And if the Egyptians, by no means
a great seafaring race, were able to do such things at this period
of their history, surely an island race, whose sole pathway to the
outer world lay across the sea, would not be behind them. There can
scarcely be any question that, by the time of the Pyramid builders
at latest, Cretan galleys were making the voyage to the Nile mouths,
and unloading at the quays of Memphis, under the shadow of the new
Pyramids, their primitive wares, among them the rude, hand-burnished
black pottery, in return for which they carried back some of the
wonderful fabric of the Egyptian stone-workers.
But supposing that the connection between the primitive Minoan
civilization and the earliest Dynasties of Egypt is a thing established,
what does this enable us to assert as to the date to which we are to
ascribe the dawn of the earliest culture that can be called European?
Here, unfortunately, we are at once involved in a controversy in
which centuries are unconsidered trifles, and a millennium is no
more than a respectable, but by no means formidable, quantity.
Egyptian chronology may be regarded as practically settled from the
beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty downwards. There is a general
consent of authority that Aahmes, the founder of that Dynasty, began
to reign about 1580 B.
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