From which direction the parent stock of the Greeks came into the land that was to be their future abiding place has long been a moot point with scholars, and is yet undetermined. So long as the original cradle of the Aryans was held to be central Asia, it was the unavoidable conclusion that the Aryans of Europe, including the Greeks, had come originally from the East. But when the theory was introduced that the real cradle of the primitive Aryan was not Asia but northwestern Europe all certainty from _a priori_ considerations vanished, for it seemed at least as plausible that the parent Greeks might have dropped aside from the main swarm on its eastern journey to invade Asia as that they should have oscillated back to Greece after that invasion had been established. And more recently the question is still further complicated by the “Mediterranean Race” theory, which includes the Greeks as descendants of a hypothetical stock whose cradle was neither Asia nor Europe, but equatorial Africa.[a] Some of the latest accounts of Greek origin are stated by Professor Bury who says: “It is in the lands of Thessaly and Epirus that we first dimly descry the Greeks busy at the task for which destiny had chosen them, of creating and shaping the thought and civilisation of Europe. The oak wood of Dodona in Epirus is the earliest sanctuary, whereof we have any knowledge, of their supreme god, Zeus, the dweller of the sky. Thessaly has associations which still appeal intimately to men of European birth. The first Greek settlers in Thessaly were the Achæans; and in the plain of Argos, and in the mountains which gird it about, they fashioned legends which were to sink deeply into the imagination of Europe. We know that when the Greek conquerors came down to the coast of the Ægean they found a material civilisation more advanced than their own; and it was so chanced that we know more of this civilisation than we know of the conquerors before they came under its influence.