These splendid buildings of the Minoans, as they {79} have been discovered for us by the digger, have a much more modern, a much less strange, appearance than those either of Babylonia or of Egypt. The Babylonian buildings especially look to us, as we make pictures of them in our minds, like palaces of some great ogre. The supports at each side of the doors and gates are very often in the form of huge winged bulls. Human heads and figures of colossal size are to be seen everywhere. And the human heads have generally great beards, and perhaps the rest of the hair worked up into a square pattern, with curls, so that they look horrible. All the insides of the Babylonian palaces seem to have been adorned with enormous hunting scenes, worked in a kind of gypsum which was found in the country. I think we should feel terribly afraid if we suddenly found ourselves in an ancient Babylonian palace or even an Egyptian one. But I believe that we should feel very much happier and more at home if we could be transported suddenly into one of the old Minoan palaces. And I believe that I can make a guess why that is so. [Sidenote: Cretan architecture] The Babylonian and the Egyptian style of building was found in these two countries, but neither Babylonians nor Egyptians went much across the sea--the Mediterranean Sea. But these Cretans, as I have said, were great sea-goers. They were the great naval power in the Mediterranean. So they went, and carried with them their ideas and their ways of building, everywhere. The effect of that is seen most of all perhaps at the site of an old Greek city on the mainland of Greece, Mycenæ, where great excavations have been made. But the effect is found in many other places too. So it has come down through the Greeks and through the Romans, and has been in the minds {80} and in the eyes of later builders, although the builders were generally, as we may suppose, not at all aware that they owed anything to these builders of so many thousands of years ago. It is a curious thing that in Egypt, in Babylonia, and also in Crete, some of the very oldest buildings and some of the very oldest works of art are the best. We have a comfortable idea in our minds that we--that is to say, mankind--have been making progress, have been improving, all through the story; but unfortunately there are some things in which we do not seem to have improved--some kinds of work in which the oldest is the best. And as I have said that the ancient buildings found in Crete are of a style that does not look nearly so strange to us as the ancient buildings of the countries on the mainland, so the Minoan engravings show us the people of that very far-off time dressed in a fashion that seems almost familiar to us. They do not look nearly so strange as the people that we see pictured and graven on the walls of those other palaces and tombs and temples.