Abstract
READERS of the articles on the “Older Civilisation of Greece” which have from time to time appeared in the columns of NATURE will remember that the archæological labours of Mr. Arthur J. Evans, F.R.S., Prof. Ludovico Halbherr, Mr. D. G. Hogarth, and Mr. R. C. Bosanquet (not to mention their assistants, of whom Dr. Duncan Mackenzie and Prof. Luigi Pernier are the most distinguished) in the island of Crete have succeeded in disinterring for modern science the remains of an ancient civilisation as highly developed as the contemporary cultures of Egypt and Babylonia, and possibly as old; in any case a thousand years older than the civilisation of Greece which we have learnt to know at our schools and academies—the Greek civilisation of the schoolmasters and the sculptors. Of this prehistoric civilisation (for prehistoric it still remains, since we cannot yet read its written records) the first remains were found by the famous Schliemann at Mycenæ and Tiryns, hence the use of the term “Mycenæan” to describe it. The excavations in Crete have of late years very considerably modified our conceptions of its character; we see now that the chief seat of its development was not the continent of Greece, but the great island of Crete, and that the two most important remains of its Cretan phase were the great stone palaces of Knossos and Phaistos, which have been excavated by Dr. Evans and Prof. Halbherr respectively.
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HALL, H. The Older Civilisation of Greece: A Prehistoric Sea-Power 1 . Nature 70, 481–483 (1904). https://doi.org/10.1038/070481a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/070481a0