It is not yet possible to trace and
identify the actual figures of the heroes of prehistoric Greece:
probably it never will be possible, unless the as yet untranslated
Cretan script should furnish the records of a more ancient Herodotus,
and a new Champollion should arise to decipher them; but there
can scarcely be any reasonable doubt that genuine men and women
of AEgean stock filled the roles of these ancient romances, and
that the wondrous story of their deeds is, in part at least, the
record of actual achievements.
In this remarkable resurrection of the past the most important
and convincing part has been played by the evidence from Crete.
The discoveries which were made during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century by Schliemann and his successors at Mycencae,
Tiryns, Orchomenos, and elsewhere, were quite conclusive as to
the former existence of a civilization quite equal to, and in all
probability the original of, that which is described for us in the
Homeric poems; but it was not until the treasures of Knossos and
Phaestos began to be revealed in 1900 and the subsequent years that
it became manifest that what was known as the Mycenaean civilization
was itself only the decadence of a far richer and fuller culture,
whose fountain-head and whose chief sphere of development had been
in Crete.
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