Bab Bab 10 · Into The Wilderness Of Europe

[Illustration: THE TROJAN HORSE]

When Heinrich Schliemann was a little boy his father told him the

story of Troy. He liked that story better than anything else he had

ever heard and he made up his mind, that as soon as he was big enough

to leave home, he would travel to Greece and “find Troy.” That he was

the son of a poor country parson in a Mecklenburg village did not

bother him. He knew that he would need money but he decided to gather

a fortune first and do the digging afterwards. As a matter of fact, he

managed to get a large fortune within a very short time, and as soon as

he had enough money to equip an expedition, he went to the northwest

corner of Asia Minor, where he supposed that Troy had been situated.

[Illustration: SCHLIEMANN DIGS FOR TROY]

In that particular nook of old Asia Minor, stood a high mound covered

with grainfields. According to tradition it had been the home of

Priamus the king of Troy. Schliemann, whose enthusiasm was somewhat

greater than his knowledge, wasted no time in preliminary explorations.

At once he began to dig. And he dug with such zeal and such speed that

his trench went straight through the heart of the city for which he

was looking and carried him to the ruins of another buried town which

was at least a thousand years older than the Troy of which Homer had

written. Then something very interesting occurred. If Schliemann had

found a few polished stone hammers and perhaps a few pieces of crude

pottery, no one would have been surprised. Instead of discovering such

objects, which people had generally associated with the prehistoric

men who had lived in these regions before the coming of the Greeks,

Schliemann found beautiful statuettes and very costly jewelry and

ornamented vases of a pattern that was unknown to the Greeks. He

ventured the suggestion that fully ten centuries before the great

Trojan war, the coast of the Ægean had been inhabited by a mysterious

race of men who in many ways had been the superiors of the wild

Greek tribes who had invaded their country and had destroyed their

civilisation or absorbed it until it had lost all trace of originality.

And this proved to be the case. In the late seventies of the last

century, Schliemann visited the ruins of Mycenæ, ruins which were so

old that Roman guide-books marvelled at their antiquity. There again,

beneath the flat slabs of stone of a small round enclosure, Schliemann

stumbled upon a wonderful treasure-trove, which had been left behind

by those mysterious people who had covered the Greek coast with their

cities and who had built walls, so big and so heavy and so strong, that

the Greeks called them the work of the Titans, those god-like giants

who in very olden days had used to play ball with mountain peaks.

[Illustration: MYCENÆ IN ARGOLIS]

A very careful study of these many relics has done away with some of

the romantic features of the story. The makers of these early works

of art and the builders of these strong fortresses were no sorcerers,

but simple sailors and traders. They had lived in Crete, and on the

many small islands of the Ægean Sea. They had been hardy mariners and

they had turned the Ægean into a center of commerce for the exchange

of goods between the highly civilised east and the slowly developing

wilderness of the European mainland.

[Illustration: THE ÆGEAN SEA]

For more than a thousand years they had maintained an island empire

which had developed a very high form of art. Indeed their most

important city, Cnossus, on the northern coast of Crete, had been

entirely modern in its insistence upon hygiene and comfort. The palace

had been properly drained and the houses had been provided with stoves

and the Cnossians had been the first people to make a daily use

of the hitherto unknown bathtub. The palace of their King had been

famous for its winding staircases and its large banqueting hall. The

cellars underneath this palace, where the wine and the grain and the

olive-oil were stored, had been so vast and had so greatly impressed

the first Greek visitors, that they had given rise to the story of

the “labyrinth,” the name which we give to a structure with so many

complicated passages that it is almost impossible to find our way out,

once the front door has closed upon our frightened selves.

[Illustration: THE ISLAND-BRIDGES BETWEEN ASIA AND EUROPE]

But what finally became of this great Ægean Empire and what caused its

sudden downfall, that I can not tell.

The Cretans were familiar with the art of writing, but no one has yet

been able to decipher their inscriptions. Their history therefore is

unknown to us. We have to reconstruct the record of their adventures

from the ruins which the Ægeans have left behind. These ruins make it

clear that the Ægean world was suddenly conquered by a less civilised

race which had recently come from the plains of northern Europe.

Unless we are very much mistaken, the savages who were responsible for

the destruction of the Cretan and the Ægean civilisation were none

other than certain tribes of wandering shepherds who had just taken

possession of the rocky peninsula between the Adriatic and the Ægean

seas and who are known to us as Greeks.