24 THE WONDERS OP ANCIENT CRETE 



creations of this busy age. Commerce also developed. 

 The amber or jet or highly-prized stone that belonged 

 to a particular region would be bartered for corn or 

 cattle or fine weapons. Trade-routes covered Europe. 

 New tribes, which had been developing along different 

 lines in Asia or on the Asiatic frontier, swept into 

 Europe with fresh institutions. One wave of people 

 from the east broke across central Europe as far as 

 France and Britain, bringing with it the practice of 

 raising large stone monuments over the dead or great 

 stone circles (Stonehenge) and avenues in honour of 

 the sun. 



At last, apparently between 4,000 and 5,000 B.C., 

 the use of metal was discovered. Copper was the 

 first metal to occur to primitive man, but as early as 

 4,000 b.c. we find that he had learned (in Egypt and 

 Babylonia, and possibly Crete) to make bronze. The 

 details of this evolution must be read elsewhere. It 

 is enough here to observe that each such new inven- 

 tion was a powerful stimulus to culture and commerce. 

 But by this time what we call civilization had 

 definitely begun, and we leave the general evolution 

 of the central human group and take up, in succes- 

 sion, the three cradles of civilization. 



We may take it that Crete was one of the chief 

 centres of the region which is now lost under the 

 waves of the Mediterranean. At what period the 

 region generally was flooded we do not know, but it 

 was most probably long before the beginning of 

 civilization. The ancient Greeks had a legend — they 

 tell us that they got it from Egypt — of a great 

 civilization being swamped by a mighty flood. Plato, 

 who makes a sort of Utopian romance out of this 

 fragment of legend, tells us that the lost civilization 



