Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/110

 90 A Short History of The World they conquered Sumeria and set up first the Akkadian and then the first Babylonian Empire. In the west these same Semitic peoples were taking to the sea. They set up a string of harbour towns along the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, of which Tyre and Sidon were the chief ; and by the time of Hammurabi in Babylon, they had spread as traders, wanderers amd colonizers over the whole Mediter- ranean basin. These sea Semites were called the Phoenicians. They settled largely in Spain, pushing back the old Iberian Basque population and sending coasting expeditions through the Straits of Gibraltar ; and they set up colonies upon the north coast of Africa. Of Carthage, one of these Phoenician cities, we shall have much more to tell later. But the Phoenicians were not the first people to have galleys in the Mediterranean waters. There was already a series of towns and cities among the islands and coasts of that sea belonging to a race or races apparently connected by blood and language with the Basques to the west and the Berbers and Egyptians to the south, the ^gean peoples. These peoples must not be confused with the Greeks, who come much later into our story ; they were pre-Greek, but they had cities in Greece and Asia Minor, Mycenae and Troy for example, and they had a great and prosperous establishment at Cnossos in Crete. It is only in the last half century that the industry of excavating archaeologists has brought the extent and civilization of the ^gean peoples to our knowledge. Cnossos has been most thoroughly explored ; it was happily not succeeded by any city big enough to destroy its ruins, and so it is our chief source of information about this once almost forgotten civilization. The history of Cnossos goes back as far as the history of Egypt ; the two countries were trading actively across the sea by 4000 B.C. By 2500 B.C., that is between the time of Sargon I and Hammurabi, Cretan civilization was at its zenith. Cnossos was not so much a town as a great palace for the Cretan monarch and his people. It was not even fortified. It was only fortified later as the Phoenicians grew strong, and as a new and more terrible breed of pirates, the Greeks, came upon the sea fron;, the north. The monarch was called Minos, as the Egyptian monarch was called Pharaoh ; and he kept his state in a palace fitted with running water, with bathrooms and the like conveniences such as we know of in no other ancient remains. There he held great festivals and shows.