The estimate in Hogarth's last sentence, which was published in 1899, before Evans's great discoveries in Crete, was one that must have seemed extravagant to those who, while familiar with the great antiquity of Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, had been accustomed to think of Greek civilization as having its beginning not so very long before the First Olympiad. It has been fully justified, however, by the event, and it may now be accepted as an established fact that the earliest civilization of Greece meets the two great ancient civilizations of Babylon and Egypt on substantially equal terms. In antiquity it appears to be practically contemporary with them; in artistic merit it need not shrink from comparison with either of them. In the earlier stages of the discussion which followed on the discoveries, it was assumed, perhaps somewhat hastily, that such a culture could not have been indigenous, resemblances to Egyptian and Mesopotamian work were pointed out, and it was suggested that the impulse and the skill which gave rise to the art of Mycenae were not native but borrowed, the Phoenicians being generally held to be the medium through which the influence of the East had filtered into the AEgean area. As time has gone on, however, the Phoenicians have gradually come to bulk less and less in the view of students of the AEgean problem. It is no longer held that they contributed anything original to the development of Mycenaean culture, and even as middlemen the tendency is to allow them an influence far smaller than was once held to be theirs. It has become manifest that, in at least the case of Crete and Egypt, communication need not have been through Phoenician media at all, but was far more probably direct. And with regard to the whole question of the debt owed to the East by this early European civilization, it is probable that the AEgean gave quite as much as it borrowed, and that its artists were sufficiently great to have originated their own culture. Mycenaean, and still more the great Minoan art of which Mycenaean has proved to be only a decadent phase, needed no Oriental crutches. With regard to Egypt, the obligations of the two cultures were certainly mutual; each influenced the other; it was not a case of master and scholar, but of two contemporary civilizations, each fully inspired with a native spirit, each ready to use whatever seemed good to it in the work of the other, but both perfectly original in their genius.