THE SPLENDOUR OP GREECE 79 



fights and semi-barbarous luxury. It was they who 

 sacked Troy, and probably they who did the chief 

 work in destroying Crete. They flowed over the 

 Mediterranean and helped in an attack on Egypt. 



These were "bronze warriors." Meantime iron 

 had been discovered in the Danube region, and the 

 next great Aryan wave that surged through the 

 passes and fell upon Greece was a body of more 

 formidable fighters with iron weapons who swept all 

 before them. In fact, they made a clean sweep of 

 civilization. Greece was barbarized again. The sea 

 was covered with Greek rovers or pirates. It was 

 something like the story of England after the Romans 

 withdrew, and the Vikings and Danes dominated the 

 sea and desolated the land. The old cities were 

 abandoned. By 1,000 b.c. the first European (really 

 Cretan) civilization was over. 



But the earlier and already civilized "Greeks" — 

 for the correct names of the various peoples the 

 reader must see larger works — had passed in great 

 numbers to the islands and the coast of Asia Minor, 

 and there they nursed what remained of civilization. 

 Within a few centuries there was a new and very 

 remarkable civilization on this coast of Asia Minor. 

 Nearly all the great names in early Greek literature, 

 philosophy, and science — Homer, Sappho, Thales, 

 Anaximander, Pythagoras, Democritus, etc. — belonged 

 to it or studied in it. There was a chain of civiliza- 

 tions across Asia Minor, linking them with Mesopo- 

 tamia, and numbers of them visited Egypt. But 

 they were Europeans, and, as the wild disorder of 

 the " iron age " settled down, they communicated 

 their civilization, slowly and gradually, to the peoples 

 of Greece. 



