It is surely no accident that the peak of this Minoan luxury coincides with the period of the great Egyptian revolution, and particularly the Hyksos time (1780-1580 B.C.).[134] The Egyptian craftsmen may well have fled in those days to the peaceful islands and even as far as the strongholds of the mainland, as in a later instance the Byzantine scholars fled to Italy. For it is axiomatic that the Minoan Culture is a part of the Egyptian, and we should be able to realize this more fully were it not that the part of Egypt’s art-store which would have been decisive in this connexion--viz.: what was produced in the Western Delta--has perished from damp. We only know the Egyptian Culture in so far as it flourished on the dry soil of the south, but it has long been admitted as certain that the centre of gravity of its evolution lay elsewhere. It is not possible to draw a strict frontier between the late Minoan and the young Mycenæan art. Throughout the Egyptian-Cretan world we can observe a highly modern fad for these alien and primitive things, and vice versa the war-band kings of the mainland strongholds stole or bought Cretan _objets d’art_ wherever and however they could come by them, admiring and imitating--even as the style of the Migrations, once supposed to be, and prized as, proto-German, borrows the whole of its form-language from the East.[135] They had their palaces and tombs built and decorated by captive or invited craftsmen. The “Treasure-house” (Tomb) of Atreus in Mycenæ, therefore, is exactly analogous to the tomb of Theoderich at Ravenna. In this regard Byzantium itself is a marvel. Here layer after layer has to be carefully separated. In 326 Constantine, rebuilding on the ruins of the great city destroyed by Septimus Severus, created a _Late Classical cosmopolis_ of the first rank, into which presently streamed hoary Apollinism from the West and youthful Magism from the East. And long afterwards again, in 1096, it is a _Late Magian_ cosmopolis, confronted in its last autumn days with spring in the shape of Godfrey of Bouillon’s crusaders, whom that clever royal lady Anna Comnena[136] portrays with contempt. As the easternmost of the Classical West, this city bewitched the Goths; then, a millennium later, as the northernmost of the Arabian world, it enchanted the Russians. And the amazing Vasili Blazheny in Moscow (1554), the herald of the Russian pre-Culture, stands “between styles,” just as, two thousand years before, Solomon’s Temple had stood between Babylon the Cosmopolis and early Christianity. II