scholars once believed, but the germs of it had come in large measure from an Oriental seed-plot. The conclusions derived from a scientific study of the myths have been confirmed and widened by the recent researches and discoveries of archæology. The spade, it has been said, is the modern instrument for reconstructing the history of the past, and in no department of history has the spade been more active of late than in that of Greece. From all sides light has come upon that remote epoch around which the mists of a fabulous antiquity had already been folded in the days of Herodotus; from the islands and shores of the Ægean, from the tombs of Asia Minor and Palestine, nay, even from the temples and palaces of Egypt and Assyria, have the materials been exhumed for sketching in something like clear outline the origin and growth of Greek civilization. From nowhere, however, have more important revelations been derived than from the excavations at Mykenæ and Spata, near Athens, and it is with the evidence furnished by these that I now propose mainly to deal. A personal inspection of the sites and the objects found upon them has convinced me of the groundlessness of the doubts which have been thrown out against their antiquity as well as of the intercourse and connection to which they testify with the great empires of Babylonia and Assyria. Mr. Poole has lately pointed out what materials are furnished by the Egyptian monuments for determining the age and character of the antiquities of Mykenæ. I would now draw attention to the far clearer and more tangible materials afforded by Assyrian art and history.
Two facts must first be kept well in view. One of these is the Semitic origin of the Greek alphabet. The Phœnician alphabet, originally derived from the alphabet of the Egyptian hieroglyphics and imported into their mother country by the Phœnician settlers of the Delta, was brought to Greece, not probably by the Phœnicians of Tyre and Sidon, but by the Aramæans of the Gulf of Antioch, whose nouns ended with the same "emphatic aleph" that we seem to find in the Greek names of the letters, alpha, beta, gamma (gamla). Before the introduction of the simpler Phœnician alphabet, the inhabitants of Asia Minor and the neighboring islands appear to have used a syllabary of some seventy characters, which continued to be employed in conservative Cyprus down to a very late date; but, so far as we know at present the Greeks of the main land were unacquainted with writing before the Aramæo-Phœnicians had taught them their phonetic symbols. The oldest Greek inscriptions are probably those of Thera, now Santorin, where the Phœnicians had been settled from time immemorial; and as the forms of the characters found in them do not differ very materially from the forms used on the famous Moabite stone, we may infer that the alphabet of Kadmus was brought to the West at a date not very remote from that of Mesha and Ahab, perhaps about 800 B.C. We may notice that Thera was an island and a Phœnician colony, and it certainly seems more probable that the alphabet was carried to the mainland from the islands of the Ægean than that it was disseminated from the inland Phœnician settlement at Thebes, as the old legends affirmed. In any case, the introduction of the alphabet implies a considerable amount of civilizing force on the part of those from whom it was borrowed; the teachers from whom an illiterate people learns the art of writing are generally teachers from whom it has previously learnt the other elements of social culture. A barbarous tribe will use its muscles in the service of art before it will use its brains; the smith and engraver precede the scribe. If, therefore, the Greeks were unacquainted with writing before the ninth century B.C., objects older than that period may be expected to exhibit clear traces of Phœnician influence, though no traces of writing.
The other fact to which I allude is the existence of pottery of the same material and pattern on all the prehistoric sites of the Greek world, however widely separated they may be. We find it, for instance, at Mykenæ and Tiryns, at Tanagra and Athens, in Rhodes, in Cyprus, and in Thera, while I picked up specimens of it in the neighborhood of the treasury of Minyas and on the site of the Acropolis at Orchomenus. The clay of which it is composed is of a drab color, derived, perhaps in all instances, from the volcanic soil of Thera and Melos, and it is ornamented with geometrical and other patterns in black and maroon red. After a time the patterns become more complicated and artistic; flowers, animal forms, and eventually human figures, take the place of simple lines, and the pottery gradually passes into that known as Corinthian or Phœniko-Greek. It needs but little experience to distinguish at a glance this early pottery from the red ware of the later Hellenic period.
Phœnicia, Keft as it was called by the
