DISCOVERY 



177 



Yfr5<fi?lfi 



The following articles are but one feeble manifesta- 

 tion of what I and thousands of others have learned 

 from Burrows. I wish I could make a truer tribute to 

 my great friend and teacher.] 



I 



The Greek Premier, Jlr. Venizelos, one of the few 

 great statesmen in Europe to-day, comes from Crete. 

 This fact seems to clinch in a striking way a connection 

 which began four thousand years ago. It was in 

 Crete, at that remote period, that the foundations of 

 Greek and indeed European culture were laid. WTien 

 Mr. Venizelos was a bo3% this fact, as that of the very 

 existence of a prehistoric Cretan civilisation, was 

 unknown. Our knowledge of it has been almost 

 entirely acquired since 1900. In this short time re- 

 markable revelations have been effected by means of 

 the spade, mostly by the spades of Sir Arthur 

 Evans. Excavation at Knossos, Phaestos, and 

 other sites in Crete has disclosed, not merely the 

 existence of a people whose form of civilisation 

 was the earliest in Europe, but their daily life, « 

 games, amusements ; their art, religion, writing — 1 

 though hardly yet their language ; their physical ' 

 characteristics, dress, the homes they lived in. A 

 huge palace, as big as Buckingham Palace, has - 

 been unearthed at Knossos. It has a drainage o 

 sj'Stem which an eminent Italian aichaeologist has ° 

 described as " absolutel}' English," and which J_ 

 certainly anticipates the hydrauUc engineering of 

 the nineteenth century. r. 



If turning in one's grave can be anything but 

 a figure of speech, Charles Kingsley must have 

 had a restless time in the last twentj' years. In 

 The Heroes he was writing what he himself described 

 as a " fairy story " for his children. We know 

 now that, in many ways, he was vmconsciously 

 writing historj'. WTien, for instance, he said that 

 the palace of King Minos at Knossos was like a 

 marble hill, he was unaware that there actually lived 

 a King Minos in Crete, that his palace stood on a hill 

 at Knossos, and that it was built, if not of marble, at 

 any rate of stone. 



It is astonishing to reflect that up to the last half- 

 century the whole culture of classical Greece was 

 regarded as an original thing, springing suddenly 

 I into a glorious existence. The sculpture and archi- 

 I tecture, philosophy-, orator}', and drama of the fifth 

 ] century B.C. were accepted as the spontaneous first- 

 '; fruits of Greek genius. The history of Greece went 

 I back only to the eighth century ; beyond were the 

 Dark Ages and nothing. It was true that before 

 l.^schylus, Sophocles, and Euripides there had been 

 'the shadowy poet Homer. He had sung of men and 

 deeds which seemed to echo from those Dark Ages. 



But he certainh', so we thought, was the beginning of 

 all things. He has now been shown to have been the 

 end of a good manj' things. 



Ignorance of the real beginnings of Greek civilisation 

 becomes remarkable when one recollects how much 

 was known of other origins in the Near East. In 

 Egypt and Babylonia the old traditions had been 

 passed on by later generations to Greek writers, who 

 preserved for us, no matter how imperfectly, the 

 necessary connecting-links. But the corresponding 

 phase of Greek civilisation was completely shut off ; 

 there was no suspicion even of its existence. The 

 complacent acceptance as myths — which is the same 

 thing as the tacit and complete disbelief — of the epic 

 stories which centred round Agamemnon and the 

 Homeric heroes was never challenged up to the middle 

 of the last centur}^ " To analyse the fables," said 



STRATA SECTION FROM PA1,ACE OF KNOSSOS. 



f^f^l!^^^SlV!ir<!'e»>rr*ff^^ SURFACE LEVEL 



- KFIIOD or PARTIAL OCCUPATION 

 (LATC MINOAM III) 



LATER PALACE I. 

 (MIDDLE MINOAN III.) 



EARLIER PALACE 

 (MIDDLE MINOAN It 



(From R. SI. Bunows's Discovcna in Crcle.) 



the historian Grote,' " and to elicit from them any 

 trustworthy particular facts," would be "a fruitless 

 attempt." 



Such was the outlook of Grote's contemporaries. It 

 was an outlook that was destined to be revolutionised 

 in a simple way. A poor boy named Schliemann 

 had learned these Greek stories from his father, and 

 his child's instinct told him they were literally true. 

 He determined to find the walls of Troy. Late in 

 life, after hard saving, he had money enough to put 

 his faith to the test. He went to Hissarlik, the spot 

 in Asia Minor where the town of Troy was said to have 

 stood. He dug into the earth, and buried walls _were 

 his reward. They proved in the end, however, to 

 belong not to the Homeric city, as Schliemann natu- 

 rally thought, but to another which had existed on the 

 same site a thousand years earUer — he had dug within 

 1 History of Greece (2nd ed., 1849), p. 223. 



