Abstract
WHILE recently excavating the prehistoric Palace of Knossos, which lies in the great central gap between the higher ranges of Crete, mid-way between the Deaks of Ida and Dicta, I was much struck by the Imost continuous dualistic style of the elements. But in this case the “eternal struggle” was not between East and West. It was North and South that here fought out. The boreal blasts which have collected from the steppes of Eastern Europe sweep almost unopposed across the ægean, and find their first obstacle in the long mountain wall of Crete. They pour through the central gap. Not unopposed, however; they are beaten Dack, and their place triumphantly taken for weeks at a time, by the parching South wind—the Notios of the Cretan natives—which is really the Khamsîn of the Libyan Desert. Owing to the fact that the shoot and dumping-ground of the excavations was, perforce, at the southern end, the works were interrupted for days at a time by an overwhelming dust-cloud due to this cause, for the Khamsîn seems to have an affinity for dust out of proportion to its actual strength. Disagreeable, however, as were these hindrances to the work of the spade, one had at least leisure to reflect on the historic lessons supplied by these natural phenomena. Crete certainly stands geographically in closer relation to Asia Minor than it does to Africa. Carpathos and Rhodes, not to speak of minor islands, afford natural stepping-stones of intercourse. The actual relations between Crete and Anatolia, ethnic and other, must not be underrated. Yet in a broad historic point of view Crete stands apart from it. It was not like Cyprus, which, although at different times it has become an outpost of Egypt and of Europe, has always remained essentially a part of Western Asia. But the main currents of Cretan history, like those of its two prevalent winds, have been Northern and Southern—European and African. Of its two direct geographical connections, that with Greece and that with Anatolia, it has consistently held to the former. On the other hand, its intercourse with the opposite Libyan coast—the Cyrenaica—and with Egypt has been singularly continuous from a very remote period. And in this lies the high importance of the part played by the island in the early history of European culture. Germs received here from the Nile Valley and its borderlands at a time when the greater part of Europe was still in its Stone Age, were propagated northwards and westwards, and seedlings hence derived spread in prehistoric times and by more than one channel, as far as the British islands.
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EVANS, A. The Recent Cretan Discoveries and their Bearing on the Early Culture and Ethnography of the East Mediterranean Basin . Nature 62, 526–529 (1900). https://doi.org/10.1038/062526a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/062526a0