Hissarlik,
under Dr. Doerpfeld's hands, yielded from the Sixth City the evidence
of an Asiatic civilization truly contemporaneous with that of Mycenae.
Even before the end of the century it became apparent that Crete was
destined to prove a focus of this early culture, and the promise, as
we shall see later, has been more than fulfilled. In Egypt Professor
Petrie found deposits of prehistoric AEgean pottery in the Delta, the
Fayum, and even in Middle Egypt, proving that this civilization,
whatever its origin, had been in contact with the ancient civilization
of the Nile Valley, while even in the Western Mediterranean, in
Sicily particularly, in Italy, Sardinia, and Spain, finds, less
plentiful, but quite unmistakable, bore witness to the wide diffusion
of Mycenaean culture.
Roughly, the result came to this: 'that before the epoch at which
we are used to place the beginnings of Greek civilization--that is,
the opening centuries of the last millennial period B.C.--we must
allow for an immensely long record of human artistic productivity,
going back into the Neolithic Age, and culminating towards the close
of the age of Bronze in a culture more fecund and more refined
than any we are to find again in the same lands till the age of
Iron was far advanced. Man in Hellas was more highly civilized
before history than when history begins to record his state; and
there existed human society in the Hellenic area, organized and
productive, to a period so remote that its origins were more distant
from the age of Pericles than that age is from our own.
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