This Exodus, as it is called, probably took place in 1200 B.C. or a little earlier, and the Israelites wandered {75} some forty years in the wilderness, living in tents, and moving about as the manner of pastoral tribes was, and is, with their flocks and herds. We see, then, that 1150 B.C. or a few years sooner, would be about the date at which they would begin, under Joshua, the invasion of Canaan. Our story has not reached that point yet. {76} CHAPTER V THE MINOANS IN CRETE Those, then, were the two great powers on land in the very old days of the story of mankind. There was Egypt along the Nile, and Babylonia--for a thousand and more years, rather to be called Assyria--along the Euphrates and Tigris. But there was also yet a third power, very great, very ancient, and highly civilised, a sea-power, with its capital in the big island, which you will sec on the map, lying to the south of Greece, Crete. You will observe, perhaps, that it quite agrees with all that we find in the later story of mankind, that a nation living on an island should be powerful at sea. To-day you see the great sea-powers, ourselves and Japan. We live on islands that are small when compared with the lands of Germany, France, America, Russia, China; but we have more power in ships and seamen. Perhaps America is going to have a greater power than Japan, but at the time that I am writing she has not. It is only of rather recent years that we have come to know much about this very ancient Cretan civilisation, and chiefly it is owing to the work of a great antiquary, Sir Arthur Evans, that we have discovered the story. It must be very interesting to be an antiquary and to dig--or to order a gang of diggers to {77} dig under your directions--and not to know what you may be going to turn up next: now a gold ear-ring, now a bronze sword, now the edge of a worked stone that may be the corner-stone of a building which more digging may prove to be one of the greatest and most marvellous buildings in the world! [Sidenote: Knossos] It sounds like a fairy story; but it was a fairy story which Sir Arthur Evans made come true at a place in Crete where the ancient city of Knossos used to be. He found wonderful things--an immense palace, a place which inscriptions, also there discovered, show to have been a temple of the gods as well. The king, it is evident, was high-priest as well as king: we have seen that union of the two offices, the king's and the priest's, before, both in Egypt and in Babylonia. (When I say before, I mean that I wrote of it earlier in the story. I do not mean that it came any earlier in the time of its actual happening.) There is evidence to show that the Cretan people were civilised, could make fine works of art and so on, right back to the very earliest date at which the evidences from the peoples living along the river-courses have anything to show us. Maybe the Cretans acquired their civilisation even earlier than the others.