DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.1021#0411
THE MYCENAEAN WORLD AND HOMER 357
in abundance the copper of Cyprus, the gold of Asia
Minor, the ivory of the Tropics, even the amber of the
Baltic — often, no doubt, in the form of finished works of
art. Thus they would be supplied at once with raw mate-
rial, model, and process; but, whatever they thus received,
it is safe to say that they stamped their own impress on the
works they wrought. It is the impress of a race but
recently emerged from barbarism — a race independent
and vigorous, still cherishing the passionate free spirit of
their northern kinsmen which makes them active and ener-
getic, sometimes even to savagery; with a creative genius
still unfettered by types and conventions; with minds that
have not yet lost the profound interest in and keen obser-
vation of Nature. These are Achaean traits, and they are
stamped unmistakably on the products of Mycenaean art.
It is not so much technical mastery we admire in the artist
as his vigor, his elasticity, his dash, and the untrammeled
spirit which never stoops to servile imitation, but looks
Nature in the face and then registers in forms of art the '
naive impression of it. To name these qualities is enough
to demonstrate the absurdity of the wholesale reference of
Mycenaean art to an Oriental — above all, to a Semitic —
source.1 If Egyptian monuments picture tribute-hearers
1 " Let us then fully acknowledge the indebtedness of early Aegean cul-
ture to the older civilizations of the East. But this indebtedness must not be
allowed to obscure the fact that what was borrowed was also assimilated. It
is the invasion of a conquering and superior culture. It has already outstripped
its instructors. What the Mycenaeans took they made their own. They bor-
rowed from the designs of Babylonian cylinders, but they adapted them to
gems and seals of their own. The influence of Oriental religious types is
traceable on their signet rings, but the liveliness of treatment and the dra-
matic action introduced into the groups separate them toto coelo from the con-
ventional schematism of Babylonian cult-scenes." — Arthur J. Evans on " The
Eastern Question in Anthropology," before the British Association. London
Times, Sept. 18, 1896.
in abundance the copper of Cyprus, the gold of Asia
Minor, the ivory of the Tropics, even the amber of the
Baltic — often, no doubt, in the form of finished works of
art. Thus they would be supplied at once with raw mate-
rial, model, and process; but, whatever they thus received,
it is safe to say that they stamped their own impress on the
works they wrought. It is the impress of a race but
recently emerged from barbarism — a race independent
and vigorous, still cherishing the passionate free spirit of
their northern kinsmen which makes them active and ener-
getic, sometimes even to savagery; with a creative genius
still unfettered by types and conventions; with minds that
have not yet lost the profound interest in and keen obser-
vation of Nature. These are Achaean traits, and they are
stamped unmistakably on the products of Mycenaean art.
It is not so much technical mastery we admire in the artist
as his vigor, his elasticity, his dash, and the untrammeled
spirit which never stoops to servile imitation, but looks
Nature in the face and then registers in forms of art the '
naive impression of it. To name these qualities is enough
to demonstrate the absurdity of the wholesale reference of
Mycenaean art to an Oriental — above all, to a Semitic —
source.1 If Egyptian monuments picture tribute-hearers
1 " Let us then fully acknowledge the indebtedness of early Aegean cul-
ture to the older civilizations of the East. But this indebtedness must not be
allowed to obscure the fact that what was borrowed was also assimilated. It
is the invasion of a conquering and superior culture. It has already outstripped
its instructors. What the Mycenaeans took they made their own. They bor-
rowed from the designs of Babylonian cylinders, but they adapted them to
gems and seals of their own. The influence of Oriental religious types is
traceable on their signet rings, but the liveliness of treatment and the dra-
matic action introduced into the groups separate them toto coelo from the con-
ventional schematism of Babylonian cult-scenes." — Arthur J. Evans on " The
Eastern Question in Anthropology," before the British Association. London
Times, Sept. 18, 1896.