured to do so here, but if such an amendment should prove generally acceptable, it would only be necessary to add the required figure to all my dates, other than Mesopotamian, prior to 1580 B.C., as far back as the beginning of the neolithic age.
APPENDIX II
MATRILINEAR SUCCESSION IN GREECE
BACHOFEN[525] was the first to draw attention to the existence of mother-right in Greece, and he was followed in 1886 by M’Lennan.[526] Both these authors claimed support from evidence which will not now stand investigation; a more judicious statement of the case was issued last year by Dr. Hartland.[527] In 1911 Professor Rose[528] set out to prove the case, but found that his evidence led him to a contrary conclusion, and he argued that such customs were unknown in Hellenic Greece. If by Hellenic he means “Achæan” and Dorian, that is to say Wiro Greece, I am in full agreement with him, but he includes also Minoan Crete, “because it is just possible that the population was in some sense Hellenic.” [529]
Rose argues that the existence of the worship of a mother goddess must not be taken as evidence of matrilinear succession, and were this the only detail on which we could rely, I would readily admit that the evidence was too slight. But we have some support from pedigrees. Rose dismisses the evidence from traditional genealogies, because “many of these are late, and a large part of them is doubtless pure invention.” [530] I do not feel confident that we must dismiss these genealogies, even if late, so summarily. Much of the detail contained in them occurs in the tragedians, who gathered it from the legendary matter current in their day. That there was much more such legendary matter, and that it was for long after kept alive in the minds of the people, is clear from the pages of Pausanias. Still doubtless there were some inventions, in fact it is obvious from internal evidence that this was so, but such interpolations can usually be detected, and by no means vitiate the pedigrees for our purpose. Often the interpolation is but the substitution of a fictitious name for an unnamed son or daughter, or when tradition states that C is the grandson of A, a name B has been invented to fill in the missing intermediate ancestor.
I propose, therefore, to examine some of these pedigrees, and will choose those of undoubted Minoan origin. Ridgeway[531] has suggested that the Minoans traced their descent from Poseidon, as the “Achæans” did from Zeus or Ares. There are three well-known families that do so, the Neleids of Pylos, the Danaans of the Argolid and the Cadmeians of Bœotia; in the two former cases there is ample evidence that those places received a population from Crete either in the first or early in the second Late Minoan period.
The Neleid pedigree is meagre and does not help us, but those of the Danaans and Cadmeians are fuller, and it is claimed by later writers that the families were connected. The first part of the genealogy is unquestionably fictitious, and designed to show a connection between the two families, but it is worth looking at.