18 president's address. 



sprung, like Athena herself, fully panoplied from the head of Zeus. The 

 indebtedness to Oriental sources was either regarded as comparatively 

 late or confined to such definite borrowings as the alphabet or certain 

 weights and measures. Egypt, on the other hand, at least till Alex- 

 andrine times, was looked on as something apart, and it must be said 

 that Egyptologists on their side were only too anxious to preserve 

 their sanctum from profane contact. 



A truer perspective has now been opened out. It has been made 

 abundantly clear that the rise of Hellenic civilisation was itself part of 

 a wider economy and can be no longer regarded as an isolated pheno- 

 menon. Indirectly, its relation to the greater World and to the 

 ancient centres to the South and East has been now established 

 by its affiliation to the civilisation of prehistoric Crete and by the 

 revelation of the extraordinarily high degree of proficiency that was 

 there attained in almost all departments of human art and industry. 

 That Crete itself — the ' Mid-Sea land,' a kind of halfway house between 

 three continents — should have been the cradle of our European civilisa- 

 tion was, in fact, a logical consequence of its geographical position. 

 An outher of Mainland Greece, almost opposite the mouths of the 

 Nile, primitive intercourse between Crete and the further shores of 

 the Libyan Sea was still further facilitated by favourable winds and 

 currents. In the Eastern direction, on the other hand, island stepping- 

 stones brought it into easy communication with the coast of Asia Minor, 

 with which it was actually connected in late geological times. 



But the extraneous influences that were here operative from a 

 remote period encountered on the island itself a primitive indigenous 

 culture that had grown up there from immemorial time. In view of 

 some recent geological calculations, such as those of Baron De Geer, 

 who by counting the number of layers of mud in Lake Eagunda has 

 reduced the ice-free period in Sweden to 7,000 years, it will not be 

 superfluous to emphasise the extreme antiquity that seems to be indi- 

 cated for even the later Neolithic in Crete. The Hill of Knossos, upon 

 which the remains of the brilliant Minoan civilisation have found their 

 most striking revelation, itself resembles in a large part of its com- 

 position a great mound or Tell — like those of Mesopotamia or Egypt — 

 formed of layer after layer of human deposits. But the remains of the 

 whole of the later Ages represented down to the earliest Minoan period 

 (which itself goes back to a time contemporary with the early Dynasties 

 of Egypt — at a moderate estimate to 3400 B.C.) occupy considerably 

 less than a half — 19 feet, that is, out of a total of over 45. Such 

 calculations can have only a relative value, but, even if we assume 

 a more rapid accumulation of debris for the Neolithic strata and deduct 

 a third from our calculation, they would still occupy a space of over 

 3,400 years, giving a total antiquity of some 9,000 years from the present 



