Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/34

 Method and Plan pursued in this History. 13 a future, were little more than fishing villages established on islets naturally protected by their insular situation. It may be that some day, in the Nile or the Euphrates valley, a more thorough and systematic exploration of the soil will enlarge the archaeologist's range of vision on those far-off days of history ; for the present, however, the darkness which surrounds them is so profound and impenetrable as to be impervious to the faintest gleam. Very different was the case of Hellas, or if preferred, Europe. There, in the Greek and Italian peninsulas, whence culture was to expand in the interior of the continent, man did not cast off his primitive barbarism until many centuries after the day when, in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the neighbouring countries, he had already attained a very considerable degree of culture. Here, therefore, there is no need to brush away or wade through the dust accumulated by so many generations, in order to get at the earliest objects fashioned by the hand of man, and on which he left the mark of his first essayals. The strata of debris that are found one upon the other are fewer and of no great depth. This the Hellenes owe in part to their innate qualities, and in part to the help which they found in the previous labours of their neighbours, so that they required less time in working out their evolution than the Asiatics did. With them the season of infancy was less abiding ; at any rate, if we have no means of gauging its duration, we know that youth and productive manhood more quickly followed adolescence. The Greeks, if the expression be allowed, lived fast ; the space that covered their years of apprenticeship and the perfect works of their vigorous maturity and perfect scientific training, was shorter than that of any other nation. Moreover our inquiry is made easier by the fact that, for the last fifty years more particularly, the Greek and Italian soil has been sounded and investigated, if not with greater zeal, at least in a more orderly and systematic manner than that of Egypt and Anterior Asia. The sites cover less ground ; excavations are not so handicapped as in lands ruled over by the Turkoman : this circumstance has enabled the explorer to prosecute his labours more leisurely, consecutively, and on points that once were dependent upon one another ; sometimes, as at Olympia, Tiryns, Eleusis, and the Athenian acropolis, the exhuming has been so thorough and complete as