To arrange the huge mass of late Mycenean vases in this long development is impossible, until the material has been sifted and worked through. But one thing already can be said with certainty, that it was not merely exported from Crete; indeed it is more than questionable, whether Crete played the leading part. In this period the native seat of the brilliant Minoan civilization is no longer in the foreground; the centre of gravity has shifted to the mainland, in particular the Argolid. Even in the period of the shaft graves we see the Peloponnesians eagerly adopting Cretan civilization; in the following period the mainland vies with Crete in the production of Mycenean vases, and finally must have wrested the lead from the southern outpost. This applies not merely to civilization but to political conditions. A hypothesis, in favour of which there is much to be said, connects the destruction of the Cretan palaces with the invasion of conquering ‘Achaeans,’ the name Homer applies to the lords of the mainland. Just as the wall-painting originally borrowed from Crete was still flourishing on the mainland, when it had died out at home, so the late Mycenean pottery must have been produced mainly in continental Greece, and the new style must have been formed by the Peloponnesians. Thus we can explain the non-Minoan elements, the strong geometrical influence on the decoration, and the taking over of figured scenes from wall-painting, which was rejected by the old Cretans. So it was probably the ‘Achaeans’ who spread the late Mycenean pottery all over the Mediterranean. They had [Illustration: PLATE IX. Figs. 16 & 17. LATE MYCENEAN VASES FROM RHODES.] become a seafaring nation on a great scale. Of their entry into Crete we have just spoken, of their united campaigns of conquest in Asia Minor, in which the Cretan king has the Argive Agamemnon as his overlord, the Homeric poems tell us, and of their colonizing expansion in the Mediterranean the vase finds among other things give evidence, as they justify conclusions about new localities of manufacture (Troy, Rhodes, Cyprus, etc.). In the beginning of the first millennium the scene is totally altered. On the coast of Asia Minor and the islands are settled Hellenic races, among which the Aeolians and Ionians are probably descendants of the emigrated Achaeans, while the Dorians represent a new tribe come in from the north, which subdued the Peloponnese and Crete and extended to the south of the Aegean Sea. These shiftings of population, the so-called Dorian invasion, with which Greek historians begin the history of their country, mark the end of the Bronze Age and of the Mycenean civilization. Iron weapons, only sporadically to be found in the late Mycenean age, take the place of bronze; the Mycenean vase style vanishes all along the line, and gives way to a new style, the Geometric. CHAPTER II. THE GEOMETRIC STYLE