other with the earlier products of Hellenic development, the problem is no longer purely one of antiquarian ethnology. We ask less what race was so greatly gifted, than what geographical or other circumstances will account for the persistence of a certain peculiar quality of civilisation in the Ægean area.[b] An eloquent summary of our Mycenæan knowledge and a lively description of life such as it may have been in Mycenæ has been drawn by Chrestos Tsountas and J. Irving Manatt in their work, _The Mycenæan Age_, from which we quote at length. [Illustration: SEPULCHRAL ENCLOSURE, MYCENÆ] THE PROBLEM OF MYCENÆAN CHRONOLOGY Whether or not the authors of this distinct and stately civilisation included among their achievements a knowledge of letters, their monuments thus far address us only in the universal language of form and action. Of their speech we have yet to read the first syllable. The vase handles of Mycenæ may have some message for us, if no more than a pair of heroic names; and the nine consecutive characters from the cave of Cretan Zeus must have still more to say when we find the key. We may hope, at least, if this ancient culture ever recovers its voice, to find it not altogether unfamiliar: we need not be startled if we catch the first lisping accent of what has grown full and strong in the Achæan epic. But for the present we have to do with a dumb age, with a race whose artistic expression amazes us all the more in the dead silence of their history. So far as we yet know from their monuments, they have recorded not one fixed point in their career, they have never even written down their name as a people. Now, a dateless era and a nameless race--particularly in the immediate background of the stage on which we see the forces of the world’s golden age deploying--are facts to be accepted only in the last resort. The student of human culture cannot look upon the massive walls, the solemn domes, the exquisite creations of what we call Mycenæan art, without asking--When? By whom? In default of direct and positive evidence, he will make the most of the indirect and probable.