Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 2.djvu/535

 478 PkiMiTivt: Greixk: Mycenian Art. the Archipelago, is a very isolated one. Nevertheless, it is hard to believe that the disappearance of part of the island, the Hight or destruction of all the inhabitants, should have found no echo in insular Hellas. A century is too short a time to allow for the eruption having ceased to be talked about and forgotten, or for all symptoms of subterranean convulsions to have disap- peared. Yet all these conditions must have been fulfilled ere man again ventured to set foot on that soil. We are thus induced to lead back to the eighteenth or seventeenth century B.C. ; that is to say, to the date or thereabouts of the geologists. On the other hand, the products of human industry found under volcanic substances at Thera point to a more advanced culture than that of the second Trojan village, or of the first establishment at Tiryns. We shall be well within the mark, then, in placing towards the year 2000 b.c. the formation of the first sedentary groups that got domiciled on the hills of the Troad and of Argolis. The slow and obscure development of the primitive island culture would come in between that distant age and the time when the walls of Tiryns and Mycenae were erected. Some of the Cyclades would appear to have been more populous at that time than they ever were afterwards. There was a great dearth of the precious metals, especially gold ; but marble was abundant. The oldest Cypriote settlements would belong to the same epoch. In turning to buildings such as those of Tiryns, Mycenae, and Orchomenos, one would wish to reach a more precise date ; but here, too, tradition contains nothing that will serve our turn. We are obliged, then, to ask if the Mycenian world at that time was likely to have dealings with some neigh- bouring people, in possession of a written history from which higher criticism may obtain information that will help it towards an approximate chronology. Now, so far as I know, the only people answering these conditions are the Egyptians. The sequence of the reigns and of the main facts of the New Empire is so well established that the most cautious historians of Egypt hold that they can creep back from the Sait Pharaohs, whose date appears in the Greek analysts, to the great con- querors of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties, without meeting serious lacunae on their path likely to falsify their calculations. The inhabitants of the JEgCdni coasts were separated from