918 REPORT—1896. 
found inthe Mycenzan deposits. But more than a mere commercial connexion 
between the Aigean seat of Mycenzean culture and Egypt seems to be indicated by 
some of the inlaid daggers from the Acropolis tombs. The subject of that repre- 
senting the ichneumons hunting ducks amidst the lotos thickets beside a stream 
that can only be the Nile, as much as the intarsia technique, is so purely of 
Egypt that it can only have been executed by a Mycenzan artificer resident within 
its borders. The whole cycle of Egyptian Nile-pieces thoroughly penetrated 
Mycenzean art,—the duck-catcher in his Nile-boat, the water-fowl and butterflies 
among the river plants, the spotted cows and calves, supplied fertile motives for 
the Mycenzean goldsmiths and ceramic artists. The griffins of Mycene reproduce 
an elegant creation of the New Empire, in which an influence from the Asiatic 
side is also traceable. 
The assimilation of Babylonian elements was equally extensive. It, too, as we 
have seen, had begun in the earlier Aigean period, and the religious influence from 
the Semitic side, of which traces are already seen in the assimilation of the more 
primitive ‘idols’ to Eastern models, now forms a singular blend with the Egyptian, 
as regards, at least, the externals of cult. We see priests, in long folding robes of 
Asiatic cut, leading griffins, offering doves, holding axes of a type of Egyptian 
derivation which seems to have been common to the Syrian coast, the Hittite 
regions of Anatolia, and Mycenzean Greece. Female votaries in flounced Baby- 
lonian dresses stand before seated Goddesses, rays suggesting those of Shamas 
shoot from a Sun-God’s shoulders, conjoined figures of moon and star recall the 
symbols of Sin and Istar, and the worship of a divine pair of male and female 
divinities is widely traceable, reproducing the relations of a Semitic Bel and Beltis. 
The cylinder subjects of Chaldean art continually assert themselves: A Mycenzean 
hero steps into the place of Gilgames or Eabani, and renews their struggles with 
wild beasts and demons in the same conventional attitudes, of which Christian art 
has preserved a reminiscence in its early type of Daniel in the lions’ den. The 
peculiar schemes resulting from, cr, at least, brought into continual prominence by 
the special conditions of cylinder engraving, with the constant tendency to which 
it is liable of the two ends of the design to overlap, deeply influenced the glyptic 
style of Mycenz. Here, too, we see the same animals with crossed bodies, with 
two bodies and a single head, or simply confronted. These latter affiliations to 
Babylonian prototypes have a very important bearing on many later offshoots of 
European culture. The tradition of these heraldic groups preserved by the later 
Mycenzan art, and communicated by it to the so-called ‘ Oriental ’ style of Greece, 
finds in another direction its unbroken continuity in ornamental products of the 
Hallstatt province, and that of the late Celtic metal workers, 
‘But this,’ exclaims a friendly critic, ‘is the old heresy—the “ Mirage 
Orientale” overagain. Such heraldic combinations have originated independently 
elsewhere :—why may they not be of indigenous origin in primitive Europe? ’ 
They certainly may be. Confronted figures occur already in the Dordogne 
caves. But, in a variety of instances, the historic and geographical connexion of 
these types with the Mycenan, and those in turn with the Oriental, is clearly 
made out. That system which leaves the least call on human efforts at inventive- 
ness seems in anthropology to be the safest. 
Let us then fully acknowledge the indebtedness of early Aigean culture to the 
older civilisations of the East. But thisindebtedness must not be allowed to obscure 
the fact that what was borrowed was also assimilated. On the easternmost coast 
of the Mediterranean, as in Egypt, it is not in a pauper’s guise that the Mycenzan 
element makes its appearance. It is rather the mvasion of a conquering and 
superior culture. It has already outstripped its instructors. In Cyprus, which had 
lagged behind the A%gean peoples in the race of progress, the Mycenzan relics 
make their appearance as imported objects of far superior fabric, side by side with 
the rude insular products. The final engrafting on Cypriote soil of what may 
be called a colonial plantation of Mycen later reacts on Assyrian art, and 
justifies the bold theory of Professor Brunn that the sculptures of Nineveh betray 
Greek handiwork. The concordant Hebrew tradition that the Philistines were 
immigrants from the Islands of the Sea, the name ‘ Cherethim,’ or Cretans, actually 
