Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/36

8 in Greece as the Mycenaean Age. But the recent discoveries in Crete have pushed things still further back, and show that for many centuries before the "Mycenaeans" there were people living in Greek lands who had attained to great skill in building, in the artistic treatment of bronze, stone, and clay, as well as in the art of painting. These people also possessed a script, or written character, as well as a system of pictography or writing by pictures and symbols. Neither script nor pictography has as yet been interpreted, but the latter (with other indications) points to a connection with Egypt. But whatever remains to be learnt from them, enough has been discovered to point to a very remote antiquity for this civilisation, and to some great catastrophe which overwhelmed it. Among other things, the remains of the immense palace or labyrinth at Cnossus confirms the literary tradition that Crete was once the seat of a rich and powerful kingdom, and illustrates the statement of Thucydides that King Minos was the first to construct a great fleet, with which he put down piracy in the Ægean Sea; while the specimens of the statuary's art found there throw light upon the tradition of the cunning of Daedalus, who first "made statues walk." Nor should we forget how legend spoke of a tribute of boys and girls from Athens to Crete, from which the Athenians were only delivered by their hero Theseus, who slew the monstrous Minotaur.

Contemporary with this Cretan civilisation—whether connected with it in race or not—was an early occupation of Greece itself by a people who