back to a much earlier time than that of the Eighteenth Dynasty, but by
proving that in its later periods Ægean art had come to be considerably
modified, both in forms and in motives and treatment of decoration,
by the art of Egypt. We have then to do, not merely with mutually
imported objects, but, much more than was previously understood, with
the mutual action of influences--the strongest possible proof of close
intercourse. On the Ægean side, our sole concern at present, are now
found scenes represented in fresco-painting or metal-work--for example,
the mural scene with a river and palms at Cnossus, and the well-known
cat-hunting scene inlaid on a Mycenæan poniard--and also decorative
motives which are of obvious Egyptian parentage. Other motives proclaim
their alien origin by more or less mistaken treatment. The best
instance in point is the use made of the lotus motive in Greece and the
isles, where the flower was never domiciled.
[Illustration: PALLAS ATHENA, THE MAIDEN GODDESS OF ATHENS
One of the chief glories of the art of ancient Greece left to the
modern world. Athena was the goddess and protectress of Athens, and
her statue stood at the height of the Acropolis, dominating the
city.
]
[Illustration: THE SUPREME MONUMENT OF ANCIENT GREECE LEFT TO THE
MODERN WORLD
The Venus of Milo, one of the noblest examples of Greek art, and
one of the most famous statues extant. Found at Milo, in Crete,
about 100 B.C., and now in the Louvre, Paris.
]
[Sidenote: Influence of Egypt and Mesopotamia]
For influences of the Mesopotamian civilisation we have to look in the
main to the early civilisations of Syria and Asia Minor; but evidence
is not wholly wanting on Ægean sites. A Babylonian cylinder came to
light at Cnossus; the fashion of dress, especially female, as shown in
Ægean frescoes and gems, is very like the Babylonian, from whatever
primitive garments it had been developed; and in other respects also
the intaglio class of Ægean art products shows at least as much
Mesopotamian as Egyptian influence. It has borrowed the decoration of
both cylinders and scarabs; but it proves its essential independence
all the time by never adopting the forms of either of those
characteristic alien vehicles of glyptic art.
[Sidenote: Religious Ideas of Early Times]
Lastly, in the most important of all aspects of early civilisation--the
religious--we now know that the Ægean approximated very closely to the
old civilisations to south and east of it. The main idea of its cult
was that which seems to have been the oldest and the most dominant in
such cults--namely, the worship of the reproductive force of Nature.
This idea was embodied, as soon as divinities were imagined in human
shape, in feminine form, the desired relation of divinity to humanity
being expressed by the addition of a son-consort. How far other
features of this cult, common to the south-eastern lands--such as the
descent of the son to the human race, his periodical death at the hands
of the latter, and his joyful resurrection--were present, we do not yet
know. It would probably be false to ascribe the presence of this cult
idea in Ægean civilisation to any foreign influence, for it seems to
be a necessary expression of the religious sense of many peoples, and
is as likely to have been as indigenous in the case of Rhea and Zeus
(to give the Divine pair their possible Ægean names) as in those of
Isis and Osiris, or Ashtaroth and Tammuz-Adon. But we may note first
that here was a vital bond of affinity between the Ægean folk and their
mainland neighbours on east and south, and second, that long before
historic Hellenic times, the former had arrived at that essential
condition of progressive civilisation, an anthropomorphic conception of
divinity.
[Sidenote: The Greek Debt to Ægean Civilisation]
Enough has now been said to show that Ægean civilisation was both a
broad channel through which influences of Asiatic and Egyptian culture
could and did flow, and also in itself of such importance as to be
likely to exert influence on nascent civilisation in Europe. To see
whether it did so, we look first to the culture which succeeded it in
its own area, the Hellenic culture of the historic age, about whose
action, exerted indirectly on all subsequent civilisation, there is
no possible doubt. And at the outset stress must be laid on the fact
that we are dealing, in respect of the two civilisations in question,
with one and the same geographical area. There is here no question of
alien influences dependent on short or long communications by sea
or land. The Hellenic race, if indeed to be distinguished from all
elements in the earlier Ægean, came into the very domain of the latter,
and experienced by actual contact the full force of the pre-existent
culture. This being so, the probability of heavy debts having been
contracted by the later culture to the earlier is enormous; and it
becomes all but certainty when the few facts which we know about the
early history of the Hellenic peoples proper come to be considered
in the light of ascertained general laws governing the relations of
intermingled races.
[Sidenote: Emerging of Historic Hellenism]
It is clear that the Hellenic tradition of a great descent of peoples
from the north into mainland Greece and the western isles, about
1000 B.C., enshrines substantial fact. These peoples, possessed of
iron weapons, were superior to the Ægean folk in war, but evidently
inferior in the softer social arts. The Greeks called them Dorians, a
name afterwards associated with the most distinctive, but the least
cultivated, of the historic races of the peninsula--a race, however,
possessed in its full form of the conception of the city-state; which
implied the subordination of the individual to the corporate body, and
was the chief social message to be taught thereafter by the Greek to
the world.
Without calling these invaders by any one name, or supposing Northern
folk to have made then their first appearance in the Ægean area, we may
safely see in this Greek tradition the record of a cataclysmic change
out of which historic Hellenism was to issue at the last. In proof of
the invader’s inferiority in the useful arts we have the undoubted
fact that the command of the Greek seas, formerly held by Cretans and
other Ægean folk, passed for some centuries into Semitic hands--the
hands of those Sidonian Phœnicians whose coming, but as yet incomplete,
“thalassocracy,” is reflected in the most important of contemporary
documents, the Homeric lays, and, under the lead of the Tyrians, was to
grow greater yet. To illustrate their inferiority in the luxurious arts
we have the dry, uninventive style of artistic decoration known as the
“Geometric,” which also lasted for some centuries. It is evident that
the newcomers were conquering soldiers, who destroyed, but could not of
their own virtue create.
[Illustration: A GREAT CITY OF ANCIENT CIVILISATION: THE BUILDING OF
CARTHAGE BY DIDO
From the painting by Turner, in the National Gallery.
]
Now, the course of events after all such conquests, if permanent but
not exterminative, is the same. The rude military invaders, finding
themselves deficient in woman-folk, take not only slaves but wives from
the civilised people of the soil. The resultant children tend more
and more, as time goes on, to be influenced by their native mothers.
In them previous culture begins to revive, and ere many generations
are past, so completely is the new race assimilated by the old that
the language in general use is that not of the conquerors but of the
conquered.
[Sidenote: Hellas and its Conquerors]
[Sidenote: The New Civilisation in Greece]
For a crucial instance we need look no further than to the after
history of the Norman invaders of Britain; and we might almost assume,
were there no actual memorials of the fact, that the civilisation which
arose anew in the Ægean area, after the tumultuous period reflected in
the Homeric lays and the Greek tradition of early Asiatic colonisation,
was largely influenced by what had been there in the Ægean Age. There
is, however, proof that such was indeed the fact. As will presently
be pointed out, the long period of unrest had allowed other alien
influences to enter Hellas notably the Semitic from Phœnicia. But
beside what appears to be Asiatic, and also beside what was new and
distinctively Hellenic in the historic culture, which became prominent
from the ninth century onwards (and this includes such all-important
features as the conceptions of a supreme Father-God, and of the
city-state--an idea of social order as obdurate to southern influences
as our own Germanic social order has proved)--beside all this, the
“non-Hellenic” elements in the civilisation are almost entirely such
as may be referred to Ægean prototypes. Hellenic art, which flourished
pre-eminently among the non-Dorian inhabitants, is distinguished from
Eastern art by just those distinctive qualities of both realism and
idealism which distinguished the highest art of the Ægean Age. Hellenic
religion has for its oldest, most universal, and most popular deities
various feminine impersonations, indistinguishable from the earlier
Mother-Goddess. The chief of these is the unwedded Artemis-Aphrodite,
supreme patroness of life all through the historic period of pagan
Greece, the essential features of whose cult are still dominant in the
observance of the Greek peasant-worshippers of the Christian Virgin.
Hellenic cult is full of interesting survivals of the Tree and Stone
ritual amply attested in Ægean cult. Hellenic custom retained many
traces of a matriarchal system, appropriate to a society exclusively
devoted to the Great Mother, whom Hellas took in name and actual
primitive form to her pantheon under the names of Rhea and Kybéle. The
Dorian and Ionian styles of architecture can be directly affiliated
to the Ægean as revealed in Mycenæan tombs and Cnossian frescoes, and
the Greek house is a development of the earlier domestic plan. Certain
notable exceptions go far to prove the rule. The dress of the upper
class, and the fashion of body-armour and weapons, seem to have been
determined henceforth by the new folk. These are just the features
in civilisation which conquering invaders would naturally introduce
and retain. It is hardly necessary to add that if Ægean civilisation
seriously influenced that of historic Hellas, it seriously influenced
at second hand that of Western and Central Europe.
[Illustration: ATHENS IN THE HEIGHT OF HER CIVILISATION: THE MARKET
PLACE RECONSTRUCTED WITH THE ACROPOLIS IN THE BACKGROUND]
[Sidenote: Other Ægean Influences in Europe]
[Sidenote: Commercial Communication with Europe]
Hellenic civilisation, however, was perhaps not the only medium
through which Ægean influence affected inner Europe. In Scandinavian
tomb-furniture certain presumably foreign decorative motives, notably
the returning spiral and the _triquetra_, which are identical with
characteristic Ægean types, make their appearance in the first part of
the local Bronze Age; and these have been noticed also, at a slightly
later period, in the art of early Ireland, at that time the most
civilised of the British Isles. In point of form also some Northern
weapons in bronze resemble those of the Far South. If the spiral motive
stood alone, the affiliation of this distant decorative art to the
Ægean would be very doubtful, since Nature, whether through the forms
assumed by vegetable tendrils or animal horns, or through those of
shavings of wood or metal, might easily have suggested the ornament
independently. But taken together with other related motives, and
the evidence of assimilation of weapon-forms, these spirals raise a
presumption in favour of an early obligation of North Europe to Ægean
civilisation. A possible explanation of this fact, if fact it be, has
been found in the communication which appears to have been created
by the Ægean demand for Baltic amber; and early ways for this traffic
have been traced by Dr. Arthur Evans up the Adriatic, and also overland
from the Ægean shores to the Danube basin, whence, from a point near
the later Carnuntum, a combined route ran up the Moldau to the Elbe
system. Further, it is the opinion of Professor Montelius and some
other archæologists that not only certain bronze forms and decorative
motives, but the usage of this metal itself was derived in Scandinavia
from the south, somewhere before 1000 B.C. Since pure copper and pure
tin hardly occur in Sweden among objects of this age, it has been
held that the bronze was imported ready made in the mass. But Sweden
contains large natural copper deposits, and tin is also found; and,
therefore, this opinion is not universally accepted. Indeed, some
authorities reverse the debt, and actually derive Ægean knowledge of
bronze from Europe. If, however, the first derivation be ever proved,
we shall have to refer the first use of metal weapons--an enormous step
forward in social progress--in North and Central Europe to the Southern
civilisations, such as the Egyptian, which had certainly known and used
bronze for at least a thousand years before we find it in Sweden. It
is sometimes maintained that Cyprus was the first, and long the sole,
source of copper, which travelled north by way of Asia Minor and the
Ægean to Hungary and inner Europe; but this is not proved. In any case,
for some reason, bronze seems to have become known to the Scandinavians
and Danes earlier than to the Gallic peoples.
[Sidenote: Influences in Western Europe]
Yet more evidence is there of possible Ægean communication with Central
Europe after the introduction of iron, which seems not to have reached
Scandinavia till almost the Christian Era. Transylvanian, Russian,
and Balkan graves have yielded to recent explorers abundance of both
weapons and decorated articles of personal use and adornment, closely
resembling fabrics in the later periods of Ægean civilisation. Further
into the European continent we have again the various evidence of
the early Iron Age graves of the Salzkammergut on the south-eastern
fringe of the Bavarian plain. This “Hallstatt” culture, as it is
called, from the location of the chief cemetery, presents both in
character and development an extraordinarily close parallel to that
of the Ægean Geometric Age. About the same period we know also that a
civilisation was in progress in the fertile lands round the head of
the Adriatic, which is called Veneto-Illyrian, and shows even stronger
evidence of Ægean influence than the Hallstatt culture; as, indeed,
might be expected, if it be remembered that in Southern and Central
Italy, as well as Sicily, forms and decoration, obviously learned from
Ægean civilisation, as well as actual imported Ægean objects, had been
plentiful ever since the bloom of the Ægean age. A visit to the local
collections in Syracuse, Bari, and Ancona, will establish this fact to
the satisfaction of any archæologist. These two civilisations, that of
the Salzkammergut and that of the North Adriatic lands, have important
bearing on the development of all Western Europe; for we know that
the Celtic peoples, who penetrated south of the Alps in the sixth and
fifth centuries B.C., learned much from both, and especially from the
second; and graves, furnished after they had been pressed back again
into Switzerland and Gaul, show abundant evidence of what is called
“sub-Ægean” influence--that is, of form and ornament probably derived
ultimately from Ægean culture, but indirectly, or after undergoing
considerable degradation. Through various subsequent intermediaries,
notably the Belgic tribes, these derivatives passed ultimately to our
own islands, and we find their influence operative on early English art.
[Sidenote: Civilisations Help One Another]
At the same time it is necessary to add that this derivation of the
higher developments of mid-European and Scandinavian culture in the
Bronze and Early Iron ages from the influence of Ægean civilisation
is far from certain, whatever be the case for the Adriatic lands.
Knowledge obtained since Dr. Evans and Dr. Montelius first expressed
their views, especially in regard to the so-called Neolithic or
“Butmir” pottery, which has a very wide range in South-Eastern Central
Europe, has not strengthened their case, but rather tended to suggest
that the continental culture developed independently to, though in a
parallel direction with, that of the southern peninsulas and isles. If
this view ultimately prevail, it will illustrate the opinion, to which
we personally incline, that the derivation of civilisations, one from
another in early times, is the exception and not the rule, except in
respect of minor matters.
[Sidenote: The Vigorous Hittite Civilisation]
Two other intermediary civilisations of the South-east remain to
be considered--the Hittite and the Phœnician. The first is still,
unfortunately, very little known to us, and we are hardly in a position
to say much about its influence on Europe until more small objects of
use and ornament have been discovered on Hittite sites. The general
facts so far ascertained, which make such influence probable, are
these. This civilisation, characterised and distinguished from all
others by a very individual art, and by a system of writing apparently
independent of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian systems, but in its later
development showing kinship to Mediterranean systems, lay across all
the mainland routes from inner Asia and Egypt to South-eastern Europe.
Its monuments have been found scattered thickly from the valley of the
Syrian Orontes northwards, to within 150 miles of the Black Sea, and
westward to the last passes which lead down from the Anatolian plateau
to the Ægean littoral. So far as we can judge at present, its place
of origin was Cappadocia, but its later focus was possibly in North
Syria; while its period of florescence ranges back from about the sixth
century B.C. for at least a thousand years.
It was, as we know from many written records, in frequent collision
with both Egypt and Assyria, and in its southern home and latest period
came under Mesopotamian domination. As is to be expected, therefore,
its monuments show very strong Mesopotamian, and less strong Egyptian,
influence. At the last, indeed, those of North Syria approximate very
closely indeed to the contemporary Assyrian of the Sargonid Age. At the
same time, however, they retain sufficient individuality never to be
mistaken for other than Hittite; they represent facial types, dress,
and fashion of arms which are peculiar; and the inscriptions they bear
are always couched in a script having no relation to cuneiform writing.
[Sidenote: Europe and Hittite Influence]
This vigorous civilisation, occupying the great land bridge from Asia
into Europe in the dawn of the historic Hellenic period, and eminently
receptive of Mesopotamian influences, cannot but have been a medium
through which these reached the Ægean Sea, and so told on Europe. But
this did not take place to any appreciable extent in what is known as
the prehistoric period. The Cretan products, and those of the other
Ægean Isles and mainland Greece, betray very little Mesopotamian
influence, and none that we can reasonably trace to the Hittites. So
far as we can see, the Ægean culture was much more ancient than the
Hittite, and if there was kinship between them we are bound, on the
evidence, to derive the latter from the former, and not vice versa.
There is a certain relation between late Ægean art and products
of inland Asia Minor, but it indicates influence passing eastward
rather than westward; and even on the remoter Ægean sites of Asia
Minor--Hissarlik, for instance--non-Ægean traces are but slight, and do
not suggest the influence of a strong civilisation focused inland.
[Sidenote: The Hittite Pathway of Civilisation]
[Sidenote: Part Played by the Phœnicians]
In the early Hellenic Age, on the other hand, we have to note
considerable Mesopotamian influence on Greek culture, and, at the
same time, certain evidence of counter influence, both sub-Ægean and
Græco-Lydian, on Mesopotamia, which is as yet not fully understood.
But whether both or either of these respective influences were
transmitted through the Hittite civilisation is still very doubtful.
The Egyptian influence on archaic Anatolia, especially on Rhodes, and
even on the Greek mainland, seems clearly to have come by way of the
sea; and considering the part which the Phœnicians had been playing
for some time previously as transmitters of things eastern, there is a
probable alternative westward route for Mesopotamian influence also.
In Cyprus, at any rate, this influence, which at a certain period
has left strong traces, certainly came for the most part through the
western Semites. The claim of the Hittites, however, is not to be
denied altogether. Their script seems undoubtedly to have been the
parent of the Lycian and other local Anatolian systems. Phrygian art
and writing attest Græco-Lydian influence inland; Ionian culture was
certainly not unaffected by the Lydian in which many students recognise
a western offshoot of the Hittite; and there are a few features in
Ionian cult and in cult representations which seem to be owed rather
to the religious system of the central plateau than to that native to
the Ægean area. In this state of suspense we must leave the question,
adding only these final remarks, that Greek tradition itself ascribed
some of the arts and luxuries of its civilisation--for example, the
coining of money--to Lydian invention, and also affiliated to Lydia a
whole western culture, that of Etruria; while it is an undoubted fact
that a Mesopotamian standard of weight-currency travelled to the Ægean,
and thence affected all western commerce, but by what channel we do not
certainly know. There is an unknown quantity in all this problem--viz.,
Lydia. We have reason to suspect the latter of a considerable influence
on early Hellenic civilisation, both as creator and transmitter, but
must await further evidence.
The part played by the Phœnicians in transmitting influences of
civilisation from East to West is far more certain, and is now much
better understood than it was a few years ago. Much vague exaggeration
of it has been swept away by recent demonstration that there is
practically nothing of probable Phœnician origin in the remains of
the Ægean culture. The script of the latter is wholly independent;
the typical Phœnician vehicles of glyptic art, the cylinder and the
scarab, were never naturalised in the early Ægean; the whole path of
the latter’s artistic development was distinct; and the Ægean religious
representations, once regarded as Semitic, are now seen to be native.
On the other hand, decadent and derived Ægean forms and motives appear
among the earliest Phœnician known to us. Influence, if it passed at
all, between the Ægean and the Syrian coast lands, in the prehistoric
age, moved from west to east.
[Sidenote: Origin of Our Written Language]
[Sidenote: Semitic Influence in Greek Art]