THE SEA-KINGS OF CRETE 
work on some ancient site ; and he would 
be a bold man who would venture today 
to call "illusory" the search for "points 
of solid truth" in the old legends, or to 
assert that "the items of matter of fact, 
if any such there be," are inextricable 
from the mass of romantic inventions in 
which they are embedded. 
WHAT cre;te; has revmled 
The resurrection of the prehistoric age 
of Greece and the disclosure of the as- 
tonishing standard of civilization which 
had been attained on the mainland and 
in the isles of the ^gean at a period at 
least 2,000 years earlier than that at 
which Greek history, as hitherto under- 
stood, begins may be reckoned as among 
the most interesting results of modern 
research into the relics of the life of past 
ages. 
The work, of course, is by no means 
complete ; very probably it is scarcely 
more than well begun ; but already the 
dark gulf of time that lay behind the 
Dorian conquest is beginning to yield up 
the unquestionable evidences of a great, 
and splendid, and almost incredibly 
ancient civilization, which neither for its 
antiquity nor for its actual attainment 
has any cause to shrink from compari- 
son with the great historic civilizations 
of Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley. 
It is not yet possible to trace and iden- 
tify the actual figures of the heroes of 
prehistoric Greece ; probably it never 
will be possible, unless the as yet un- 
translated Cretan script should furnish 
the records of a more ancient Herodotus, 
and a new Champollion should arise to 
decipher them ; but there can scarcely be 
any reasonable doubt that genuine men 
and women of yEgean stock filled the 
roles of these ancient romances, and that 
the wondrous story of their deeds is, in 
part at least, the record of actual 
achievements. 
In this remarkable resurrection of the 
past the most important and convincing 
part has been played by the evidence 
from Crete. The discoveries which 
were made during the last quarter of the 
nineteenth century, by Schliemann and 
his successors, at Mycenae, Tiryns, Or- 
chomenos, and elsewhere were quite con- 
clusive as to the former existence of a 
civilization quite equal to, and in all 
probability the original of, that which is 
described for us in the Homeric poems ; 
but it was not until the treasures of 
Knossos and Phsestos in Crete began to 
be revealed that it became manifest that 
what was known as the Mycensean civ- 
ilization was itself only the decadence 
of a far richer and fuller culture, whose 
fountain-head and whose chief sphere 
of development had been in Crete. 
And it has been in Crete that explora- 
tion and discovery have led to the most 
striking illustration of many of the 
statements in the legends and traditions, 
and have made it practically certain that 
much of what used to be considered 
mere romantic fable represents, with, of 
course, many embellishments of fancy, 
a good deal of historic fact. 
The position of Crete — "a halfway 
house between three continents, flanked 
by the great Libyan promontory, and 
linked by smaller island stepping-stones 
to the Peloponnese and the mainland of 
Anatolia"^ — marks it out as designed by 
Nature to be a center of development in 
the culture of the early ^gean race, 
and in point of fact ancient traditions 
unanimously pointed to the great island 
as being the birthplace of Greek civili- 
zation. 
WHO WAS MINOS? 
It was the surprising claim of the 
Cretans to possess the burial place of 
the supreme God of Hellas which first 
attached to them the unenviable reputa- 
tion for falsehood which clung to them 
throughout the classical period, and was 
crystallized by Callimachus in the form 
adopted by St. Paul in the Epistle to 
Titus — "The Cretans are always liars."' 
It is round Minos, the son of Zeus 
and Europa, that the bulk of the Cretan 
legends gathers. The suggestion has, 
been made, with great probability, that 
the name Minos is not so much the name 
of a single person as the title of a race 
of kings. "I suspect," says Professor 
Murray, "that Minos was a name, like 
'Pharaoh' or 'Csesar,' given to all Cre- 
