Crete Author:Charles Henry Hawes Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SURVEY OF THE PREHISTORIC PERIODS OF CRETE WE have in brief fashion resumed the way by which was made the great discovery of a remote civilization existing in... more » the SJgean area and originating in Crete. It is not our purpose to write an archaeological treatise dealing minutely and in technical language with Cretan excavations. Yet without a previous outline of their results even a general description would be unintelligible to the lay reader, so great and varied is the material. A book of this kind must reverse the order of the spade. For whereas the excavator begins at the surface and reads history downward, one who writes on the subject must ' begin at the beginning,' that is, with what the excavator has learned at the bottom of his pit. And whereas the excavator, from a mass of careful observations, forms his picture of the past, the writer must first sketch the broad outlines of the picture, and then fill in the details. For scaffolding he will use the structure that has cost the excavator years of effort, namely, his system of chronology. The Golden Age of Crete, when did it begin and how long endure ? If we use the phrase in its narrower sense, we must limit the time to c. 15001450 B.c., only half a century, like the Age of Pericles, the brilliant ' Fifty Years ' of Athens. But as the whole classical era of Greece appears golden in contrast to the later obscurity, so the whole Minoan Age of Crete shines by comparison with what followed. The Minoan Age began at the end of the Stone Age with the introduction of bronze weapons and tools, and ended with the incoming of iron, which replaced the softer metal. During this long period of about two thousand years, covering roughly the third and second millenniums before Christ, whether it be spears, daggers, saws, nails, fish-hoo...« less