508 MAN: PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



Troad) under eastern influences, but still independently, in so far 

 that the eastern models were not slavishly borrowed, but rather 

 assimilated and still further improved. Moreover, it was from the 

 ^Egean centre, and not directly from the East, that the arts of the 

 Bronze and later periods were introduced into Europe, so that the 

 ^Egean is to be regarded as the connecting link 

 between East and West, between, for instance, the 

 bronzes of Ireland and Scandinavia on the one hand 



Culture. 



and those of Egypt and Babylonia on the other. 

 His conclusions being based, not only on his own researches, but 

 also on those of Schliemann, Tsountas and others in Hissarlik 

 (Troy), Tiryns, Mykenae, Argos, Cyprus, together with the 

 revelations of the Swiss lake-dwellings and the Terramare of 

 north Italy, have a solid foundation in fact, and are now largely 

 accepted by archaeologists. The old views respecting the 

 "Etruscan" or "Semitic" origin of the Western Bronze culture, 

 are falling into the background, and making way for the several 

 periods of ^gean culture, as determined by the finds in the second 

 city of Troy, in Amorgos, under the volcanic bed in the island of 

 Thera, in the tombs of Mykenae and elsewhere. 



The first period covers the wide domain comprised by Switzer- 

 land and Upper Italy, the Danube basin (especially Hungary) 

 and the Balkan peninsula; it is continued throughout a great part 

 of Asia Minor, and at last ends in Cyprus. In this artistic domain, 

 in which Asia Minor appears as a part of Europe, the later yEgean 

 culture was evolved mainly along the sea-coasts, for "life springs 

 from water." The assumption that navigation in the eastern 

 Mediterranean had its rise on the unsheltered Syrian seaboard, 

 where we now know that the Phoenicians arrived at a relatively 

 late period, can no longer be maintained. The yEgean islands 

 were the natural home of the earliest efforts of seafaring man, and 

 thus was here stimulated a higher degree of culture, which reacted 

 not only on the whole of the European domain, but also influenced 

 the earlier Egyptian and Asiatic fields themselves. 



But the influences were mutual, as shown by the /Egean 

 imitation of the Babylonian cylinders and other objects, and 

 especially by the spiral motive in ornamentation, which already 

 appears in the Amorgos (pre-Mykenaean) period, and later 



