When it is remembered that, firstly, knowing not a word of the Mycenæan language, we are quite ignorant of its affinities; secondly, not enough Mycenæan skulls have yet been recovered to establish more than the bare fact that the race was mixed and not wholly Asiatic; and thirdly, since identity of civilisation in no sense necessarily entails identity of race, we may have to do not with one or two, but with many races—it will be conceded that it is more useful at present to attempt to narrow the issue by excluding certain claimants than to pronounce in favour of any one. The facial types represented not only on the Knossian frescoes, but by statuettes and gems, are distinctly non-Asiatic, and recall strongly the high-crowned brachycephalic type of the modern northern Albanians and Cretan hillmen. Of the elder civilised races about the Levantine area the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians may be dismissed at once. We know their art from beginning to end, and its character is not at any period the same as that of Ægean art. As for the Phœnicians, for whom on the strength of Homeric tradition a strong claim has been put forward, it cannot be said to be impossible that some objects thought to be Mycenæan are of Sidonian origin, since we know little or nothing of Sidonian art. But the presumption against this Semitic people having had any serious share in Mycenæan development is strong, since facial types apart, the only scripts known to have been used in the Mycenæan area and period are in no way affiliated to the Phœnician alphabet, and neither the characteristic forms nor the characteristic style of Phœnician art, as we know it, appear in Mycenæan products. The one thing, of which recent research has assured us in this matter, is this, that the Keftiu, represented in XVIIIth Dynasty tombs at Thebes, were a “Mycenæan” folk, an island people of the northern sea. They came into intimate contact, both peaceful and warlike, with Egypt, and to them no doubt are owed the Ægean styles and products found on Nile sites. Exact parallels to their dress and products, as represented by Egyptian artists, appear in the work of Cretan artists; and it is now generally accepted that the Keftiu were “Mycenæans” of Crete at any rate, whatever other habitat they may have possessed.
As to place of origin, Central Europe or any western or northern part of the continent is out of the question. Mycenæan art is shown by various remains to have moved westwards and northwards, not vice versa. It arose within the Ægean area, in the Argolid as some, e.g., the Heræum excavators, seem to propose, or the Cyclades, or Rhodes; or, if outside, then the issue is narrowed for practical purposes to a region about which we know next to nothing as yet, northern Libya, and to Asia Minor. So far as the Mycenæan objects themselves testify, they point to a progress not from south or west, but from east. In the western localities, notably Crete and Mycenæ, we have more remains of highly developed Mycenæan civilisation, but less of its early stages than elsewhere. Nothing in the Argolid, but much in the Troad, prepares us for the Mycenæan metallurgy. The appearance of Mycenæan forms and patterns is abrupt in Crete, but graduated in other islands, especially Thera and Melos. The Cretan linear script seems to be of “Asianic” family, and to be inscribed in Melos on sherds of earlier date than its appearance at Knossos. Following Mycenæan development backwards in this manner, we seem to tend towards the Anatolian coasts of the Ægean, and especially the rich and little-known areas of Rhodes and Caria.
It does not advance seriously the solution of the racial problem to turn to Greek literary tradition. Now that we are assured of the wide range and the long continuance of the influence of Mycenæan civilisation, overlapping the rise of Hellenic art, we can hardly question that the early peoples whom the Greeks knew as Pelasgi, Minyæ, Leleges, Danai, Carians, and so forth, shared in it. But were they its authors? and who, after all, were they themselves? The Greeks believed them their own kin, but what value are we to attach to the belief of an age to which scientific ethnology and archæology were unknown? Nor is it useful to select traditions, e.g., to accept those about the Pelasgi, and to override those which connect the Achæans equally closely with Mycenæan centres. We are gradually learning that the classical Hellene was of no pure race, but the result of a blend of several racial stocks, into which those pre-existing in his land can hardly fail to have entered; and if we have been able to determine that Mycenæan art was distinguished by just that singular quality of idealism which is of the essence of the art which succeeded it in the same area (whatever be the racial connection), it can scarcely be doubted in reason that Mycenæan civilisation was in some sense the parent of the later civilisation of Hellas. In fact, now that the Mycenæan remains are no longer to be regarded as isolated phenomena on Greek soil, but are seen to be intimately connected on the one hand with a large class of objects which carry the evolution of civilisation in the Ægean area itself back to the Stone Age, and on the other with the earlier products of Hellenic development, the problem is no longer purely one of antiquarian ethnology. We ask less what race was so greatly gifted, than what geographical or other circumstances will account for the persistence of a certain peculiar quality of civilisation in the Ægean area.b An eloquent summary of our Mycenæan knowledge and a lively description of life such as it may have been in Mycenæ has been drawn by Chrestos Tsountas and J. Irving Manatt in their work, The Mycenæan Age, from which we quote at length.
Sepulchral Enclosure, Mycenæ
THE PROBLEM OF MYCENÆAN CHRONOLOGY
Whether or not the authors of this distinct and stately civilisation included among their achievements a knowledge of letters, their monuments thus far address us only in the universal language of form and action. Of their speech we have yet to read the first syllable. The vase handles of Mycenæ may have some message for us, if no more than a pair of heroic names; and the nine consecutive characters from the cave of Cretan Zeus must have still more to say when we find the key. We may hope, at least, if this ancient culture ever recovers its voice, to find it not altogether unfamiliar: we need not be startled if we catch the first lisping accent of what has grown full and strong in the Achæan epic.
But for the present we have to do with a dumb age, with a race whose artistic expression amazes us all the more in the dead silence of their history. So far as we yet know from their monuments, they have recorded not one fixed point in their career, they have never even written down their name as a people.
Now, a dateless era and a nameless race—particularly in the immediate background of the stage on which we see the forces of the world’s golden age deploying—are facts to be accepted only in the last resort. The student of human culture cannot look upon the massive walls, the solemn domes, the exquisite creations of what we call Mycenæan art, without asking—When? By whom? In default of direct and positive evidence, he will make the most of the indirect and probable.
We have taken a provisional and approximate date for the meridian age of Mycenæan culture—namely, from the sixteenth to the twelfth century B.C. We have also assumed that the Island culture was already somewhat advanced as far back as the earlier centuries of the second millennium before our era. This latter datum is based immediately on geological calculations: M. Fouqué, namely, has computed a date circa 2000 B.C. for the upheaval which buried Thera, and thus preserved for us the primitive monuments of Ægean civilisation. Whatever be the value of Fouqué’s combinations—and they have been vigorously, if not victoriously, assailed—we may reach a like result by another way round. The Island culture is demonstrably older than the Mycenæan—it must have attained the stage upon which we find it at Thera a century or two at least before the bloom-time came in Argolis. If, then, we can date that bloom-time, we can control within limits the geologists’ results.