Abstract
IN a review of No. VI. of “The Annual of the British School at Athens,” published last year (vol. lxiv. p. 11), the great importance of the discoveries of Mr. A. J. Evans at Knossos in Crete was pointed out, and the opinion was expressed that that volume contained “matter of extraordinary interest to students of the history, not only of Greece, of Egypt, and Western Asia, but also of mankind in general,” for, since “the culture which now dominates the world is the child of the civilisation of Ancient Greece, … any archæological discovery which tends to increase our knowledge of the beginnings of Greek civilisation possesses an importance and an interest far greater than that of any other possible discovery whatever in the archæological field.” The writer then proceeded to sketch briefly the position of Mycenæan civilisation in history, insisting more especially upon what is now a commonplace of archæological knowledge—the fact that “the culture of classical Greece, as we know it, is but the second epoch of Greek civilisation. Classical Greece had a past, the true history of which had been half forgotten, had been preserved in confused and contradictory legends. The culture of the past had bloomed from end to end of the Greek world, in cities, some, like Athens or Knôssos, of renown in classical as well as præ-classical days, others, like Mycenæ and Tiryns, cities whose fame ceased to be when the Dorians entered Greece. This culture was bronze-using, and was, in fact, the Greek phase of the European culture of the Bronze Age, a phase earlier in date than the phases of Central and Northern Europe, and in all probability not only their forerunner, but to a great extent their forebear.”
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H., H. The Older Civilisation of Greece: Further Discoveries in Crete 1 . Nature 66, 390–394 (1902). https://doi.org/10.1038/066390d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/066390d0