Vol. XXIII, No. I 
WASHINGTON 
January, 1912 
ATUOHAIL 
©(SmAIFMIKD 
A(SAM] 
HP] 
THE SEA-KINGS OF CRETE 
By Rev. James Baikie 
Explorers with the spade have been making discoveries in Crete which have 
completely altered our ideas of early civilization in the JEgean Sea. They have 
found that Crete was the home of the first great sea power, and that more than a 
thoiisand years before the time of the Phcenicians, who generally have been cred- 
ited with inventing writing, the Cretans devised and used the linear characters, 
which the Phcenicians simply adapted. The Cretans were curiously modern in 
their dress and habits. Pictures have been uncovered shozving ladies long before 
the time of Homer dressed in Parisian styles, zvith big hats, high heels, and tight- 
laced corsets. The houses and the methods of sanitation were extremely modern, 
far surpassing anything known in civilized times until the last jo years. Rev. 
James Baikie, of Edinburgh, has luritten an entertaining and instructive book 
summarizing the results of these explorations, particidarly those by Dr. A. J. 
Evans, the pioneer and chief of Cretan explorers. From this book, "The Sea- 
Kings of Crete," Adam and Charles Black, publishers (New York, The Macmillan 
Co.), the follozving article has been abstracted by the Editor. The illustrations, 
by Dr. A. J. Evans, are from the same source. 
THE present generation has wit- 
nessed remarkable discoveries in 
Mesopotamia and in Egypt, but 
neither Nififur nor Abydos disclosed a 
world so entirely new and unexpected 
as that which has been revealed by the 
work of Schliemann and his successors 
at Troy, Mycense, and Tiryns, and by 
that of Evans and the other explorers — 
Italian, British, and American — in Crete. 
It was obvious that mighty men must 
have existed before Agamemnon, but 
what manner of men they were and in 
what manner of world they lived were 
matters absolutely unknown and, to all 
appearance, likely to remain so. An 
abundant Avealth of legend told of great 
kings and heroes, of stately palaces, and 
mighty armies, and powerful fleets, and 
the whole material of an advanced civili- 
zation. But the legends were manifestly 
largely imaginative — deities and demi- 
gods, men and fabulous monsters, were 
mingled in them on the same plane- — and 
it seemed impossible that we should ever 
get back to the solid ground, if solid 
ground had ever existed, on which these 
ancient stories first rested. 
For the historian of the middle of the 
nineteenth century Greek history began 
with the First Olympiad, in 776 B. C. 
Before that the story of the return of the 
Herakleids and the Dorian conquest of 
the men of the Bronze Age might very 
probably embody, in a fanciful form, a 
genuine historical fact; the Homeric 
poems were to be treated with respect, 
not only on account of their supreme 
poetical merit, but as possibly represent- 
ing a credible tradition, though, of 
