618 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1913. 



less and less possible without taking into constant account that of the 

 Minoan and Mycenaean world that went before it. 



The truth is that the old view of Greek civilization as a kind of 

 " enfant de miracle " can no longer be maintained. Whether they 

 like it or not, classical students must consider origins. One after an- 

 other the " inventions " attributed by its writers to the later Hellas 

 are seen to have been anticipated on Greek soil at least a thousand 

 years earlier. Take a few almost at random: The Aeginetan claim 

 to have invented sailing vessels, when such already plowed the 

 Aegean and the Libyan seas at the dawn of the Minoan age; the 

 attribution of the great improvement in music, marked by the seven- 

 stringed lyre, to Terpander of Lesbos in the middle of the seventh 

 century B. C. — an instrument played by the long-robed Cretan priests 

 of Hagia Triada some 10 centuries before, and, indeed, of far earlier 

 Minoan use. At least the antecedent stage of coinage was reached 

 long before the time of Pheidon, and the weight standards of Greece 

 were known ages before they received their later names. 



Let us admit that there may have been reinventions of lost arts. 

 Let us not blink the fact that over a large part of Greece darkness for 

 a time prevailed. Let it be assumed that the Greeks themselves were 

 an intrusive people and that they finally imposed their language on 

 an old Mediterranean race. But if, as I believe, that view is to be 

 maintained it must yet be acknowledged that from the ethnic point 

 of view the older elements largely absorbed the later. The people 

 whom we discern in the new dawn are not the pale-skinned north- 

 erners — ^the " yellow-haired Achaeans " and the rest — but essentially 

 the dark-haired, brown-complexioned race, the ^ohcKsg or " Red 

 men" of later tradition, of whom we find the earlier portraiture in 

 the Minoan and Mycenaean wall paintings. The high artistic ca- 

 pacities that distinguish this race are in absolute contrast to the pro- 

 nounced lack of such a quality among the neolithic inhabitants of 

 those more central and northern European regions, whence ex h}'- 

 pothesi the invaders came. But can it be doubted that the artistic 

 genius of the later Hellenes was largely the continuous outcome of 

 that inherent in the earlier race in which they had been merged? 

 Of that earlier " Greece before the Greeks " it may be said, as of the 

 later Greece, capta ferum victorem cepit. 



It is true that the problem would be much simplified if we could 

 accept the conclusion that the representatives of the earlier Minoan 

 civilization in Crete and of its Mycenaean outgrowth on the mainland 

 were themselves of Hellenic stock. In face of the now ascertained 

 evidence that representatives of the Aryan-speaking race had already 

 reached the Euphrates by the fourteenth century B. C. there is no 

 a priori objection to the view that other members of the same lin- 

 guistic group had reached the Aegean coasts and islands at an even 



