Note 823 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

The recent discoveries in Crete show beyond doubt that the school of Aegean civilization was in that island. Ancient Phoenicia, Argos, even Mycenae and Tiryns put off their mask of age and appear as rosy boys learning none too aptly of their great and elderly master. Borrowing the seeds of culture from Asia and Egypt,823 Crete nursed and tended them through the Neolithic and Bronze Age, transformed them completely, much as scientific tillage has converted the cotton tree into a low shrub. The precocity of this civilization is clear. At early as 3000 B.C. it included an impressive style of architecture and a decorative art naturalistic and beautiful in treatment as that of modern Japan.824 From this date till the zenith of its development in 1450 B.C., Crete became a great artistic manufacturing and distributing center for stone carving, frescoes, pottery, delicate porcelain, metal work, and gems.825 By 1800 B. C., seven centuries before Phoenician writing is heard of, the island had matured a linear script out of an earlier pictographic form.826 This script, partly indigenous, partly borrowed from Libya and Egypt, gives Crete the distinction of having invented the first system of writing ever practised in Europe.827