The rise of the Greek epic - 1907 Author:Gilbert Murray Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MIGRATIONS: THE POLIS If we regard Greece as the cradle of European civilization, we cannot help some feeling of surprise at its comparative lack of antiq... more »uity. True, we have evidence of a civilization existing in Crete and the Islands of the Aegean as far back as the end of the Stone Age. But, for one thing, our knowledge of this civilization is scanty and conjectural, inasmuch as it depends upon our interpretation of the stones, not upon literature : and, what is more important, it is emphatically not the civilization that we call Greek. I do not mean only or especially that the builders of the earliest Cretan palaces were, as far as we can judge, of different race and language from the Greeks. I mean that this civilization, so far as we know it, has few or none of the special marks that we associate with Hellenism. But of that hereafter. In any case there lies between the prehistoric palaces of Crete, Troy, or Mycenae, and the civilization which we know as Greek, a Dark Age covering at least several centuries. It is in this Dark Age that we must really look for the beginnings of Greece. In literature and in archaeology alike we are met with the same gap. There is a far-off island of knowledge, or apparent knowledge; then darkness ; then the beginnings of continuous history. At Troy there are the remains of no less than six cities one above the other. There was a great city there in 2000 B.C., the second of the series. Even in the second city there was discovered a fragment of white nephrite, a rare stone not found anywhere nearer than China, and testifying to the distances which trade could travel by slow and unconscious routes in early times. That city was destroyed by war and fire ; and others followed. The greatestof all was the sixth city, which we may roughly iden...« less