OEIGINS OF dVILIZATION IN" EUROPE EVANS. 439 



derivation from this source among the inherited acquirements that 

 finally led up to the higher forms of a'ncient civilization that arose on 

 the Nile and the Euphrates. In many directions, we may believe, the 

 flaming torch had been carried on by the relay runners. 



But what, it may be asked, of Greece itself, where human culture 

 reached its highest pinnacle in the ancient world and to which we 

 look as the principal source of our own civilization? 



Till within recent years it seemed almost a point of honor for clas- 

 sical scholars to regard Hellenic civilization as a wonder child, 

 sprung, like Athena herself, fully panoplied from the head of Zeus. 

 The indebtedness to oriental sources was either regarded as compara- 

 tively late or confined to such definite borrowings as the alphabet or 

 certain weights and measures. Egypt, on the other hand, at least till 

 Alexandrine times, was looked on as something apart, and it must be 

 said that Egyptologists, on their side, were only too anxious to pre- 

 serve their sanctum from profane contact. 



A truer perspective has now been opened out. It has been made 

 abundantl}^ clear that the rise of Hellenic civilization was itself part 

 of a wider economy and can be no longer regarded as an isolated 

 phenomenon. Indirectly, its relation to the greater world and to the 

 ancient centers to the south and east has been now established by its 

 affiliation to the civilization of prehistoric Crete and by the revelation 

 of the extraordinarily high degree of proficiency that was there at- 

 tained in almost all departments of human art and industry. That 

 Crete itself — the " Mid-Sea Land," a kind of halfway house between 

 three continents— should have been the cradle of our European civili- 

 zation was, in fact, a logical consequence of its geographical position. 

 An outlier of mainland Greece, almost opposite the mouths of the 

 Mle, primitive intercourse between Crete and the farther shores of 

 the Libj^an Sea was still further facilitated by favorable winds and 

 currents. In the eastern direction, on the other hand, island stepping- 

 stones brought it into easy communication with the coast of Asia 

 Minor, with which it was actually connected in late geological times. 



But the extraneous influences that were here operative from a 

 remote period encountered on the island itself a prunitive indige- 

 nous culture that had grown up there from immemorial time. In 

 view of some recent geological calculations, such as those of Baron 

 de Geer, who by counting the numbers of layers of mud in Lake 

 Eagunda has reduced the ice-free period in Sweden to 7,000 years, 

 it will not be superfluous to emphasize the extreme antiquity that 

 seems to be indicated for even the later Neolithic in Crete. The 

 Hill of Knossos, upon which the remains of the brilliant Minoan 

 civilization have found their most striking revelation, itself re- 

 sembles in a large part of its composition a great mound or tell — 

 like those of Mesopotamia or Egypt — formed of layer after layer 



