Now, that piracy, together with the style of architecture and the making of smaller works of art which they practised, are the two great facts to remember about this wonderful civilisation of the ancient Minoans. For just about the year 1500 B.C., at which we left the story of Egypt, or a little later, some terrible catastrophe overtook the Minoans. What happened we do not know. It has been guessed that they suffered an invasion and a complete overthrow {84} by the Dorians, a people who had come down from the north and had taken possession of that southern part of Greece which is called the Peloponnese. But nothing is certainly known, except that the Minoans did suffer a very complete overthrow, that their power was shattered, their splendid buildings were destroyed, and they seem to vanish out of the story altogether. Their conquerors were evidently a people far less civilised and accomplished than they. Antiquaries tell us that there were at least two distinct stages in the making of buildings and works of art under the Minoans before this last catastrophe, but after that there is no building, no art work, worth accounting for. It all went. But they had left the mark of their genius in the buildings at Mycenæ and elsewhere, and they had established the habit of piracy in the seas about their island. So now, I think, we have the frame set in which we may place the picture. We have these ancient Egyptians leading the kind of life that I have tried to show you. We have the Babylonians and Assyrians along those other river-courses established as a great power in the east, and we have the Minoans, very shortly to be overthrown and to disappear, scouring the seas in their ships and having all the power along the coasts. And between them, in the very midst, is that country of Syria and Palestine which--especially Palestine, because it is south of Syria--lies right in the course which the great empires must traverse when they come to grips with each other. Palestine is the country through which they must pass whether for trade or for war with each other. You can imagine what a terrible position that must have been. Syria {85} and Palestine, as you know, were peopled by Semitic tribes, to which race the Babylonians also belonged originally. But the divisions and differences, both between the Babylonians and the others, and between these others, among themselves, were many and of various kinds. Some must have regarded each other as almost of the same kindred. Others must have seemed quite strange and foreign. It was a great mixture.