Note 177 — Chapter V · CITIES AND PEOPLES (B) PEOPLES, RACES, TONGUES

This suggestive sentence should, of course, be read with its reservation. The cranial evidences of Crete are highly illustrative in this connexion; they would not indeed be trusted by a modern historian without weighty collateral evidence, but here this evidence exists. Up to the latter part of Middle Minoan, the “long” head predominated heavily, not only from the outset, but increasingly as the Culture rose, until it included two-thirds of the whole, intermediates forming a quarter and “short” heads a mere handful. But from about the time of the catastrophic fall of Late Minoan II, the long heads fall to a startlingly low figure, while intermediates account for half, and short heads for more than a third. It marks the end of Minoan Civilization and the coming of the Achæans. But just as the Minoan skull held its own throughout the Minoan Age, so now, after its fall, the short head maintained itself, as stated in the text, through all subsequent vicissitudes, from the “Sea-peoples” through Roman, Arab, and Turk, to this day. Thus the Cretan landscape has had two skull-types successively; but the change from one to the other occurred in connexion with an immense cataclysm, nothing less than the collapse of a Civilization. The rough deduction that seems to emerge from this case is that a great Culture holds its skull, no doubt in the course of its striving towards ideal physical type of its own (see p. 127), but that where that major organism does not exist, the skull endures as the land endures and the peasant endures. This applies also to the Alpine region, which has received the deposit of migrations, but has never been the centre of a high Culture.—Tr.