THE island of Crete, known to the Venetians as Candia, has lain for about three thousand years out of the main line of traffic. In fact, when the prehistoric fleets of Crete, the first maritime power of the Mediterranean, gave place to Phoenician craft, the island ceased at once to be the gateway for commerce between Egypt and the European ports of the Adriatic, the Gulf of Salonica, and the Black Sea. To-day the stream of traffic hurries east and west, and the impatient traveller bound for the Indies, Cathay, or the antipodes, is lucky if he catches a distant glimpse of the snow-peaks of Crete.
It seems strange that so beautiful an island, the scene of successive invasions in the past, should have escaped the inroad of the ubiquitous nineteenth-century tourist. The reasons for this were several—the presence of alien Turkish rulers, the frequent revolutions of their subjects, the insufficiency and uncertainty of connections, and the lack of decent accommodations. That the island is becoming known at all is due in the main to archaeologists and the 'Cretan Question.'
Even to classical students twenty, nay, ten years ago, Crete was scarcely more than a land of legendary heroes and rationalized myths. It is true that the first reported aeronautical display was made by a youth of Cretan parentage, but in the absence of authenticated records of the time and circumstances of his flight, scholars were skeptical of his performance. And yet within less than ten short years we are faced by a revelation hardly more credible than this story; we are asked by archaeologists to carry ourselves back from A.D. 1910 to 1910 B.C., and witness a highly artistic people with palaces and treasures and letters, of whose existence we had not dreamed.
And, observe, we have leapt over the heads of the Greeks; we have excelled even Icarus in audacity. We have committed an affront in the eyes of some conservative Greek scholars, who still cling to the miraculous creation of Greek art. The theme is a fresh one, because nothing was known of the subject before 1900; it is important, because the Golden Age of Crete was the forerunner of the Golden Age of Greece, and hence of all our western culture. The connection between Minoan and Hellenic civilization is vital, not one of locality alone, as is the tie between the prehistoric and the historic of America, but one of relationship. Egypt may have been foster-mother to classical Greece, but the mother, never forgotten by her child, was Crete. Before Zeus, was the mother who bore him in that mysterious cave of Dicte.
The revelation of a pre-Hellenic culture in the Aegean area is due in the first place to Dr. Schliemann, whose great discoveries on the site of Troy, begun in 1871, led up to the revelations in Crete from 1900 onwards. It seemed fitting to the Muse of History that a man whose own life was a romance should open to us the door into one of her sealed chambers of the past. Let us in briefest fashion glance at his story.
Henry Schliemann was born in the little town of Neu Buckow, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in the year 1822. He grew up in his father's parish of Ankershazen, where his natural disposition for the mysterious and the marvellous was stimulated by the wonders of the locality in which he lived. "Our garden-house," he writes, "was said to be haunted by the ghost of my father's predecessor, Pastor von Russdorf, and just behind our garden was a pond called 'das Silberschälchen,' out of which a maiden was believed to rise each midnight, holding a silver bowl. There was also in the village a small hill surrounded by a ditch, probably a prehistoric burial-place (or so-called Hünengrab) in which, as the legend ran, a robber knight in times of old had buried his beloved child in a golden cradle. Vast treasures were also said to have been buried close to the ruins of a round tower in the garden of the proprietor of the village."
It seems strange that so beautiful an island, the scene of successive invasions in the past, should have escaped the inroad of the ubiquitous nineteenth-century tourist. The reasons for this were several—the presence of alien Turkish rulers, the frequent revolutions of their subjects, the insufficiency and uncertainty of connections, and the lack of decent accommodations. That the island is becoming known at all is due in the main to archaeologists and the 'Cretan Question.'
Even to classical students twenty, nay, ten years ago, Crete was scarcely more than a land of legendary heroes and rationalized myths. It is true that the first reported aeronautical display was made by a youth of Cretan parentage, but in the absence of authenticated records of the time and circumstances of his flight, scholars were skeptical of his performance. And yet within less than ten short years we are faced by a revelation hardly more credible than this story; we are asked by archaeologists to carry ourselves back from A.D. 1910 to 1910 B.C., and witness a highly artistic people with palaces and treasures and letters, of whose existence we had not dreamed.
And, observe, we have leapt over the heads of the Greeks; we have excelled even Icarus in audacity. We have committed an affront in the eyes of some conservative Greek scholars, who still cling to the miraculous creation of Greek art. The theme is a fresh one, because nothing was known of the subject before 1900; it is important, because the Golden Age of Crete was the forerunner of the Golden Age of Greece, and hence of all our western culture. The connection between Minoan and Hellenic civilization is vital, not one of locality alone, as is the tie between the prehistoric and the historic of America, but one of relationship. Egypt may have been foster-mother to classical Greece, but the mother, never forgotten by her child, was Crete. Before Zeus, was the mother who bore him in that mysterious cave of Dicte.
The revelation of a pre-Hellenic culture in the Aegean area is due in the first place to Dr. Schliemann, whose great discoveries on the site of Troy, begun in 1871, led up to the revelations in Crete from 1900 onwards. It seemed fitting to the Muse of History that a man whose own life was a romance should open to us the door into one of her sealed chambers of the past. Let us in briefest fashion glance at his story.
Henry Schliemann was born in the little town of Neu Buckow, in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in the year 1822. He grew up in his father's parish of Ankershazen, where his natural disposition for the mysterious and the marvellous was stimulated by the wonders of the locality in which he lived. "Our garden-house," he writes, "was said to be haunted by the ghost of my father's predecessor, Pastor von Russdorf, and just behind our garden was a pond called 'das Silberschälchen,' out of which a maiden was believed to rise each midnight, holding a silver bowl. There was also in the village a small hill surrounded by a ditch, probably a prehistoric burial-place (or so-called Hünengrab) in which, as the legend ran, a robber knight in times of old had buried his beloved child in a golden cradle. Vast treasures were also said to have been buried close to the ruins of a round tower in the garden of the proprietor of the village."
