Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/93

 72 Primitive Greece: Mycenian Art. west of Asia Minor, those which, like the Dardani, Phrygians, Carians, and Lycians, drew other nationalities to themselves, and those which, like the Achaeans and lonians, approached homogeneous groups scattered in Europe, and together ended in building up, if not a single commonwealth, at any rate a moral body, all that goes to the making of a nation. In the first place there is the radiation of the culture which we have called Hittite or Syro-Cappadocian. We have said elsewhere that it carried its arms and left the image of its gods northward of Taurus, as far as the mouth of rivers that descend from the central plateau of Anatolia and carry their waters into the iEgean sea. Even when obliged to fall back inland, cut off as the Hittites were from that sea by Aryan populations which had taken forcible possession of the coasts, they still influenced the new-comers in a variety of ways. This is proved by the borrowings which the Asiatic Greeks did not disdain to make from them. Their oldest system of signs are the same which, through a curious phenomenon, survived very late in the Cypriote alphabet, and has all the air of having been derived from Hittite hieroglyphs through a process akin to that which the Phoenicians employed in the formation of their letters from Egyptian writing. Across Syria and Cappadocia lay the caravan routes by means of which some of the products of Mesopo- tamian industry, whose perfect technique was of long standing, reached the lonians settled on the coast. But if much came to them by land, far more was brought by sea. The Phoenicians were the initiators, the real teachers of the populations of the Archipelago.^ They alone enlarged the narrow circle of the natives' daily life ; they showed them vaster horizons, where the needs they had awakened in them could be satisfied. By calling to mind the mission which these early navigators assumed, and following on their track, ^ Xenophon, on visiting a Phoenician ship anchored in one of the harbours belonging to Athens, was struck with the order which reigned on board ; the measures that were taken to have at hand all the requisites for working the ship ; and that on its floating house the crew should find all necessary accommoda- tions, despite the large space allotted to the merchandise. From the admiration unconsciously dropped out, it would seem, we might almost infer that Phoenician ships were better kept than those of the Greeks. If this was the case, it arose from longer experience and older habits of a life spent on the sea.