PREHISTORIC MAN IN THE EASTERN 

 MEDITERRANEAN. 



PART II. 



THE MYKENAEAN QUESTION. 



45- A RECENT article summarised the evidence of the 

 1\ course of the dominant civilisation in the Eastern 

 Mediterranean down to the point where Hellenic history 

 may fairly be said to begin. But the caution is perhaps 

 hardly yet superfluous, that community of civilisation does 

 not prove community of race, though it frequently accom- 

 panies it, and sometimes can be shown to result from it. 

 The question therefore which next occurs is twofold : firstly, 

 from what source or blended sources is the ^Egean civilisa- 

 tion derived ; secondly, if it is indigenous, what is the 

 ethnographic position of the race or races who originated 

 it ; and if it is immigrant, who, in addition, introduced it, 

 and from whence, among the peoples of the /Egean area 

 and their neighbours. 



46. A premature but not unnatural conjecture led Dr. 

 Schliemann to equate absolutely the civilisations and 

 peoples of Mykense and what we know now as pre- 

 Mykenaean Hissarlik with those described as Achaean and 

 Trojan respectively in the Homeric poems ; and a large 

 part of the subsequent commentary on these and kindred 

 discoveries has approached the question from the side of 

 the Homeric literature, and has turned upon the validity of 

 this identification. But this identification itself only sub- 

 stituted an Achaean y for the Mykenaean x, and the problem 

 still remained of the relations in which Homer's Achaeans 

 stood to their namesakes in historic Hellas, and to the 

 other Hellenic stocks. 



47. Dr. Tsountas has attempted to dissever ethno- 

 logically the representatives of the Cycladic from those of 

 the Mykenaean stage of y'Egean civilisation, and to identify 

 the former with the Danaans, the latter with the Achaeans 



