Note 828 — Chapter XIII · —Island Peoples

Yet all this wealth of achievement bore the stamp of the indigenous; nearly every trace of its remote Asiatic or Egyptian origin was obliterated. Here the isolation of an island environment did thoroughly its work of differentiation, even on this thalassic isle which maintained constant intercourse with Egypt, the Cyclades, the Troad and the Greek peninsula.828 Minoan art has a freshness, vivacity, and modernity that distinguishes it fundamentally from the formal products of its neighbors. "Many of the favorite subjects, like the crocus and wild goat, are native to the islands.... Even where a motive was borrowed from Egyptian life, it was treated in a distinctive way," made tender, dramatic, vital. "In religion, as in art generally, Crete translated its loans into indigenous terms, and contributed as much as it received."829 The curator of Egyptian antiquities in the New York Metropolitan Art Museum examined five hundred illustrations of second and third millenium antiquities from Gournia and Vasiliki in Crete, made by Mrs. Harriet Boyd Hawes during her superintendence of the excavations there, and pronounced them distinctly un-Egyptian, except one vase, probably an importation.830 All this was achieved by a small insular segment of the Mediterranean race, in their Neolithic and Bronze Age, before the advent of those northern conquerors who brought in an Aryan speech and the gift of iron. It was in Crete, therefore, that Aegean civilization arose. On this island it had a long and brilliant pre-Hellenic career, and thence it spread to the Greek mainland and other Aegean shores.831