The
destruction of the central power at Knossos must have involved, as
Dr. Evans has suggested,[*] the collapse of much of the commerce
on which the island of the Hundred Cities depended for the support
of its great population. Already in the reign of Amenhotep III.
of Egypt, that powerful monarch had been obliged to establish a
special coastguard service at the mouths of the Nile to protect his
trade-routes against the Lycian pirates. When the Minoan fleet was
no longer in being to police the AEgean, these and other piratical
races must have quickly driven the Cretan merchant marine from the
seas. The purple fisheries and the oil trade would dwindle and
die, and the population which had been supported by them would be
driven from a land which could no longer maintain it. The colonizing
movement which has left traces of Minoan culture in Anatolia, in
Palestine, in Sicily, and even in Spain, began, no doubt, at an
earlier period, when the Empire of the Sea-Kings was in its full
strength; but it probably received a considerable impulse at this
time of forced emigration. The sudden introduction of the same
culture into Cyprus at some period after 1400 B.C. has been referred
to conquest by men of the AEgean race, who may very well have been the
men of Knossos driven forth by the pressure of altered conditions
to find a new home for themselves.
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