60 HISTORY OF GREECE, ROME, AND ASIA 



the conclusion of Paul Kretschmer, whose work on primitive Greece 

 embodies most of the latest knowledge. 1 The results of linguistic 

 inquiry are far more important. Starting from the fact that there are 

 elements, in the old Greek that we know, still inexplicable, that there 

 are formations of place-names which have all the air of being non- 

 Aryan, Kretschmer has compared the relics we have of the languages 

 of Asia Minor, excluding those of the Aryan type. His conclusion is 

 that inter-related languages of a non- Aryan type were spread all over 

 the seaboard of Asia Minor, and that the features of these languages 

 which remain are also to be found in Hellenic place-names. 2 Hence 

 the science of language warrants us in assuming that Aryan invaders 

 found all over Greece and Asia Minor an earlier population with, if 

 not unity, at least kinship, in the grammatical structure of their 

 speech, and therefore probably not primitive or savage, but provided 

 with some degree of civilization. Hence the earliest Greek culture, 

 even if Cretan and Mykensean work were Greek, may be regarded as 

 a composite civilization, and the fascinating task of future inquirers 

 will be to assign to the different layers of population their respective 

 shares in the great result. In such investigations all the sister sciences 

 must lend a hand to the historian linguistics, anthropology, archieo- 

 logy, and above all he must possess that highest quality in any scien- 

 tific man, the imagination which combines facts, which strikes out 

 theories, which makes research methodical by bringing it under fixed 

 and leading ideas, which turns the valley of dry bones into the habita- 

 tion of living men. The ancient times of Greek history are therefore 

 a progressive study, in the truest sense of the word. Grote discarded 

 the myths as evidence, he even ignored the living testimony of the 

 everlasting hills and the many voices of the ever-intruding sea, and 

 wrote his great work in a London study. E. Curtius, a generation later, 

 equipped himself by long residence and travel in the glens and fiords of 

 Greece, and if in political understanding he was far inferior to the 

 English statesman, in picturesqueness, and in his feeling for the real 

 life behind the myths, he made a long step in advance. Another gen- 

 eration passes by, and we have, among many able books, the newest 

 and best in the history of Mr. Bury. His opening chapters seem cen- 

 turies ahead of Grote, generations ahead of Curtius. For in the last 

 twenty years excavations in many parts of Greece have added masses 

 of new evidence. Egyptology and general linguistics have contributed 

 their share, and as the force of genius in the individual brings up from 

 the darkness of the sub-conscious self the long-forgotten lessons of 

 the past, so the power of Minos, the long succession of human homes 

 on the hill of Ilion, the builders of the great fort of Tiryns, are rising 

 from prehistoric night into the morning of Greek history. 



1 Einleit. in die Gesch. der griech. Sprache (Gfittingen, 1896), cap. n. 

 * Op. tit. p. 292. 



