CHAPTER I. 
EARLY GREEK GAMES AND PRIZES. 
PLATE I AND FIGURES I AND 2. 
Before attempting to trace historically the development of monu- 
ments of victors in the gymnic and hippic contests at Olympia, and 
before attempting to reconstruct their different types, it will be 
useful to devote a preliminary chapter to the early history of Greek 
aebueics and victor prizes in general. 
It is a truism that the origin of Greek athletics is not to be found in 
the recently discovered Aegean civilization.of Crete, nor in the latest 
phase of the same culture on Mycenzan sites of the mainland of Greece. 
Their origin is not to be sought in the indigenous Mediterranean stock 
which produced that culture; ut rather among thenorthern invaders of ___ 
Greece, the fair-haired Achzans of the Homeric poems, and especially 
among the later Dorians in the Peloponnesus. It was to the physical 
vigor of these strangers rather than to the more artistic nature of the 
Mediterraneans that the later Greeks owed their interest in sports. As 
these invaders settled themselves most firmly in the Peloponnesus, Greek 
athletics may be said to be chiefly the product of South Greece.<Tt was 
here that three of the four national festivals grew up—at Olympia, 
Nemea, and on the Corinthian Isthmus. It was in the schools of Argos 
and Sikyon that athletic sculpture flourished best and in later Greek 
history physical exercise was most fully developed among the Dorian 
Spartans.! 
SPORTS IN CRETE. 
VCenturies before the Achzan civilization of Greece had bloomed, 
there developed among the Minoans of Crete,a passion for certain 
acrobatic performances and for gymnastics. “These Cretans, though 
strongly influenced by Egypt and the East, did not borrow their love 
of sport from outside any more than did the later Achzans. On the 
walls of the tombs of Beni-Hasan on the Nile are pictured many ath- 
letic sports, including a series of several hundred wrestling groups,’ but 
these sports did not influence, so far as we know, Cretan athletics. “ At 
Knossos bull-grappling seems to have been the national sport, as we 
see from the frescoes on the palace walls. In the absence of the horse, 
which did not appear in early Aegean times in Crete, it is not difficult 
to understand the development of gymnastic sports with bulls. At 
Knossos a seal has been found which shows the rude drawing of a vessel 
with rowers seated under a canopy, superimposed on which is drawn 
the greater portion of a huge horse. In this design, dating from about 
1600 B.C. and synchronizing with the earlier part of the eighteenth 
Egyptian dynasty, we doubtless see a graphic way of indicating the 
1Cf. Gardiner, pp. 8-9. 2See infra, p. 228 and n. 2. 
