THE PEOPLE OF THE AEGEAN SEA CARRIED THE CIVILISATION OF OLD ASIA INTO
THE WILDERNESS OF EUROPE
WHEN Heinrich Schliemann was a little boy his father told him the story
of Troy. He liked that story better than anything else he had ever heard
and he made up his mind, that as soon as he was big enough to leave
home, he would travel to Greece and "find Troy." That he was the son of
a poor country parson in a Mecklenburg village did not bother him. He
knew that he would need money but he decided to gather a fortune first
and do the digging afterwards. As a matter of fact, he managed to get
a large fortune within a very short time, and as soon as he had enough
money to equip an expedition, he went to the northwest corner of Asia
Minor, where he supposed that Troy had been situated.
In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high mound covered
with grainfields. According to tradition it had been the home of Priamus
the king of Troy. Schliemann, whose enthusiasm was somewhat greater than
his knowledge, wasted no time in preliminary explorations. At once he
began to dig. And he dug with such zeal and such speed that his trench
went straight through the heart of the city for which he was looking
and carried him to the ruins of another buried town which was at least
a thousand years older than the Troy of which Homer had written. Then
something very interesting occurred. If Schliemann had found a few
polished stone hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude pottery, no one
would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such objects, which
people had generally associated with the prehistoric men who had lived
in these regions before the coming of the Greeks, Schliemann found
beautiful statuettes and very costly jewelry and ornamented vases of a
pattern that was unknown to the Greeks. He ventured the suggestion that
fully ten centuries before the great Trojan war, the coast of the AEgean
had been inhabited by a mysterious race of men who in many ways had been
the superiors of the wild Greek tribes who had invaded their country and
had destroyed their civilisation or absorbed it until it had lost
all trace of originality. And this proved to be the case. In the late
seventies of the last century, Schliemann visited the ruins of Mycenae,
ruins which were so old that Roman guide-books marvelled at their
antiquity. There again, beneath the flat slabs of stone of a small round
enclosure, Schliemann stumbled upon a wonderful treasure-trove, which
had been left behind by those mysterious people who had covered the
Greek coast with their cities and who had built walls, so big and so
heavy and so strong, that the Greeks called them the work of the Titans,
those god-like giants who in very olden days had used to play ball with
mountain peaks.
A very careful study of these many relics has done away with some of the
romantic features of the story. The makers of these early works of
art and the builders of these strong fortresses were no sorcerers, but
simple sailors and traders. They had lived in Crete, and on the many
small islands of the AEgean Sea. They had been hardy mariners and they
had turned the AEgean into a center of commerce for the exchange of
goods between the highly civilised east and the slowly developing
wilderness of the European mainland.
For more than a thousand years they had maintained an island empire
which had developed a very high form of art. Indeed their most important
city, Cnossus, on the northern coast of Crete, had been entirely modern
in its insistence upon hygiene and comfort. The palace had been properly
drained and the houses had been provided with stoves and the Cnossians
had been the first people to make a daily use of the hitherto unknown
bathtub. The palace of their King had been famous for its winding
staircases and its large banqueting hall. The cellars underneath this
palace, where the wine and the grain and the olive-oil were stored, had
been so vast and had so greatly impressed the first Greek visitors, that
they had given rise to the story of the "labyrinth," the name which we
give to a structure with so many complicated passages that it is almost
impossible to find our way out, once the front door has closed upon our
frightened selves.
But what finally became of this great AEgean Empire and what caused its
sudden downfall, that I can not tell.
The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing, but no one has yet
been able to decipher their inscriptions. Their history therefore is
unknown to us. We have to reconstruct the record of their adventures
from the ruins which the AEgeans have left behind. These ruins make it
clear that the AEgean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilised
race which had recently come from the plains of northern Europe. Unless
we are very much mistaken, the savages who were responsible for the
destruction of the Cretan and the AEgean civilisation were none other
than certain tribes of wandering shepherds who had just taken possession
of the rocky peninsula between the Adriatic and the AEgean seas and who
are known to us as Greeks.