Connecting the results of explorations in Asia Minor, Egypt, Crete, Cyprus, Rhodes, Thera, Melos, and other islands of the Eastern Mediterranean with those in the Peloponnesus, the existence of a pre-Phœnician civilisation, of which Mycenæ may be conveniently regarded as the centre, appears to be demonstrated. That civilisation, so far as its connection with the prehistoric stages of man's development goes, falls in, like aught else in this wide and ancient world, with the doctrine of continuity, but for purposes of time-reckoning dates at latest far back in the third millennium before our era. Mycenæan vases have been found in Egypt, and Egyptian scarabs in Mycenæan deposits. They prove an intimate intercourse between the two countries two thousand five hundred years before Christ. And there was intercourse farther afield. The imitations of Babylonian cylinders, the sculptured palms and lions, the figures of Astarte and her doves, show that fifteen hundred years before the date ascribed to the Homeric poems Assyria and Greece had come into contact. But the examples of Oriental art which had found their way to the soil of Argolis remained more or less exotic, the independent features of Mycenæan art being retained unaltered. Now the cumulative effect of this evidence, which is only baldly summarised here, is to shatter to pieces current theories as to the Phœnician origin of European civilisation, and, consequently, what mainly concerns us here, of the Phœnician origin of the European alphabets through the Egyptian hieratic. For that evidence shows that the Mycenæan civilisation is (1) earlier in time, and (2) indigenous in character.