Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/156

 Ii8 Outlines of European History followed (pp. 56 ff.) ; while in the west other ^gean kindred of these Trojan and Hittite peoples had their homes in the ^Egean islands, even as far as Crete. Some of them, too, formed the population of Greece, where they were the predecessors of the people known to us as the Greeks. These predeces- sors of the Greeks in the ^gean world belonged to a great and gifted white race, whose origin and relationships with other peoples are still quite undeter- mined. We shall call this race the ^geans. All of these ^gean peoples were so long with- out writing, that they at first left no written monu- ments to tell us their story; hence the difficulty in the disentangling of their relation- ships. Some time after 2000 b.c. the Hittites invented a system of hieroglyphic writing (Fig. 60) showing Egyptian influence, which we find inscribed on stone monuments widely scattered through Asia Minor and northern Syria. Later they also found that their commerce with Babylonia brought into their hands Fig. 63. Ruins of the Main Entrance to THE Cretan Palace at Cnossus, built ABOUT 1800 B.C. It is on the north side, facing the harbor three and a half miles away, from which a road leads up to this entrance. Notice the heavy masonry of stone — the only portion of the palace built for defense, the rest being of sun-baked brick