THE SPLENDOUR OF GREECE 77 



maps and geological conditions as superficial and 

 " materialistic." But it is precisely this "materialism" 

 that has made the story of man at last fairly intel- 

 ligible, and we now apply it to the awakening of 

 Europe. 



It is well to take a broad view, to begin with. 

 Nearer xlsia — or the region from the Nile to the 

 Persian Gulf — made more rapid progress than Europe 

 at first for reasons that we have seen. At the close 

 of the Ice Age men of the New Stone Age spread 

 over Europe. But, just because they spread, they 

 had not the same stimulus to progress as those of 

 the Mediterranean region who remained in contact. 

 There was, of course, progress. The Britons, for 

 instance, developed an elementary civilization, with 

 fine gold and bronze ornaments, long before the 

 Romans came. Broadly speaking, however, the New 

 Stone Age men of Europe made little progress, except 

 where, as in Greece and Italy, the Cretan civilization 

 touched them. 



Then the " Aryans " (to which the Britons belonged, 

 of course) came upon the scene. The real Europeans 

 — ancestors of the modern European nations — began. 

 They had, apparently, lived somewhere near the 

 Caspian Sea and the Caucasus mountains during the 

 later phase of the Ice Age. They had become accus- 

 tomed to bracing conditions, and had gone further 

 north as the ice receded. The Teutonic and Slav 

 families went right up to the Baltic region. Then 

 they turned south and west. The Celts reached 

 France and Britain ; and a large family took the 

 nearer route to Italy and Greece. The ancestors of 

 the Greeks were, naturally, the first to reach the sea 

 and come into contact with the older civilizations, 



