TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 919 
‘applied to them, and the religious ties which attached ‘Minoan’ Gaza to the cult 
of the Cretan Zeus, are so many indications that the Avgean settlements, which in 
all probability existed in the Delta, extended to the neighbouring coast of Canaan, 
and that amongst other towns the great staple of the Red Sea trade bad passed 
into the hands of these prehistoric Vikings. The influence of the Mycenzwans on 
the later Phoenicians is abundantly illustrated in their eclectic art. The Cretan 
evidence tends to show that even the origins of their alphabet receive illustration 
from the earlier AXgean pictography. It is not the Mycenzans who are Pheeni- 
cians. Itis the Phoenicians who, in many respects, acted as the depositaries of 
decadent Mycenzean art. 
If there is one thing more characteristic than another of Phoenician art, it is ite 
borrowed nature, and its incongruous collocation of foreignelements. Dr. Helbig 
himself admits that if Mycenzean art is to be regarded as the older Phcenician, the 
Pheenician historically known to us must have changed his nature. What the 
Mycenzans took they made theirown. They borrowed from the designs of Babylon- 
ian cylinders, but they adapted them to gems and seals of their own fashion, and 
rejected the cylinders themselves. The influence of Oriental religious types is 
traceable on their signet rings, but the liveliness of treatment and the dramatic 
action introduced into the groups separate them, toto celo, from the conventional 
schematism of Babylonian cult-scenes, The older element, the sacred trees and 
pillars which appear as the background of these scenes—on this I hope to say 
more later on in this Section—there is no reason to regard here as Semitic. It 
belongs to a religious stage widely represented on primitive European soil, and 
nowhere more persistent than in the West. 
Mycenzean culture was permeated by Oriental elements, but never subdued 
‘by them. This independent quality would alone be sufficient to fix its original 
birthplace in an area removed from immediate contiguity with that of the 
older civilisations of Egypt and Babylonia. The Aigean island world answers 
admirably to the conditions of the case. It is near, yet sufficiently removed, 
combining maritime access with insular security. We see the difference if we 
compare the civilisation of the Hittites of Anatolia and Northern Syria, in some 
respects so closely parallel with that of Mycense. The native elements were there 
cramped and trammelled from the beginning by the Oriental contact. No real 
life and freedom of expression was ever reached ; the art is stiff, conventional, 
becoming more and more Asiatic, till finally crushed out by Assyrian conquest. 
It is the same with the Phcenicians. But in prehistoric Greece the indigenous 
.element was able to hold its own, and to recast what it took from others in an 
original mould. Throughout its handiwork there breathes the European spirit 
of individuality and freedom. Professor Petrie’s discoveries at Tell-el-Amarna 
show the contact of this Aigean element for a moment infusing naturalism and life 
into the time-honoured conventionalities of Egypt itself. 
A variety of evidence, moreover, tends to show that during the Mycenzan 
period the earlier Aigean stock was reinforced by new race elements coming from 
north and west. The appearance of the primitive fiddle-bow-shaped fibula or 
safety-pin brings Mycenzan Greece into a suggestive relation with the Danube 
Valley and the Terremare of Northern Italy. Certain ceramic forms show the 
same affinities; and it may be noted that the peculiar ‘two-storied’ structure of 
the ‘ Villanova’ type ef urn which characterises the earliest Iron Age deposits of 
Italy finds already a close counterpart in a vessel from an Akropolis grave at 
Mycenze—a parallelism which may point to a common Illyrian source. The 
‘painted pottery of the Mycenzans itself, with its polychrome designs, betrays 
Northern and Western affinities of a very early character, though the glaze and 
exquisite technique were doubtless elaborated in the Augean shores. Examples of 
»spiraliform painted designs on pottery going back to the borders of the Neolithic 
“period have been found in Hungary and Bosnia. In the early rock-tombs of Sicily 
‘of the period anterior to that marked by imported products of the fully developed 
Mycenzan culture are found unglazed painted wares of considerable. brilliancy, 
and allied classes recur in the heel of Italy and in the cave deposits of Liguria of 
_ ‘the period transitional between the use of stone and metal. The ‘household gods,’ 
