Cretan Palaces and the Aegean Civilization. II

In my previous paper on Cretan Palaces and the Aegean Civilization I sought to give a general account of the architectural evidence resulting from excavation, in its bearing on the disputed question as to the continuity of Aegean culture throughout the course of its development.It will now be advisable to consider the problems involved on a wider basis, in the light of the objects other than architectural, found in Crete and elsewhere in the Aegean world.The Carian Hypothesis as to the Origins of the Aegean Civilization.That the implications of the question are of an ethnological character will at this stage in the inquiry be generally admitted. And here it will be convenient to take as our point of departure a standpoint that may now perhaps be regarded as pretty general, though negative in its bearings, and which is to the effect that the originators of the Aegean civilization, at any rate in its pre-Mycenaean phases, were not ‘Achaeans’ in the vague general sense of being a people from the mainland of Greece. But the attempt to give a positive form to this conclusion has led to the revival of an old hypothesis which is perhaps not so entirely out of date as has lately been supposed. According to this hypothesis, the originators and representatives of the Aegean civilization were Carians from southwest Anatolia, and it was they, according to Doerpfeld, who built the earlier palaces of Crete. The later Cretan palaces, on the other hand, according to the same authority, were built by people of Achaean, and so of Hellenic race.