The Glow Spreads West 47 



Would that we could name these hard-working but pious fisher- 

 men, but this sea hunt, the Hke of which must have taken place 

 countless hundreds of times throughout the length and breadth of 

 the Aegean Sea for perhaps a hundred centuries, occurred too long 

 ago. It was a regular practice among these seafaring people, and we 

 know somewhat of how it was accomplished from much later refer- 

 ences by the Greeks, and more especially from many exquisitely col- 

 ored murals found in the temples of Cnossos in Crete, and from 

 scenes depicted on vases of the period. Here, seven thousand years 

 after the neolithic people of the North Sea learned to harpoon the 

 porpoise, and a thousand years after the Phoenicians first sought the 

 nakhiri, we stumble across still another ancient whaling industry, and 

 in another sea-country. Mariners, it seems, must always follow the 

 whale. 



The Minoans of Crete, or the Keftiu, as the ancient Egyptians 

 called them, developed a high culture at an extremely early age, 

 contemporary, in fact, with those first beginnings that we have 

 noted in India, in Mesopotamia, and along the valley of the Nile. 

 At the dawn of the third millennium before our era they had already 

 developed most competent ships and were sailing the open sea. In 

 contrast to the ancient Egyptians, who were essentially a riverine 

 people, the Cretans were peninsular-insular folk par excellence who 

 appear to have abhorred coastal navigation and to have set out di- 

 rectly across the eastern Mediterranean to trade with other lands. 

 Their pottery and other wares appear in Egypt, intermixed with 

 the relics of the earliest dynasties, whereas they do not appear on 

 the nearby coasts of Asia Minor until much later, which seems to 

 indicate that the Keftiu pioneered the route to the mouth of the 

 Nile. Certainly they maintained a tremendous trading port at what 

 is now Alexandria, for an enormous harbor has been found there 

 which must have been built by Egyptian slave labor, but which was 

 obviously constructed under the guiding genius of some truly sea- 

 faring people who were certainly not Egyptians. Centuries before 

 the coming of the Dorians, who overran Greece and overthrew this 

 wonderful Minoan civilization about 1700 B.C., these fearless people 

 had reached Sicily, the west coast of Italy, and perhaps even Spain, 

 and they certainly sailed the Black Sea. 



Their ships appear to have been their own original development 



