The Minoans

Towards the end of the Minoan Age Cretan culture began to spread generally over the Ægean, and extended to the mainland. Cretan vases are found as far north as Bœotia, and the many Cretan relics discovered in Mycenæan tombs were not all war-souvenirs; some of them, belonging to times before the fall of Knossos, were the peaceful product of Cretan workmen who had been induced by the Lords of Mycenæ to emigrate.

The men from the North who finally overthrew what we call the Minoan civilization, became to some extent the repositories of Cretan tradition. They carried on a less splendid phase of Cretan civilization, a phase which was distinguished by the name “Mycenæan.” They had come to Greece from lands still further north, whence they had themselves been driven to seek new homes. They came down in successive waves of invasion, the men who formed the first wave being known as the “Achæans,” the “yellow-haired Achæans” of Homer. It was they—so at least some authorities hold—who sacked Knossos, and who afterwards, during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., wandering about in search of adventure, became the terror of the whole Ægean. An Egyptian inscription of those times says: “The Isles were restless: disturbed among themselves.”

Egypt herself felt the effect of the disturbances. From the “isles in the midst of the Great Green Sea” there no longer came the peaceful Minoans to pay friendly tribute to the King of Egypt; instead there came the Achæans, on an unpeaceful mission. Two raids were made—according to the students of Egyptian records—one about 1230 B.C., another about 1200 B.C. (See H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, p. 70. Methuen, 1913.) Mr. Hall gives the more definite date of c. 1196 for the second invasion. Not long after we find the Achæans, in Agamemnon’s famous expedition, fighting against the Trojans in Asia Minor. They took the city at last in 1184 B.C., if we accept the date which Greek tradition pointed to. It is their deeds in the latter war that were sung by Homer. Two generations after the Trojan war, shortly before 1100 B.C., Greece was overrun by the Dorians, who formed the second great wave of Northern invaders. After that came the Dark Age, out of which about 800 B.C. emerged classical Greece.

Classical Greece was the fusion of the two main elements of prehistoric times, the artistic Mediterranean people on the one hand, and the robust Northern invaders on the other. Just as the fusion was probably consummated in the Dark Age, so the first poet of classical Greece, Homer, whether one person or the embodiment of many, heralded their new life in poems which seemed to take their subject from that Dark Age. What Homer wrote was probably less legendary than historical. Whether the traditions of the Minoan Age in Crete were kept alive through the Dark Age in Ionia, whither it is thought that they were carried by Achæan refugees at the time of the Dorian invasion, which extended to Crete, or whether they remained dormant in Crete itself, and in the Mycenæan centres of the mainland of Greece, it is in either case certain that they were well preserved, for their traces are plainly to be seen throughout Greek civilization. From the Greek writers they descended to the poets of Rome, and so to the art and literature of Europe.