Now, the course of events after all such conquests, if permanent but not exterminative, is the same. The rude military invaders, finding themselves deficient in woman-folk, take not only slaves but wives from the civilised people of the soil. The resultant children tend more and more, as time goes on, to be influenced by their native mothers. In them previous culture begins to revive, and ere many generations are past, so completely is the new race assimilated by the old that the language in general use is that not of the conquerors but of the conquered.
Hellas and its Conquerors
For a crucial instance we need look no further than to the after history of the Norman invaders of Britain; and we might almost assume, were there no actual memorials of the fact, that the civilisation which arose anew in the Ægean area, after the tumultuous period reflected in the Homeric lays and the Greek tradition of early Asiatic colonisation, was largely influenced by what had been there in the Ægean Age. There is, however, proof that such was indeed the fact. As will presently be pointed out, the long period of unrest had allowed other alien influences to enter Hellas notably the Semitic from Phœnicia. But beside what appears to be Asiatic, and also beside what was new and distinctively Hellenic in the historic culture, which became prominent from the ninth century onwards (and this includes such all-important features as the conceptions of a supreme Father-God, and of the city-state—an idea of social order as obdurate to southern influences as our own Germanic social order has proved)—beside all this, the “non-Hellenic” elements in the civilisation are almost entirely such as may be referred to Ægean prototypes. Hellenic art, which flourished pre-eminently among the non-Dorian inhabitants, is distinguished from Eastern art by just those distinctive qualities of both realism and idealism which distinguished the highest art of the Ægean Age. Hellenic religion has for its oldest, most universal, and most popular deities various feminine impersonations, indistinguishable from the earlier Mother-Goddess. The chief of these is the unwedded Artemis-Aphrodite, supreme patroness of life all through the historic period of pagan Greece, the essential features of whose cult are still dominant in the observance of the Greek peasant-worshippers of the Christian Virgin. Hellenic cult is full of interesting survivals of the Tree and Stone ritual amply attested in Ægean cult. Hellenic custom retained many traces of a matriarchal system, appropriate to a society exclusively devoted to the Great Mother, whom Hellas took in name and actual primitive form to her pantheon under the names of Rhea and Kybéle. The Dorian and Ionian styles of architecture can be directly affiliated to the Ægean as revealed in Mycenæan tombs and Cnossian frescoes, and the Greek house is a development of the earlier domestic plan. Certain notable exceptions go far to prove the rule. The dress of the upper class, and the fashion of body-armour and weapons, seem to have been determined henceforth by the new folk. These are just the features in civilisation which conquering invaders would naturally introduce and retain. It is hardly necessary to add that if Ægean civilisation seriously influenced that of historic Hellas, it seriously influenced at second hand that of Western and Central Europe.
ATHENS IN THE HEIGHT OF HER CIVILISATION: THE MARKET PLACE RECONSTRUCTED WITH THE ACROPOLIS IN THE BACKGROUND
LARGER IMAGE
Other Ægean Influences in Europe
Hellenic civilisation, however, was perhaps not the only medium through which Ægean influence affected inner Europe. In Scandinavian tomb-furniture certain presumably foreign decorative motives, notably the returning spiral and the triquetra, which are identical with characteristic Ægean types, make their appearance in the first part of the local Bronze Age; and these have been noticed also, at a slightly later period, in the art of early Ireland, at that time the most civilised of the British Isles. In point of form also some Northern weapons in bronze resemble those of the Far South. If the spiral motive stood alone, the affiliation of this distant decorative art to the Ægean would be very doubtful, since Nature, whether through the forms assumed by vegetable tendrils or animal horns, or through those of shavings of wood or metal, might easily have suggested the ornament independently. But taken together with other related motives, and the evidence of assimilation of weapon-forms, these spirals raise a presumption in favour of an early obligation of North Europe to Ægean civilisation. A possible explanation of this fact, if fact it be, has been found in the communication which appears to have been created by the Ægean demand for Baltic amber; and early ways for this traffic have been traced by Dr. Arthur Evans up the Adriatic, and also overland from the Ægean shores to the Danube basin, whence, from a point near the later Carnuntum, a combined route ran up the Moldau to the Elbe system. Further, it is the opinion of Professor Montelius and some other archæologists that not only certain bronze forms and decorative motives, but the usage of this metal itself was derived in Scandinavia from the south, somewhere before 1000 B.C. Since pure copper and pure tin hardly occur in Sweden among objects of this age, it has been held that the bronze was imported ready made in the mass. But Sweden contains large natural copper deposits, and tin is also found; and, therefore, this opinion is not universally accepted. Indeed, some authorities reverse the debt, and actually derive Ægean knowledge of bronze from Europe. If, however, the first derivation be ever proved, we shall have to refer the first use of metal weapons—an enormous step forward in social progress—in North and Central Europe to the Southern civilisations, such as the Egyptian, which had certainly known and used bronze for at least a thousand years before we find it in Sweden. It is sometimes maintained that Cyprus was the first, and long the sole, source of copper, which travelled north by way of Asia Minor and the Ægean to Hungary and inner Europe; but this is not proved. In any case, for some reason, bronze seems to have become known to the Scandinavians and Danes earlier than to the Gallic peoples.