TJie Mediterranean World and the Early Greeks 127 rivers, mountains, and plants, the old language of the ^^geans left its traces in the Greek tongue ; and doubtless much of the supreme genius of the classical Greeks was due to this admixture of the blood of the gifted Cretans, with their open-mindedness toward influences from abroad and their fine artistic instincts. The Dorians did not stop at the southern limits of Greece, The Greeks but, learning a little navigation from their ^gean predecessors, s?on o?the^" they passed over to Crete, where they must have arrived by ^gean world 1400 B.C. Cnossus, unfortified as it was, and without any walled castle (p. 121), must have fallen an easy prey of the invading Dorians in Dorians, who took possession of the island, and likewise seized so^uthern the other southern islands of the yEgean. Between 1300 and ^gean 1000 B.C. the Greek tribes took possession of the remaining islands, as well as the coast of Asia Minor, the Cohans in the ^oiians and north, the lonians in the middle, and the Dorians in the south, further^north Thus during the thousand years between 2000 and 1000 B.C. the Greeks took possession of the entire ^Egean outpost of the Orient, including the islands of the ^gean Sea, the coasts of Asia Minor, and the easternmost peninsula of Europe. Driven from their native harbors by the Greeks, the ^gean Effect on mariners fled and their fleets appeared in great numbers along the coasts of Syria and Egypt, where they assisted in inflicting the deathblow on the Egyptian Empire in the twelfth century B.C. (see p. 53). Some of them, expelled from Crete, took refuge on the coast of Palestine, and w^e have already met them as the Philistines (Fig. 70 and p. 103). Thus the effect of the advance Philistines of the Indo-European line to the Mediterranean along its north- ern shores was felt by the older civilizations of the Orient on its other shores. Section 22. The Greek City-States under Kings In spite of their seaward expansion the Greeks were still a The nomad barbarous people of flocks and herds. As a race they had not a settled life yet taken to the water, and even as late as 700 B.C. we find their
