Excavations on Mycenaean and pre-Mycenaean sites furnish some testimony, chiefly negative, in favour of this view. The civilization disclosed by the excavations at Cnossus and other Cretan sites is an Aegean product influenced possibly by Egypt and the East, but certainly not by the mainland of Greece, though its own influence was probably extensive. Cretan civilization, like Egyptian, seems so much a thing apart that it hardly comes into our subject. In Egypt, indeed, we find depicted in the tombs of Beni-Hassan a varied array of athletic sports and games, including a most wonderful series of over 300 wrestling groups, but even Herodotus does not venture to ascribe Greek athletics to the Egyptians. At Cnossus the favourite sport seems to have been a sort of bull-baiting.[1] A fresco discovered by Dr. Evans represents a girl toreador in a sort of cowboy costume in the act of being tossed by a bull, while a youth appears to be turning a somersault over the animal’s back into the arms of a girl who stands behind the bull. Sometimes on gems a youth is depicted “springing from above, and seizing the bull’s horns in cowboy fashion.” The latter scene has also been found in a fresco at Tiryns, and a similar sport known as ταυροκαθαψία survived in historical times in Thessaly.[2] These purely acrobatic feats have nothing distinctively athletic about them, any more than dancing, another favourite Minoan spectacle, for which possibly was intended a square theatre surrounded by rows of seats at the north-west of the palace. Indeed, such scenes are the very reverse of athletic; for history has shown that the peoples who find pleasure in such performances have ceased to be, even if they ever have been, themselves athletic. The only form of true athletics represented is boxing, which occurs on some clay sealings, on a steatite relief (Fig. 1), and in conjunction with a bull-hunting scene on a steatite rhyton found at Hagia Triada.[3] The boxers are muscular and athletic-looking, their attitude is decidedly vigorous. They wear, according to Dr. Evans, a kind of glove or caestus, but the illustrations do not enable us to determine its character, and I do not feel sure that any such covering is intended. Anyhow, the Minoan boxer has a distinctly gladiatorial look, which is quite in harmony with the bull-baiting scenes. We shall probably not be far wrong in assuming that Minos, like oriental despots, kept his own prize-ring, and that his courtiers preferred to be spectators of the deeds of others rather than to take any active part in sports themselves. Sports and games, of course, existed in Crete as in all countries, but there is no evidence in Crete of anything from which Greek athletics could have developed. The unathletic character of the Aegean people is confirmed by the absolute absence of anything athletic at Mycenae and Tiryns, if we except the bull scenes, a fact which certainly supports the modern view that the Mycenaean civilization was