As time has gone on, however, the Phoenicians
have gradually come to bulk less and less in the view of students
of the AEgean problem. It is no longer held that they contributed
anything original to the development of Mycenaean culture, and even
as middlemen the tendency is to allow them an influence far smaller
than was once held to be theirs. It has become manifest that, in
at least the case of Crete and Egypt, communication need not have
been through Phoenician media at all, but was far more probably
direct. And with regard to the whole question of the debt owed
to the East by this early European civilization, it is probable
that the AEgean gave quite as much as it borrowed, and that its
artists were sufficiently great to have originated their own culture.
Mycenaean, and still more the great Minoan art of which Mycenaean has
proved to be only a decadent phase, needed no Oriental crutches.
With regard to Egypt, the obligations of the two cultures were
certainly mutual; each influenced the other; it was not a case of
master and scholar, but of two contemporary civilizations, each
fully inspired with a native spirit, each ready to use whatever
seemed good to it in the work of the other, but both perfectly
original in their genius.
The question which was of such supreme interest to Schliemann still
survives, however, though in a wider and more important form than
that in which he conceived of it.
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