The Mediterranean World and the Early Greeks 123 Section 21. The Early Greeks Thus far the islands had been leading the civilization of the The Greek ^gean world, but the fleets of Egypt and Crete carried a bS'ore'the constant flow of commerce from the islands to the mainland of Q°eeks °the^ Greece. Massive strongholds, with heavy stone masonry foun- Mycenaean dations, have been excavated at Tiryns (Fig. 67) and Mycenae (Fig. 68) in southern Greece.-^ The ^gean princes who built these strongholds a little after 1500 B.C. imported works of Cretan and Egyptian art in pottery and metal.^ These things, with fragments of Egyptian glaze, still lying in the ruins, are the earliest tokens of a life of higher refinement as it displaced the barbarism of the Stone Age on the continent of Europe.^ But the mainland still lagged behind the islands, for Cretan writing seems not to have followed Cretan commerce, and there was as yet no writing on the continent of Europe. Regions on the north of Greece, such as Thessaly, were covered with scattered settlements which had advanced but little beyond the Late Stone Age civilization of the rest of Europe. Metal was not common in Thessaly until about 1500 B.C. The cultured Cretans had little influence here in the north, where a hostile race was already appearing. As far back as 2000 B.C. we s^e these in- vaders appearing behind the passes of the Balkan Mountains. These newcomers and not the gifted Cretans and their ^gean kindred were to possess the Greek peninsula.* The people whom we call the Greeks were a large group of tribes of the Indo-European race. We have already followed 1 Also at Troy, the Sixth City, the Homeric Troy (Fig. T). 2 See the rehef on the golden goblet, a work of Cretan art, found at Vaphio, near Sparta, in southern Greece (p, iii). 3 The discoveries of Schliemann at Mycenae were among the first revela- tions of pre-Greek art and civilization in the yEgean world. The discoveries in Crete had not yet been made, and the Cretan source of Mycenaean art was un- known. Hence this pre-Greek civilization of the vEgean is still commonly called " Mycenaean," although, as we have seen, Mycenae represents only a late and declining stage of the high ^Egean civilization attained by Crete. 4 The student should here carefully reread pp. 86-88.
