TEMPLE OF WINGLESS VICTORY: IONIC ORDER
The perfection of the second Hellenic style, refined from the Doric, probably in the first place by Asiatic Greeks. Fifth century B.C.
The Contact of Early Civilisations
Secondly, it is now known that this civilisation, of remote indigenous origin and independent development, reached a very high point of achievement in many respects which afford the best-known tests of culture—namely, in its artistic products, extant examples of which offer ample evidence of wonderfully close study of natural forms, of mastery of decorative principles and their execution, and of a sort of idealistic quality, which has been rightly called “a premonition of the later Hellenic”; also, in architectural construction and the organisation of domestic comfort, as displayed in the palaces at Cnossus and Phæstus, with their superposed stories, their broad stairways of many flights, their rich ornament, their arrangements for admitting air and light, and their astonishing systems of sanitation and drainage. The written documents found, though still undeciphered, plainly attest an advanced knowledge of account-keeping and correspondence. The frescoes and gem scenes, as well as many surviving objects of luxury, attest the existence of a leisured and pleasure-loving class; and, lastly, the tribute-tallies of Cnossus support the inference which is legitimately drawn from the uniformity of certain material objects all over the Ægean area at certain periods—notably that contemporaneous with the earlier part of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty—and also from the wide range of certain place-names, that there was an extensive imperial organisation. The centre of this empire, as well as the original focus of the civilisation, was almost beyond question in Crete. The prejudice in favour of other focuses raised by the priority of Ægean discoveries elsewhere, especially those made in the Argolid, has been greatly weakened by demonstration of the superior catholicity and quality of Cretan culture, and by recognition of the failure of Mycenæ to offer evidence of anything like the same antiquity. And no more need be said here to counteract it than that, if Buckle’s statement of the climatic and geographical conditions necessary to the first development and upward progress of culture be sound, those conditions were never present in plenitude anywhere in the Ægean area except in Crete. There are found in the most conspicuous degree the combination of these geographical features—large tracts of fertile and deep lowland soil; mountains so situated as to cause abundant precipitation, and so high as to store snow against the early summer; absence of both swamps and desert areas; and a climate not prone to extremes.
What Crete has Taught us
Like all other high civilisations the Ægean both borrowed and lent. Since its debts could be contracted only with contemporary cultures as high as its own, they were owed mainly to Egypt and Babylonia, while its loans went out chiefly to lower civilisations further removed than itself from the eastern centres, those, namely, of the European continent. As regards Egypt, something has been said already of its intercourse with the Ægean in all ages of the latter’s prehistoric period. The evidence of that intercourse, known even before the exploration of Crete, was fairly abundant, though limited almost entirely to later ages of Ægean culture, often called particularly “Mycenæan.” The “pre-Cretan” case was set forth very concisely in a paper read before the Royal Society of Literature in 1897 by Professor Flinders Petrie, who enumerated the objects of Egyptian fabric or style found on Ægean sites, notably at Mycenæ, and in Cyprus and Rhodes; and of objects of Ægean style or fabric found in Egypt, notably at Thebes, Memphis and Tell-el-Amarna and in the Fayum. One word of warning only may be added—that the occurrence of such imported objects, especially if they be of the amulet class, on a site of a certain date does not necessarily imply exact contemporaneity with the period at which the objects were actually produced; for they may well have been carried hither and thither in the stream of trade for some time ere coming to rest, and been long preserved afterwards. Some of the Cypriote and Rhodian tombs, for example, in which scarabs and other Egyptian objects of the Eighteenth Pharaonic Dynasty have been found, are probably considerably later than that dynasty.
Crete has largely reinforced this evidence, not only by throwing it back to a much earlier time than that of the Eighteenth Dynasty, but by proving that in its later periods Ægean art had come to be considerably modified, both in forms and in motives and treatment of decoration, by the art of Egypt. We have then to do, not merely with mutually imported objects, but, much more than was previously understood, with the mutual action of influences—the strongest possible proof of close intercourse. On the Ægean side, our sole concern at present, are now found scenes represented in fresco-painting or metal-work—for example, the mural scene with a river and palms at Cnossus, and the well-known cat-hunting scene inlaid on a Mycenæan poniard—and also decorative motives which are of obvious Egyptian parentage. Other motives proclaim their alien origin by more or less mistaken treatment. The best instance in point is the use made of the lotus motive in Greece and the isles, where the flower was never domiciled.
PALLAS ATHENA, THE MAIDEN GODDESS OF ATHENS