Concerning the influences coming from the south-east, there was never any doubt. All the legends about Cadmus, Danaus, and the like assert the importation of the culture of Phœnicia and of Egypt into Greece. The same thing is said of the empire of Minos of Crete, which is now found to have been a reality, and from which a very early culture passed through the Ægean Islands to the coasts of Greece. Whether the early graphic systems used at Cnossos made their way to Mycenæ or Tiryns we have no evidence to determine. Most probably they did, and these may have been the “dire symbols” which Homer mentions as sent with Bellerophon to seal his fate with the Lycian king. But in any case the Phœnician alphabet came in; the use of engraved seals was carried by the same traders from Babylon; the ostrich eggs, the ivory from Africa, the designs on many objects, tell no uncertain tale. For all that, the earliest art of Greece--I will not call it Hellenic as yet--is not Oriental but European, and with features of its own. And this need not be referred to its originality; far more probably was it caused by assimilating another kind of culture, which had features of its own and which can be shown to have had its influence on Mycenæan art. This civilisation dwelt in central Europe and came from the north to Greece. It has been called Keltic, it has been called Pelasgian; we find it in tombs, and in raths even as far as Ireland. It was from this source that came the fancy for Baltic amber as an ornament--a thing as strange in Greece as the ostrich egg. From here too came the shape of early bronze weapons, probably the habit of burying the dead in beehive tombs; actually many of the patterns used for ornament on tools and weapons. And who can tell how much more filtered in from this source, which the old Greeks called Pelasgian? Thus the Hellenic race was on the verge of two kinds of culture, and created from both that distinct type which ultimately became the most perfect in the world.