When it is remembered that, firstly, knowing not a word of the Mycenæan language, we are quite ignorant of its affinities; secondly, not enough Mycenæan skulls have yet been recovered to establish more than the bare fact that the race was mixed and not wholly Asiatic; and thirdly, since identity of civilisation in no sense necessarily entails identity of race, we may have to do not with one or two, but with many races--it will be conceded that it is more useful at present to attempt to narrow the issue by excluding certain claimants than to pronounce in favour of any one. The facial types represented not only on the Knossian frescoes, but by statuettes and gems, are distinctly non-Asiatic, and recall strongly the high-crowned brachycephalic type of the modern northern Albanians and Cretan hillmen. Of the elder civilised races about the Levantine area the Egyptians, Assyrians, and Babylonians may be dismissed at once. We know their art from beginning to end, and its character is not at any period the same as that of Ægean art. As for the Phœnicians, for whom on the strength of Homeric tradition a strong claim has been put forward, it cannot be said to be impossible that some objects thought to be Mycenæan are of Sidonian origin, since we know little or nothing of Sidonian art. But the presumption against this Semitic people having had any serious share in Mycenæan development is strong, since facial types apart, the only scripts known to have been used in the Mycenæan area and period are in no way affiliated to the Phœnician alphabet, and neither the characteristic forms nor the characteristic style of Phœnician art, as we know it, appear in Mycenæan products. The one thing, of which recent research has assured us in this matter, is this, that the Keftiu, represented in XVIIIth Dynasty tombs at Thebes, were a “Mycenæan” folk, an island people of the northern sea. They came into intimate contact, both peaceful and warlike, with Egypt, and to them no doubt are owed the Ægean styles and products found on Nile sites. Exact parallels to their dress and products, as represented by Egyptian artists, appear in the work of Cretan artists; and it is now generally accepted that the Keftiu were “Mycenæans” of Crete at any rate, whatever other habitat they may have possessed.