DOI Seite / Zitierlink:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0408
354 THE MYCENAEAN AGE
pie landsmen living from their flocks and fields. But once
established along the deeply indented coasts of
and com- Greece, on the shores of a sea so studded with
islands that one could traverse it without ever
losing sight of land, many of them naturally took to the
new element. Greek history affords more than one parallel:
as in olden times the Dorians of Aegina, so in our day the
Albanians of Hydra and Spetsia lead all the Greeks in bold
and enterprising seamanship j yet Dorians and Albanians
alike were originally mountaineers, and most of their kins-
men always remained strangers to the sea.
Commerce there must have been from the beginning, as
tribe bartered with its neighbor tribe, until even the pro-
duets of interior Asia would find their slow way overland
into far-off Europe. But it was on the Aegean they first
tried the watery ways. The Islanders, intermediaries in
commerce as in art between Greece and the Orient, doubt-
less had much to do with setting their neighbors of the
Mainland on these new paths of civilization.1
It goes without saying that cities with near and safe
harbors, especially if they were possessed of a considerable
productive territory, would be the first to enter into these
wider relations and throw off their original barbarism. Hav-
ing the more to give in exchange for the foreign goods,
which had so much to do with progress in the arts and the
amelioration of life, they would forge ahead the more
rapidly. With the advantage of position commercially, the
Islands were too restricted in productive area to keep pace
in the long run with Mainland cities like Tiryns and Orcho-
1 Cf. Arthur J. Evans on " The Eastern Question in Anthropology," before
the British Association, as reported in the Times of Sept. 18, 1896 : " Mari-
time enterprise did not begin on the harhorless eoasts of Palestine. The
island-world of the Aegean was the natural home of primitive navigation."
pie landsmen living from their flocks and fields. But once
established along the deeply indented coasts of
and com- Greece, on the shores of a sea so studded with
islands that one could traverse it without ever
losing sight of land, many of them naturally took to the
new element. Greek history affords more than one parallel:
as in olden times the Dorians of Aegina, so in our day the
Albanians of Hydra and Spetsia lead all the Greeks in bold
and enterprising seamanship j yet Dorians and Albanians
alike were originally mountaineers, and most of their kins-
men always remained strangers to the sea.
Commerce there must have been from the beginning, as
tribe bartered with its neighbor tribe, until even the pro-
duets of interior Asia would find their slow way overland
into far-off Europe. But it was on the Aegean they first
tried the watery ways. The Islanders, intermediaries in
commerce as in art between Greece and the Orient, doubt-
less had much to do with setting their neighbors of the
Mainland on these new paths of civilization.1
It goes without saying that cities with near and safe
harbors, especially if they were possessed of a considerable
productive territory, would be the first to enter into these
wider relations and throw off their original barbarism. Hav-
ing the more to give in exchange for the foreign goods,
which had so much to do with progress in the arts and the
amelioration of life, they would forge ahead the more
rapidly. With the advantage of position commercially, the
Islands were too restricted in productive area to keep pace
in the long run with Mainland cities like Tiryns and Orcho-
1 Cf. Arthur J. Evans on " The Eastern Question in Anthropology," before
the British Association, as reported in the Times of Sept. 18, 1896 : " Mari-
time enterprise did not begin on the harhorless eoasts of Palestine. The
island-world of the Aegean was the natural home of primitive navigation."