DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0346
CHAPTER XII
"Whatever view we take of Mycenaean writing, it re-
mains the fact that we have not recovered — at least we
have not read — any Mycenaean scripture. The
subject in soapstone block from the cave-shrine of Zeus may
of written bear a sacred text, but as yet we are without the
key. In this total dearth of written data — of
recorded ritual—it might appear futile to attempt a study
of Mycenaean religion. And yet we possess documents,
objective or representative, to teach us not a little of the
religious faith and practice of the people whose palaces and
tombs, whose ways in life and death, are fairly well known
to us. These real scriptures are naturally richer in their
revelation of man's future as he conceived it than in aught
they have to tell us about the origin of things. Still, a
French zoologist' has read in Mycenaean vase-paintings the
whole theory of evolution by spontaneous generation; he
has caught deep-sea protoplasm (in the form of a huge
polyp) in the very act of bursting into an eruption of life, —
fish, flesh, and fowl, including even the fretful porcupine.2
Man does not appear on the scene, but he must have been
on hand in the person of the painter who (as Perrot puts
1 M. Houssay, known to archaeologists in connection with M. Dieulafoy's
expedition to Susiana.
2 His chief document is a stirrup-handled amphora found by Hamdi-Bey in
the necropolis of Pitane, near Smyrna ; another is a funerary urn from Crete.
Both are published by Perrot, Myc. Art., Figs. 480-482.
"Whatever view we take of Mycenaean writing, it re-
mains the fact that we have not recovered — at least we
have not read — any Mycenaean scripture. The
subject in soapstone block from the cave-shrine of Zeus may
of written bear a sacred text, but as yet we are without the
key. In this total dearth of written data — of
recorded ritual—it might appear futile to attempt a study
of Mycenaean religion. And yet we possess documents,
objective or representative, to teach us not a little of the
religious faith and practice of the people whose palaces and
tombs, whose ways in life and death, are fairly well known
to us. These real scriptures are naturally richer in their
revelation of man's future as he conceived it than in aught
they have to tell us about the origin of things. Still, a
French zoologist' has read in Mycenaean vase-paintings the
whole theory of evolution by spontaneous generation; he
has caught deep-sea protoplasm (in the form of a huge
polyp) in the very act of bursting into an eruption of life, —
fish, flesh, and fowl, including even the fretful porcupine.2
Man does not appear on the scene, but he must have been
on hand in the person of the painter who (as Perrot puts
1 M. Houssay, known to archaeologists in connection with M. Dieulafoy's
expedition to Susiana.
2 His chief document is a stirrup-handled amphora found by Hamdi-Bey in
the necropolis of Pitane, near Smyrna ; another is a funerary urn from Crete.
Both are published by Perrot, Myc. Art., Figs. 480-482.