Then in the seventies came the redoubtable Dr. Schliemann, most erudite of sappers, and dug into the hill at Hissarlik to see if he could find the bones of Hector and the ruins of Troy. Troy he found in abundance, five Troys, at least, one on the top of another. He called the second from the bottom the city of Priam, and then he crossed over with his spades and picks to look for what might be left of Agamemnon at Mycenæ. Sure enough, he presently startled the learned world by a telegram to the King of Greece saying that he had found the tomb of Agamemnon. Quite certainly he had found some very important things--things, as we shall soon see, far more interesting and valuable to history than if they had belonged, as Schliemann thought, to the King of all the Greeks. But the point is that for many years to come all the excavators who worked on Greek soil started with the false belief that Homer was the beginning of all things and that their discoveries were illustrating Homer. We now know that the excavations at Mycenæ and the poems of Homer represent two entirely different civilisations, neither of them primitive. We are now in a position to throw the beginnings of European culture in the Mediterranean basin centuries--nay, whole millenniums--farther back than our fathers’ wildest dreams could carry them. The history of European civilisation is no longer a traceable progression from Homer to Tennyson or from Odysseus to Captain Peary, but a long cycle of rising and decaying cultures with periods of darkness intervening. For this revolution in our ideas the responsible weapon is the humble but veracious spade. CRETE, THE DOORSTEP OF EUROPE We are to picture the primitive tribes of the world as continually moving under the double pressure of the wolf in their bellies and the enemy at their backs--moving, in the main, north and west, as climatic conditions relented before them. So long as they were in this nomadic stage little progress could be made in civilisation; tents must form their houses, and their goods could be only such trifles of necessary pots and pans as they could carry. But when the moving tribe reached the sea it was compelled to halt and settle. Thus it is that civilisation begins in the oases of the desert, on the north coasts of Africa, and in the isles of Greece. Settled by force, and to some degree protected by nature, they could begin to accumulate possessions, and to improve them with art. They could begin to build houses, and develop morals and polities.