442 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1916. 



was partly assimilated witk Hathor, the Egyptian cow goddess of the 

 underworld. 



My own most recent investigations have more and more brought 

 home to me the all-pervading community between Minoan Crete 

 and the land of the Pharoahs. When we realize the great indebted- 

 ness of the succeeding classical culture of Greece to its Minoan prede- 

 cessor the full significance of this conclusion will be understood. 

 Ancient Egypt itself can no longer be regarded as something apart 

 from general human history. Its influences are seen to lie about 

 the very cradle of our own civilization. 



The high early culture, the equal rival of that of Egypt and Baby- 

 lonia, which thus began to take its rise in Crete in the fourth mil- 

 lenniiun before our era, flourished for some two thousand years, 

 eventually dominating the ^gean and a large part of the Mediter- 

 ranean Basin. To the civilization, as a whole, I ventured, from the 

 name of the legendaiy king and lawgiver of Crete, to apply the 

 name of "Minoan," which has received general acceptance; and it 

 has been possible now to divide its course into three ages — early, 

 middle, and late, answering roughly to the successive Egyptian king- 

 doms, and each in turn with a triple subdivision. 



It is difficult, indeed, in a few words to do adequate justice to this 

 earliest of European civilizations. Its achievements are too mani- 

 fold. The many-storied palaces of the Minoan priest kings in 

 their great days, by their ingenious planning, their successful combi- 

 nation of the useful with the beautiful and stately, and last but not 

 least, by their scientific sanitary arrangements far outdid the similar 

 works, on however vast a scale, of Egyptian or Babylonian builders. 

 What is more, the same skillful and commodious construction recurs 

 in a whole series of private mansions and smaller dwellings through- 

 out the island. Outside "broad Knossos" itself flourishing towns 

 spring up far and wide on the country sides. New and refined crafts 

 were developed, some of them like that of the inlaid metal work, 

 unsurpassed in any age or country. Artistic skill, of coui'se, reached 

 its acme in the great palaces themselves, the corridors, landings, and 

 porticoes of which were decked with wall paintings and high reliefs, 

 showing in the treatment of animal life not only an extraordinary 

 grasp of nature but a grandiose power of composition such as the 

 world had never seen before. Such were the gi'eat bull -grappling 

 reliefs of the sea "gate at Knossos and the agonistic scenes of the 

 great palace hall. 



The modernness of much of the life here revealed to us is aston- 

 ishing. The elaboration of the domestic arrangements, the stair- 

 cases story above story, the front places given to the ladies at shows, 

 their fashionable flounced robes and jackets, the gloves sometimes 

 seen on their hands or hanging from their folding chairs, their 



