Page:Early Greek philosophy by John Burnet, 3rd edition, 1920.djvu/16

2 II. It must, however, be remembered that the world was already very old when science and philosophy began. In particular, the Aegean Sea had been the seat of a high civilisation from the Neolithic age onwards, a civilisation as ancient as that of Egypt or of Babylon, and superior to either in most things that matter. It is becoming clearer every day that the Greek civilisation of later days was mainly the revival and continuation of this, though it no doubt received certain new and important elements from the less civilised northern peoples who for a time arrested its development. The original Mediterranean population must have far outnumbered the intruders, and must have assimilated and absorbed them in a few generations, except in a state like Sparta, which deliberately set itself to resist the process. At any rate, it is to the older race we owe Greek Art and Greek Science. See Sir Arthur Evans, "The Minoan and Mycenean Element in Hellenic Life" (J.H.S. xxxii. 277 sqq.), where it is contended (p. 278) that "The people whom we discern in the new dawn are not the pale-skinned northerners—the 'yellow-haired Achaeans' and the rest—but essentially the dark-haired, brown-complexioned race of whom we find the earlier portraiture in the Minoan and Mycenean wall-paintings." But, if the Greeks of historical times were the same people as the "Minoans," why should Sir Arthur Evans hesitate to call the "Minoans" Greeks? The Achaians and Dorians have no special claim to the name; for the Graes of Boiotia, who brought it to Cumae, were of the older race. I can attach no intelligible meaning either to the term "pre-Hellenic." If it means that the Aegean race was there before the somewhat unimportant Achaian tribe which accidentally gave its name later to the whole nation, that is true, but irrelevant. If, on the other hand, it implies that there was a real change in the population of the Aegean at any time since the end of the Neolithic age, that is untrue, as Sir Arthur Evans himself maintains. If it means (as it probably does) that the Greek language was introduced into the Aegean by the northerners, there is no evidence of that, and it is contrary to analogy. The Greek language, as we know it, is in its vocabulary a mixed speech, like our own, but its essential structure is far liker that of the Indo-Iranian languages than that of any northern branch of Indo-European speech. For instance, the augment is common and peculiar to Sanskrit, Old Persian, and Greek. The Greek language cannot have differed very much from the Persian in the second millennium B.C. The popular distinction between centum and satem languages is wholly misleading and based on a secondary phenomenon, as is shown by the fact that the Romance languages have become satem languages in historical times. It would be more to the point to note that Greek, like Old Indian and Old Persian, represents It is a remarkable fact