Commenting in another place on the discoveries in Crete, Mr. Hogarth has pointed out their effect in modifying the ideas heretofore entertained of the importance of Phoenician influence in the rise of European civilization. "For many years now," he writes, "we have had before our eyes two standing protests against the traditional claim of Phoenicia to originate European civilization, and those protests come from two regions which Phoenician influence, travelling west, ought first to have affected, namely, Cyprus and Asia Minor. In both these regions exist remains of early systems of writing which are clearly not of Phoenician descent. Both the Cypriote syllabic script and the 'Hittite' symbols must have been firmly rooted in their homes before ever the convenient alphabet of Sidon and Tyre was known there. And now, since Mr. Evans has demonstrated the existence of two non-Phoenician systems of writing in Crete also, the use of one of which has been proved to extend to the Cyclades and the mainland of Greece, it has become evident that we have to deal in south-eastern Europe, as well as in Cyprus or Asia Minor, with a non-Phoenician influence of civilization which, since it could originate that greatest of achievements, a local script, was quite powerful enough to account by itself also for the local art. {25} "Those who continue to advocate the Phoenician claim do not seem sufficiently to realize that nowadays they have to take account neither only of the Homeric age nor only of even half a millennium before Homer, but of an almost geologic antiquity. Far into the third millennium B. C. at the very least, and more probably much earlier still, there was a civilization in the Aegean and on the Greek mainland which, while it contracted many debts to the East and to Egypt, was able to assimilate all that it borrowed, and to reissue it in an individual form, expressed in products which are not of the same character with those of any Eastern civilization that we know." _D. G. Hogarth, Authority and Archaeology Sacred and Profane, part 2, pages 237-238 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons)._