Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/82

The People. 6i much ruder age, traces of folk whose sole implements were of stone or bone, and whose ill-baked earthenware was not cast on the wheel. That the coasts and islands of the ^gean were inhabited when Sidonian sailors were learning the way to those far-off lands, may be accepted as an established fact. If their purpose had been the purple-mollusk alone, they would have been content with securing fishing stations on those points where the murex was most plentiful. Nothing of the sort took place : if they everywhere planted factories along these coasts, many of which grew into important cities, it was because they were met on the threshold of their expeditions by a people whose mind was already sufficiently awakened to grasp the advantages likely to accrue to both parties from a free exchange of commodities. Did this early population, which dwelt either in villages nest- ling in the clefts of the volcanic rocks of Thera, or the hill of Hissarlik, or at Tiryns, belong to a race other than the Greek? We have no reason so to think. The Greeks ruled, and their hypothesis is the likeliest, that they were descended from the Pelasgi, themselves the sons of the earth, the great nourisher of all. The Hellenes did not remember a time when, in order to get possession of the land, they were obliged to expel folk differentiated from them by language, public worship, and outward aspect. Nor has the spade of the excavator, however deeply it may have been thrust, brought out the slightest vestige indicating that a civilization earlier than that with which we are concerned, appeared on this scene. Despite considerable differences between what may be called the primary stratum and the next overlaying it, commonly called ** Hellenic," there IS nothing to betray a sudden gap, or that practical progress did not follow its usual course. The advance between the first and second epoch, the growth of taste and professional skill, may be tested by every one ; but the persistency with which certain characteristic forms and processes recur throughout both strata induces the belief that the mass of the population was practically the same. Looking at them we seem to be present at the progressive evolution of tribes of the same stock, which through repeated efforts and successive flights of the imagination, rose from barbarism to a culture, at first of the most rudimentary kind, then step by step more complex and scientific.