DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1066#0155
CRETE AND GREECE
trace the early racial and cultural conditions. The
absence as yet of adequate anthropological and
archaeological evidence warns us to go softly in
attempting any description of the early Bronze
Age of Greece. Most of the skulls that have been
described in times past are not of certain pro-
venance or date, and we wait impatiently for
the publication of the mass of material, ancient
and modern, which Professor Stephanos has col-
lected. Taking the anthropological criterion of
the cephalic index, Greece is much mixed to-day,
but the farther we go back in our examination of
skulls the more numerous the long-heads, and the
longer they become. This agrees with the anthro-
pological evidence for Crete, which is clearer ; and
this in turn falls in with the views generally held
by anthropologists for the Mediterranean basin,
that a long-headed, short, brunet people inhabited
it from the earliest Neolithic times. To-day
Greece is moderately broad-headed, whereas Crete
is mesocephalic, that is, neither broad nor long,
and the difference is to be explained by the more
accessible position of Greece, open by land con-
nections or easy coasting journeys to the inroads
of peoples from the north. For it is known that
there was, as there is to-day, a stream of broad-
headed people stretching across the continent from
the Pamirs on the east to Brittany on the west.
The northern invasion has [continued down to
historic times, and Greece has suffered incursions
of Slavs and Albanians who have increased the
broad-headed tendency, immigrations which Crete
has in the main escaped.
The long-headed autochthones of Greece and
141
trace the early racial and cultural conditions. The
absence as yet of adequate anthropological and
archaeological evidence warns us to go softly in
attempting any description of the early Bronze
Age of Greece. Most of the skulls that have been
described in times past are not of certain pro-
venance or date, and we wait impatiently for
the publication of the mass of material, ancient
and modern, which Professor Stephanos has col-
lected. Taking the anthropological criterion of
the cephalic index, Greece is much mixed to-day,
but the farther we go back in our examination of
skulls the more numerous the long-heads, and the
longer they become. This agrees with the anthro-
pological evidence for Crete, which is clearer ; and
this in turn falls in with the views generally held
by anthropologists for the Mediterranean basin,
that a long-headed, short, brunet people inhabited
it from the earliest Neolithic times. To-day
Greece is moderately broad-headed, whereas Crete
is mesocephalic, that is, neither broad nor long,
and the difference is to be explained by the more
accessible position of Greece, open by land con-
nections or easy coasting journeys to the inroads
of peoples from the north. For it is known that
there was, as there is to-day, a stream of broad-
headed people stretching across the continent from
the Pamirs on the east to Brittany on the west.
The northern invasion has [continued down to
historic times, and Greece has suffered incursions
of Slavs and Albanians who have increased the
broad-headed tendency, immigrations which Crete
has in the main escaped.
The long-headed autochthones of Greece and
141