overlooked that the period of Charles the Great is an episode of the surface, ending, as accidentals do end, without issue. After 900, after a new deep depression, there begins something really new, something having the telling force of a Destiny and the depth that promises duration. But in 800 it was the sun of the Arabian Civilization passing on from the world-cities of the East to the countryside of the West. Even so the sunshine of Hellenism had spread to the distant Indus.[1]
That which stands on the hills of Tiryns and Mycenæ is Pfalz and Burg of root-Germanic type. The palaces of Crete — which are not kings' castles, but huge cult-buildings for a crowd of priests and priestesses — are equipped with megalopolitan — nay, Late-Roman — luxury. At the foot of those hills were crowded the huts of yeoman and vassals, but in Crete (Gournia, Hagia Triada) the excavation of towns and villas has shown that the requirements were those of high civilization, and the building-technique that of a long experience, accustomed to catering for the most pampered taste in furniture and wall-decoration, and familiar with lighting, water-circulation, staircases, and suchlike problems.[2] In the one, the plan of the house is a strict life-symbol; in the other, the expression of a refined utilitarianism. Compare the Kamares vases and the frescoes of smooth stucco with everything that is genuinely Mycenæan — they are, through and through, the product of an industrial art, clever and empty, and not of any grand and deep art of heavy, clumsy, but forceful symbolism like that which in Mycenæ was ripening towards the geometric style. It is, in a word, not a style but a taste.[3] In Mycenæ was housed a primitive race which chose its sites according to soil-value and facilities for defence, whereas the Minoan population settled in business foci, as may be observed very clearly in the case of Philakopi on Melos which was established for the export trade in obsidian. A Mycenæan palace is a promise, a Minoan something that is ending. But it was just the same in the West about 800 — the Frankish and Visigothic farms and manor-houses stretched from the Loire to the Ebro, while south of them lay the Moorish castles, villas, and mosques of Cordova and Granada.
It is surely no accident that the peak of this Minoan luxury coincides with the period of the great Egyptian revolution, and particularly the Hyksos time (1780-1580 B.C.).[4] The Egyptian craftsmen may well have fled in those days to the peaceful islands and even as far as the strongholds of the mainland, as in a later instance the Byzantine scholars fled to Italy. For it is axiomatic that the Minoan Culture is a part of the Egyptian, and we should be able to realize
- ↑ Without Alexander, and even before him, for Alexander neither kindled nor spread that light; he did not lead, but followed its path to the East.
- ↑ See G. Glotz's recent work La Civilisation égéenne, 1923 (English translation, 1927). — Tr.
- ↑ This is now recognized by art-research; cf. Salis, Die Kunst der Griechen (1919), pp. 3, et seq.; H. Th. Bosser, Alt-Kreta (1921), introduction.
- ↑ D. Fimmen, Die kretisch-mykenische Kultur (1921), p. 210.
