338 SCIENCE PROGRESS. 



the assumption that the representations of dress, armour, 

 etc., of the sixth, fifth and fourth centuries B.C., were valid 

 illustrations of poems which at the latest belonged to the 

 seventh, and on an average were assigned to the ninth or 

 tenth century. The reason of this was that Homeric sub- 

 jects in Greek art are uniformly furnished with accessories 

 of the age of the artist, and that until the study of Classical 

 Antiquities began to be infected with the " evolutionary 

 notions " which had already long been current in all other 

 departments of Ethnography, the attention of students of 

 Greek art and culture was strictly confined to mature and 

 decadent art ; everything which could not be assigned to a 

 century subsequent to the fifth was either dismissed as 

 barbaric, or discounted as a " Phoenician importation " ; the 

 part which " Phoenician " fables, ancient and modern, have 

 played in the historical study of the Mediterranean area will 

 be considered briefly later on. Such, for example, was the 

 received opinion — so far as there was one — of such dis- 

 coveries of pre-Hellenic culture as those of M. Fouque's 

 expedition to the Island of Santorin (Thera, 1862), where, in 

 the course of a geological investigation, a primitive settle- 

 ment was found under a thick bed of volcanic debris, or of 

 those of MM. Salzmann and Biliotti (1868-71), who in 

 searching for antiquities in Rhodes found at Ialysos, for the 

 British Museum, a magnificent collection of early vases 

 which are now known to be Mykenaean, and second only in 

 quality and variety to those from Mykense itself. The 

 Santorin settlement was simply taken to confirm the legend 

 of the Phoenician colony of Kadmos (Hdt. iv., 147), and 

 the vases from Ialysos were explained as the barbarous but 

 immediate predecessors of those from Kamiros, were classed 

 with them as " Grseco-Phcenician," and were referred to the 

 seventh century, in spite of the absence of Egyptian objects 

 of the twenty-sixth Dynasty, and the presence of objects of 

 the eighteenth : a view which in certain quarters is not 

 yet quite extinct. 



6. It was not till 1871 that Dr. Heinrich Schliemann 

 was enabled to execute his lifelong ambition of testing with 

 the spade the Greek tradition that the site of the Grseco- 



