The Greek Debt to Ægean Civilisation
Enough has now been said to show that Ægean civilisation was both a broad channel through which influences of Asiatic and Egyptian culture could and did flow, and also in itself of such importance as to be likely to exert influence on nascent civilisation in Europe. To see whether it did so, we look first to the culture which succeeded it in its own area, the Hellenic culture of the historic age, about whose action, exerted indirectly on all subsequent civilisation, there is no possible doubt. And at the outset stress must be laid on the fact that we are dealing, in respect of the two civilisations in question, with one and the same geographical area. There is here no question of alien influences dependent on short or long communications by sea or land. The Hellenic race, if indeed to be distinguished from all elements in the earlier Ægean, came into the very domain of the latter, and experienced by actual contact the full force of the pre-existent culture. This being so, the probability of heavy debts having been contracted by the later culture to the earlier is enormous; and it becomes all but certainty when the few facts which we know about the early history of the Hellenic peoples proper come to be considered in the light of ascertained general laws governing the relations of intermingled races.
Emerging of Historic Hellenism
It is clear that the Hellenic tradition of a great descent of peoples from the north into mainland Greece and the western isles, about 1000 B.C., enshrines substantial fact. These peoples, possessed of iron weapons, were superior to the Ægean folk in war, but evidently inferior in the softer social arts. The Greeks called them Dorians, a name afterwards associated with the most distinctive, but the least cultivated, of the historic races of the peninsula—a race, however, possessed in its full form of the conception of the city-state; which implied the subordination of the individual to the corporate body, and was the chief social message to be taught thereafter by the Greek to the world.
Without calling these invaders by any one name, or supposing Northern folk to have made then their first appearance in the Ægean area, we may safely see in this Greek tradition the record of a cataclysmic change out of which historic Hellenism was to issue at the last. In proof of the invader’s inferiority in the useful arts we have the undoubted fact that the command of the Greek seas, formerly held by Cretans and other Ægean folk, passed for some centuries into Semitic hands—the hands of those Sidonian Phœnicians whose coming, but as yet incomplete, “thalassocracy,” is reflected in the most important of contemporary documents, the Homeric lays, and, under the lead of the Tyrians, was to grow greater yet. To illustrate their inferiority in the luxurious arts we have the dry, uninventive style of artistic decoration known as the “Geometric,” which also lasted for some centuries. It is evident that the newcomers were conquering soldiers, who destroyed, but could not of their own virtue create.
A GREAT CITY OF ANCIENT CIVILISATION: THE BUILDING OF CARTHAGE BY DIDO
From the painting by Turner, in the National Gallery.
LARGER IMAGE