PREFACE

This volume deals with the myths and legends connected with the ancient civilization of Crete, and also with the rise and growth of the civilization itself, while consideration is given to various fascinating and important problems that arise in the course of investigating pre-Hellenic habits of thought and habits of life, which are found to have exercised a marked influence in the early history of Europe. In the first two chapters the story of European civilization is carried back to remote Palæolithic times, the view having been urged, notably by Mosso, that a connection existed between the civilization of the artistic cave-dwellers in France and Spain, and that of the Island of Minos. It is shown that these civilizations were not, however, contemporary, but separated by thousands of years, and that in accounting for close resemblances the modern dogma of independent evolution is put to a severe test. The data summarized in the Introduction emphasize the need for caution in attempting to solve a complex problem by the application of a hypothesis which may account for some resemblances but fails to explain away the marked differences that existed even between contemporary civilizations of the Neolithic, Copper, and Bronze Ages.

To enable the reader to become familiar with the geological, ethnological, and archæological evidence regarding the earliest traces and progressive activities of man in Europe, who laid the foundations of subsequent civilizations, a popular narrative is given in the first chapter, the scientific data being cast in the form of a legend following the manner of Hesiod’s account of the Mythical Ages of the World in the Work and Days, and of that of the Indian sage Markandeya’s story of the "Yugas" in the Máhabhárata, and of Tuan MacCarell’s narrative of his experiences in the various Irish Ages. Footnotes provide the necessary references.

Consideration is also given, in dealing with Cretan origins, to Schliemann’s hypothesis regarding the "Lost Atlantis", and the connection he believed existed between the Mexican, early European, and Nilotic civilizations. It is brought out that the historical elements in Plato’s legend are susceptible of a different explanation.

Cretan civilization has not yet been rendered articulate, for its script remains a mystery, but of late years a flood of light has been thrown upon it by the archæologists, among whom Sir Arthur Evans is pre-eminent. We can examine the remains of the palace of Minos; tread the footworn stones of the streets of little towns; examine pottery and frame a history of it; gaze on frescoes depicting scenes of everyday life in ancient Crete, on seal engravings which show us what manner of ships were built and navigated by mariners who ruled the Mediterranean Sea long before the Ph?nician period, what deities were worshipped and what ceremonies were performed; we can study a painted sarcophagus which throws light on funerary customs and conceptions of the Otherworld, and stone vases which afford glimpses of boxers, bull-baiters, soldiers, and processions; and we can also examine the jewellery, weapons, and implements of the ancient folk. With the aid of these and other data we are enabled to reconstruct in outline the island civilization and study its growth over a period embraced by many centuries. It has even been found possible to arrange a system of Cretan chronology) approximate dates being fixed with the aid of artifacts, evidently imported from Egypt, and of Cretan artifacts found in the Nilotic area and elsewhere. The idea of the "Hellenic miracle" no longer obtains. It is undoubted that Crete was the forerunner of Greece, and that the Hellenes owed a debt to Cretan civilization the importance of which was not realized even by the native historians of ancient Greece.

Various problems arise in dealing with the growth of civilization in Crete and the influence exercised by it in Central and Western Europe. These include the race question, the migrations of peoples from the area in which the agricultural mode of life was first adopted, the question of cultural contact, of trade routes on sea and land. of homogeneity of beliefs of common origin, and of the influence of locality in the development of beliefs and material civilization. In the pages that follow, these problems are presented in their various aspects, and such representative evidence as is available has been utilized with purpose to throw light upon them.

Readers cannot fail to be impressed by the note of modernity which prevails in the story of Cretan life. It is emphasized to a remarkable degree in Minoan art. In this connection the coloured illustrations in the present volume. by Mr. John Duncan, A.R.S.A., are of peculiar interest. In preparing these designs Mr. Duncan has deliberately sought to follow the style of the Minoan artists themselves, as displayed in the relics of frescoes, and in pottery, seal engravings and impressions, &c., recently unearthed. The colours are confined to those used by the native craftsmen, while the decorative borders are essentially Cretan in character. In the Plate facing a suggestive parallel is drawn between Celtic and Minoan patterns and symbols. It will be noted that the Celtic treatment of complicated patterns of common origin is more thorough and logical than the Minoan, as, for instance, when we compare No. 3, which has incomplete curves, with the finished and exact No. 4. The examples dealt with include a symbol of the Egypto-Libyan goddess Neith.

The note of modernity in Cretan art inclines us perhaps to be somewhat generous and enthusiastic in our praises of it. An eminent archæologist has declared that "it yields to none that was contemporary and hardly to any that came after it". This is a strong claim, especially when we give consideration to the extraordinarily full and varied art of Egypt. In Crete, for instance, we do not meet with the skilled technique and psychological insight of some of Egypt’s notable portraiture in stone, nor with faces of such high intellectual and moral qualities; nor do we meet with the masculine energy, the disciplined ferocity and brilliant directness of appeal that characterize the finest products of Assyrian art; nor can we help noting the absence of the idealistic tendencies of Greek art, with its aim to visualize mental and spiritual impressions, its moral ascendancy, and its preoccupation with the idea of beauty of form and character. No doubt it is because Cretan art is infused with a lyrical carelessness and freedom, not only in subject, but also in execution, that it makes a very special appeal to modern eyes. There are certainly notable instances of excellency in delicate modelling, a love of colour—who can refrain, for instance, from admiring the golden afternoon effects of Vasiliki pottery?—a delight in natural objects, a marked absence of formalism in the best work, and an extreme and arresting grace, especially in the ivory work. Yet it is possible to overestimate the artistic value of such works as the "Harvester Vase", with its liveliness of movement and expression, and to commend even its defects, and forget that there are finer examples of low relief in Egypt, where the artists have left us in no doubt as to what they meant; it is possible also to infuse our art criticisms with archæological enthusiasm, as when, for instance, we gaze on the fresco of the Cup Bearer, which is an impression of a very ordinary, good-looking, young man, with formal eyes, and hand and arm out of drawing. Yet while, as a whole, Cretan art is very unequal, there are a few masterpieces which set it on a high level. The ivory figurine of "The Leaper" is one of these.

The spirit of naturalism pulsating in Cretan art is also found in Palæolithic art, of which two notable examples are given from the cave paintings. These remarkable relics of the Pleistocene Age are typical products of Palæolithic art, the advanced condition of which suggests a long history, and even the existence, in such remote times, not only of devoted personal study, but also of an organized system of training. The civilization reflected by such an art must have been of no mean order. Evidently it met with disaster during the Fourth Glacial Period, but subsequent discoveries may yet demonstrate that its influence was not wholly lost to mankind.

D. A. MACKENZIE.

INTRODUCTION

IN relating how Crete has risen into prominence as the seat of a great and ancient civilization, one is reminded of the fairy story of Cinderella. The archæological narrative begins with the discovery made by Schliemann of traces of a distinctive and high pre-Hellenic culture amidst the ruins of the Peloponnesian cities of Tiryns and Mycenæ, which he assigned to the Homeric Age. Evidence was soon forthcoming that this culture was not of indigenous character, but had been imported from some unknown area after it had reached its highest development and was beginning to show signs of decadence -a sure indication of its great antiquity. A dramatic search followed for the centre of origin and diffusion. The wonderful slipper had been found, but where was Cinderella? In the end, after several claims had been urged, the last comer was proved to be the missing princess of culture, and the last comer was Crete. Research on that island had been long postponed on account of the disturbed political conditions that prevailed under the Turkish regime.

A new first chapter has since been added to the history of European civilization. We no longer begin with Hellenic Greece, or believe that Hellenic culture sprang full-grown into being like the fabled deity who leapt from her parent’s head. In this volume it is shown that the myths and legends preserved in the works of various classical writers regarding the sources of Grecian culture were well founded, and that the traditions of the "Heroic Age" did not have origin in the imaginations of poets and dramatists. But, wise as we chance to be, after the event, we need not regard with scorn the historians of a past generation who hesitated to sift and utilize such elusive myths as the Cretan origins of Zeus and Demeter, and the semi-historical references to Crete, in the works of Homer, Thucydides, and others, to find a sure basis for a convincing narrative worthy of the name of history.

It is only within recent years that the necessary archaeological data have been available which enables students of ancient civilization to draw with some degree of confidence upon the abundant but confused contents of the storehouse of folk memory.

The discovery that Crete was the birth-place of Ægean civilization, which radiated in the pre-Hellenic times throughout Europe—"the little leaven that leavened the whole lump"—does not, however, set a limit to the work of research, or solve all the problems which are involved. Although it has been demonstrated that the Cretan leaven was in existence and at work at the dawn of the Egyptian Dynastic Age, and when the Sumerians were achieving their earliest triumphs in the Tigro-Euphratean valley, we are still confronted with the problem of remote origin. The earliest settlers in Crete had, as their artifacts demonstrate, already obtained a comparatively high degree of Neolithic culture. Houses were built of stone as well as of wattles daubed with clay, a sea trade was in existence, for obsidian was imported from Melos, and a section of the community had adopted the agricultural mode of life. Withal, beliefs were well developed and had assumed a fixity which remained until they were merged in the accumulated mass of Grecian inheritance, and suffered, as a result, for long ages, complete loss of identity. The earliest settlement of people at Knossos has been assigned to about 10,000 B.C., an approximate dating which is based on the evidence of the archaeological strata.

But the earliest traces of an artistic culture in Europe belong to a still more remote age. Although during the vast periods of the Neolithic, or Late Stone Age, there existed savage communities, just as happens to be the case at the present day in various parts of the world, there were also, as in Crete, Egypt, and Babylonia, refined and progressive peoples who were already "heirs of all the Ages"—the Ages when ancient Europe passed through stages of climatic oscillations of such pronounced character that the remains of mankind are found in strata yielding alternately tropical, temperate, and Arctic flora and fauna. The period in question, the lengthiest in the history of civilization, is the archaeological Palæolithic, or Early Stone Age. Towards its close, for which the minimum dating is 20,000 B.C., there existed in Europe at least two races, whose cultures are referred to as Aurignacian and Magdalenian. A stage called Azilian links the Palæolithic with the Neolithic Age, and the continuity of culture from the earliest times is now generally regarded as an established fact.

The story of Cretan civilization may constitute, as has been said, the first chapter of European history. But the "Introduction" is derived from the Palæolithic Age, before and during the Fourth Glacial Epoch of the geologists.

Our introductory data are obtained from the famous Palæolithic cave-dwellings of France and Spain, which are dealt with in Chapters I and II. No definite traces are yet obtainable, among the scanty human remains that have been discovered, of racial types resembling those of early Egypt or early Crete, but remarkable evidence has been forthcoming which not only establishes the great antiquity of certain artistic motifs -of finished artistic skill and even of certain customs that afterwards appeared on the Island of Minos and in the Nilotic and Tigro-Euphratean areas.

The links with Crete are so close and suggestive that writers like Angelo Mosso have expressed the belief in the Neolithic and Cretan origin of Aurignacian and Magdalenian art. But the geologists have established beyond a shadow of doubt that the civilization of which this art is an eloquent expression must be assigned to the latter part of the Pleistocene period, when the reindeer roamed through the valleys of France.

Those ancient Palæolithic hunters were skilled artists and carvers of bone and ivory. They painted and engraved on cave roofs the figures of animals with a realism and freedom which were never surpassed in Greece; they also carved ivory female figurines in the round which are worthy of comparison with similar artistic products of Egypt, and not always to their disadvantage.

"The resemblances", writes Mosso, "between the most ancient female figures in France and the Neolithic figures of Crete and Egypt are very striking." Among the rock pictures of women he sees "the girdle and the Egyptian mode of hairdressing". Describing a Palæolithic painting, he writes: "The women’s hair flows down upon their shoulders like that of the Minoan women; the bosom is uncovered and the breasts much developed. The triangular shape of the heads indicates a hood or a kind of mitre. Two of them wear a bracelet on the upper arm near the elbow, and all have a very slender waist, with the body shaped like an hour-glass." He also comments in another instance on the skirts, which were also characteristic of Crete.  Comparisons between the Cretan frescoes and the Palæolithic cave-paintings of Spain and France have likewise been made by the Abbé Breuil, Don Juan Cabre Aguila, and other Continental archæologists.

One of the racial types which existed during the Aurignacian and Magdalenian periods, or stages of culture, was the Cro-Magnon. It can still be traced in Europe, especially in the French Dordogne valley, and among the Berbers in North Africa, as Dr. Collignon has shown.  Evidence of Cro-Magnon migration in Late Pleistocene times has also been forthcoming from Belgium, while traces of their burial customs have been found in Moravia and elsewhere. How and by what route Aurignacian influence reached Crete, after the lapse of thousands of years, we have as yet no means of knowing. It seems reasonable to assume that this civilization did not end without leaving heirs somewhere. The Greeks were heirs of Crete, and yet it is but quite recently that this fact has been fully demonstrated.

Not only has the antiquity of European art been established; the Palæolithic data which have been accumulated emphasize also the remote beginnings of certain magical and religious beliefs and practices. The suggestion is thus rendered plausible that some of the widespread myths and folk-tales may be as old as the French and Spanish cave-paintings and ivory carvings. Who will venture, for instance, to date the origin of that far-travelled tale about the lovers who escape from the giant’s den and throw down pebbles which become mountains and twigs which create forests, to delay their angry pursuer? The late Mr. Andrew Lang has shown that it is found in Zulu, Gaelic, Norse. Malagasy, Russian, Italian, and Japanese folk-literatures. The author "will never", he wrote, "be known to fame", although, among storytellers, he has achieved "the widest circulation in the world". 

A now popular hypothesis, first urged by Hugh Miller, is usually held to offer a conclusive explanation for the wonderful resemblances between certain legends collected in various parts of the world. "I have seen", Miller wrote about eighty years ago, "in the museum of the Northern Institution (Inverness) a very complete collection of stone battle-axes. some of which have been formed little earlier than the last age. by the rude natives of America and the South Sea Islands, while others, which have been dug out of the cairns and tumuli of our own country, bear witness to the unrecorded feuds and forgotten battle-fields of twenty centuries ago. I was a good deal struck by the resemblance which they bear to each other; a resemblance so complete, that the most practised eye can hardly distinguish between the weapons of the old Scot and the New Zealander. . . . Man in a savage state is the same animal everywhere, and his constructive powers, whether employed in the formation of a legendary story or of a battle-axe, seem to expatiate almost everywhere in the same ragged track of invention. For even the traditions of this first stage may be identified., like his weapons of war, all the world over." 

Since Miller’s day experts have become so familiar with the stone implements and weapons of primitive men that they experience no difficulty, not only in distinguishing between the characteristic products of various countries, but also of the various ages, or stages of culture, in one particular area. We find ourselves, however, on less sure ground when we deal with traditional tales. Miller’s hypothesis in regard to these must still receive acceptance but with certain qualifications. It certainly accounts for striking resemblances, although not for equally striking differences. If it were to be urged in every instance, the work of research would be stultified and rendered somewhat barren. "There is a well-known tendency", as Mr. Hogarth reminds us, "to find one formula to explain all things, and an equally notorious one to overwork the latest formula." 

The intensive study of the mythology of a particular civilization, like that of Crete or Egypt, for instance, reveals marked local divergencies which are not easily accounted for. It is an extremely risky proceeding, therefore, when we find a fragment of a legend, or a clue to some archaic religious custom, in a cultural centre like Crete, to undertake the work of reconstruction by selecting something from Australia, adding a Chinese idea, and completing the whole with contributions from Russia, Greenland, or Mexico. We may find similar symbols in different countries, but it does not follow that they had originally all the same significance; similar alphabetical signs have not always the same phonetic values. The human mind is not like a mould which produces automatically the same shapes for the same purposes, or the same ideas to account for the same problems, in every part of the world.

Myths are products of beliefs, and beliefs are products of experiences. They are also pictorial records of natural phenomena. Mankind have not had the same experiences everywhere, nor have they found the world lacking in variety of contour and climate. Certain peoples, for instance, have achieved progress in civilizations based on the agricultural mode of life. Their beliefs have consequently been influenced by their agricultural experiences, and their myths have been given an agricultural significance. Before the Calendar was invented, the farmer who profited from the experiences of his ancestors, and handed on his knowledge to posterity, did not speak about "ploughing in spring" and "reaping in autumn", or explain the futility of sowing seed, say, in December and expecting crops in April. He framed instead a system of myths which guided the agricultural operations of his kin for long centuries. In India, which suffers at one season from great heat and drought, he conceived the Drought Demon which imprisoned the fertilizing waters in a mountain cave. just when the world is about to perish, the god Indra comes to its rescue armed with his thunderbolt. He attacks and slays the demon, exclaiming:

I am the hurler of the bolt of thunder;
For man flow freely now the gleaming waters.

After this thunder-battle, rain descends in torrents, the withered grass sprouts luxuriantly, and the rice harvest follows.

In Babylonia the demon is the water-monster Tiamat, who enters the Euphrates and causes it to flood. She is slain and cut up by Merodach, who thus sets the world in order. Then the farmer sows his seeds. In Egypt the inundation of the Nile is brought about by Ra, who, having undertaken to destroy his human enemies, relents and withdraws the waters, so that seeds may be cast in the fertilized soil and the harvest gathered in season. Pious worshippers of the deities who controlled the forces of nature were expected to perform ceremonies and offer sacrifices to assist or propitiate them. Thus the local forms of religion were shaped by local phenomena of which the myths are reflections.

Peoples who lived among the mountains and followed the pastoral mode of life had different experiences from those who found their food-supply in river valleys. In districts where the rainfall was regular and abundant they knew nothing of India’s droughts, or Egypt’s floods. On the other hand, they might have experiences of binding frost, fierce blizzards, and snow-blocked passes, which forced them to migrate to districts where they could winter their flocks and herds. Their myths were consequently based on experiences and natural phenomena which contrasted sharply with those of the Nilotic and Tigro-Euphratean peoples, with the result that their systems of religious beliefs developed upon different lines. Similarly, peoples who dwelt upon islands and along sea-coasts and gathered the harvest of the deep, and forest-dwellers who lived on fruits and trophies of the chase, formulated and perpetuated modes of thought which were products of their particular modes of life in different environments. It is obvious, therefore, that the mind of man did not everywhere follow "the same rugged track of invention". In different districts and at different periods sections of mankind achieved independent development on sharply differentiated lines, with the result that religious conceptions, like outstanding racial types, had their areas of characterization.

Consideration should next be given to cultural influence resulting from contact. The oscillations of climate which followed the last glacial epoch caused widespread migrations of peoples. Racial types which are still recognizable were already fixed; mankind at the dawn of the Neolithic or Late Stone Age had attained full mental  and physical development. Races were distributed far and wide, and settlers favoured those areas which were suitable for their habits of life. The barriers of ice and snow which had separated peoples for thousands of years vanished before the warm sun, and as the various races prospered and increased they came into contact with one another. Let us picture a pastoral tribe issuing from a region of steppe lands and entering a valley occupied by agriculturists. They come with a heritage of beliefs and customs as alien as their language to those who rear crops and dwell in villages. The small farmers regard them as demons, and go out to battle to conquer or be conquered. If the invaders prevail, they remain in the district and in time fuse with the conquered. Then the beliefs of the mingled peoples are fused also. The result is a compromise between the distinctive religions. In the valley the earlier faith secures ascendancy because the invaders have no agricultural religion and no words even for "corn" and "furrow" and "plough". But a portion of the conquerors follow their old habits of life as pastoralists and hunters, and occupy the grazing-lands round the valley and among the hills, where they find a new Olympus for their gods. In time a pantheon is formed which embraces the deities of conquered and conquerors.

Trade springs up between various communities and the influence of culture flows along the trade routes. The knowledge of how to grow corn passes from tribe to tribe. But the isolated hunters in a northern valley who become agriculturists do not simply import implements and seeds; those who instruct them how to till the soil instruct them also regarding the ceremonies which are necessary to ensure growth and the harvest. So the agricultural religion of Egypt or Babylon passes through Europe and Asia, and is adopted by peoples who mix with it their own peculiar local practices inherited for untold generations from their remote ancestors.

In Denmark the northern huntsman and fisherman came into contact with the little farmers from the south, or tribes who had acquired the southern art of agriculture. They learned to sow the seed in sorrow and to beat their breasts when they cut the corn, and thus slew the corn spirit, and to return rejoicing carrying the sheaves. Magical ceremonies were considered to be as essential to agricultural success as ploughs and reaping-hooks, Consequently they adopted the magical ceremonies that had origin somewhere on the shores of the Mediterranean or in the Nile valley. So we find in Denmark the myth of Scef, the child god, who comes over the sea with the first sheaf of corn, which so closely resembles the Babylonian myth of Tammuz, who comes as a child from the Underworld and the Deep every new year.

The non-agricultural mountain-folk, who migrated hither and thither, knew naught of the corn-child. They conceived of a god who shaped the mountains with his hammer, the thunderbolt; each blow was a peal of thunder. He also hammered the sky into shape. Meteorites which fell from the sky were found to be of iron; it was consequently believed that the sky was formed of iron, which became known as "the metal of heaven". Iron was regarded as a protective charm. It was associated with the great deity who slew demons. A mortal had only to "touch iron" to drive demons away, for by doing so he established a magical connection between himself and the hammer deity.

Worshippers of the mountain-god went northward and called him Thor. In Asia Minor he was Tarku and Teshub; in India, Indra, son of Dyaus; in Greece, Zeus. Those worshippers who reached Palestine called him Pathach (the Hebrew name), and those who settled in Egypt knew him as Ptah, and, although thunderstorms are rare in Egypt, the Memphites never forgot the hammer of Ptah and the heaven of iron which he had beaten into shape. In time Ptah acquired new attributes. As the artisan-god he was credited with the invention of the Egyptian potter’s wheel, on which he shaped the sun and moon, and the first man and woman. He was thus localized. Yet he ever remained distinctive among the deities of Egypt.

Tradition dies hard. Once an idea became impressed on the human mind it remained there, and new ideas were superimposed upon it. The Egyptians achieved great progress as thinkers and artisans, yet they dung to beliefs and customs of savage origin. So did the Greeks, who never forgot Cronos, the bloodthirsty god who swallowed his children and had to be murdered by his heir. It does not follow, however, that this tendency to conserve ancient beliefs and modes of thought was opposed to the growth of culture, or that men and women who perpetuated them were as ignorant and bloodthirsty as their primitive ancestors. In our own day an individual with a university degree may dread to spill salt, regard a black cat as lucky, and refuse to occupy a hotel bedroom numbered 13. Motor-cars and flying-machines carry mascots, as did the galleys of ancient Egypt, Crete, and Ph?nicia. The writer has seen a Girton girl perpetuating a religious custom of her remote ancestors by attaching a rag to a tree that overhangs a "wishing well", and wishing silently her wish quite as fervently as do less highly cultured members of her sex in places as far removed as the Scottish Highlands and the Island of Crete. Superstitious practices which are familiar in our everyday lives have a long history. They have survived nearly two thousand years of Christian influence. Who will undertake to date their origins? They may go back to the Bronze Age, the Late Stone Age, and even to the interglacial periods of the Palæolithic Age. The following comparative notes will serve to illustrate the antiquity of at least one remarkable folk-belief.

In Upper Egypt discovery has been made of bodies which were buried in hot dry sands about sixty centuries ago. Not only have the bones, skin, hair, muscles, and eyes been preserved, but even the internal organs. The contents of stomachs and intestines have been examined by Dr. Netolitzky, the Russian scientist, who ascertained in this way what food the ancient people ate. "The occasional presence of the remains of mice in the alimentary canals of children, under circumstances which prove that the small rodent had been eaten after being skinned, is", writes Professor Elliot Smith, "a discovery of very great interest, for Dr. Netolitzky informs me that the body of a mouse was the last resort of medical practitioners in the East several millennia later as the remedy for children in extremis."  Until comparatively recently the liver of a mouse was in the Scottish Highlands the "old wife’s cure" for children dangerously ill. The writer was informed regarding it in more than one locality, long before the Egyptian discovery was made, by women who professed to have had experience of the efficacy of the mouse cure.

The ashes of a mouse baked alive used to be a cure for rheumatism in Suffolk. In Lincolnshire fried mice were given to children suffering from whooping-cough and quinsy. According to Henderson  a whooping-cough patient in the northern counties had to be seated on a donkey, with face towards the tail, when the mouse was being eaten. The custom of entombing a live mouse in an ash-tree, to cure children or charm cattle against attack, prevailed in Leicestershire.  A similar custom obtained in Scotland, where the shrew-mouse was believed to paralyse a limb it chanced to creep over.  The traditional fear of mice among women is of interest in this connection. Roasted mouse was, in the north-eastern counties of Scotland, a cure for cold or sore throat.

In Egypt the mouse was associated with the lunar god Thoth, who cured Horus when he was bitten by the scorpion, restored the sight of his eye which was blinded by the black Set pig, and assisted in uniting the fragments of the body of Osiris. The mouse crouches at the base of his rod of destiny, on which he measured out the lives of men.  In Greece the mouse was associated with Apollo. This god was identified by the Romans with the sun, but Homer knew him as Smintheus Apollo, "Mouse Apollo", who struck down the Greeks with his arrows of pestilence.  According to Strabo, there were many places which bore the Apollo mouse name.  Mouse feasts were held at Rhodes, Gela, Lesbos, and Crete. According to a Trojan story, the settlement took place in Anatolia of Cretans who were advised by an oracle to select the first place where they were attacked by the children of the soil. At Hamaxitus, in the Troad, a swarm of mice ate their bow-strings and the leather of their armour, and they decided to make that place their home.  In India the mouse was associated with Rudra, to whom the poet prayed:

Give unto me of thy medicines, Rudra,
So that my years may reach to a hundred. 

Rudra, like Apollo, sent diseases, and was therefore able to prevent and cure them.

The mouse feasts referred to by ancient writers may have been held to ensure long life among those who, like the Egyptians, connected the mouse with the moon, the source of fertility and growth and the measurer of the days of man. The Egyptian lunar god Khonsu was the divine physician and the love-god. All fertility deities, indeed, cured diseases. The King of Mitanni sent the image of Ishtar to Thebes when Pharaoh Amenhotep III was ill. Isaiah refers to the mouse-eating practice: "They that sanctify themselves and purify themselves in the gardens behind one tree in the midst, eating swine’s flesh, and the abomination, and the mouse, shall be consumed together, saith the Lord."  When the Philistines, who came from Crete, were stricken by a pestilence, they placed five golden mice in the ark and sent it back to the Israelites.  Thus we find the Highland mouse-cure belief going back for 6000 years and reaching to the remotest areas settled by representatives of the Mediterranean race. Other superstitions may be as old, or older. The ancient Egyptians, like our own people, inherited beliefs from their savage ancestors.

The evidence summarized in this volume (Chapter II) regarding Palæolithic customs and beliefs tends to emphasize that, while mankind everywhere may arrive at similar conclusions under similar circumstances, some conceptions were handed down by tradition and distributed over wide areas by wandering peoples long before the dawn of the Neolithic period in Europe and Egypt. If the mouse cure can be traced back for sixty centuries it may well have been known for a further sixty centuries. In Palæolithic times, at least 20,000 years ago, the spine of a fish was laid on the corpse when it was entombed, just as the "ded" amulet, which was the symbol of the backbone of Osiris, was laid on the neck of the Egyptian mummy. Anthropologists have favoured the theory that the animal-headed deities of Egypt are links between animal and anthropomorphic deities. Animal-headed deities with arms uplifted in the Egyptian attitude of adoration figure in Palæolithic cave-drawings. The process of change, if such it was, must therefore have commenced thousands of years before the Dynastic Egyptians became supreme in the Nile valley. It used to be urged that the Ph?nicians were the inventors of alphabetic script, but linearized signs "of curiously alphabetic aspect—at times even in groups—are seen engraved on reindeer horns or ivory, or on the surface of the rock itself", which were the work of Palæolithic folk in the Fourth Glacial Period. "Certain signs", says Sir Arthur Evans, from whom we quote, "carved on a fragment of reindeer horn, are specially interesting from the primitive anticipation that they present of the Ph?nician alef . . . . It is interesting to observe that among the existing peoples of the extreme north of Europe, whose conditions most nearly represent those of the old Reindeer folk, the relics of pure pictography were preserved to modern times. . . . These Lapp pictographs themselves belong to a widely diffused primitive group—illustrated by the paintings and carvings on rocks and other materials—which extends across the whole Fenno-Tataric region from the White Sea to the Urals and throughout Siberia to the borders of China.

  It was probably from an early offshoot of this great family of pictorial signs that the elaborate characters of the Chinese writing were ultimately evolved." Similar pictographs are found in Scandinavia, Ireland, Brittany, Portugal, Spain, North-West Africa, the Canaries, in the Maritime Alps, the Vosges, Dalmatia, in Transylvania, and on early Trojan artifacts. 

In addition to the pictographs there also passed from the Palæolithic into the Neolithic and Bronze Ages certain burial customs, decorative designs developed from animal drawings, the custom of shaping figurines of the mother goddess with female characteristics emphasized, and the bell-shaped skirt which found favour in Crete. Palæolithic pottery found in Belgium has Neolithic characteristics. It has also been demonstrated, as stated, that what is known as the Azilian stage of culture links the cultures of the Early and Late Stone Ages. After the close of the Fourth Glacial Period the early pioneers of the Mediterranean race came into contact in Europe with the remnants of the Palæoliths and mingled with them in localities. Among a large number of skulls taken recently from an old Glasgow graveyard, into which an Infirmary extension intruded, were a considerable sprinkling of Palæolithic types. The interments at this part were made during the 18th century and the early part of the 19th century. Apparently there were descendants of the Palæoliths among the makers of modern Glasgow.

Certain beliefs and customs and folk-tales appear also to have survived with the peoples of the Reindeer Period, among whom they were prevalent. And as the culture of that period (the Fourth Glacial Epoch) developed from the cultures of the earlier periods, it is possible that some surviving modes of thought may have obtained for 40,000 years. The Chellean hand-axe of the Second Interglacial Period in France was distributed far and wide; it travelled across the Italian land-bridge to Africa and penetrated as far as Cape Colony; it was imitated in Asia and passed across the Behring Straits land-bridge to America. and reached the utmost southern limits of South America. It never reached Australia. Perhaps Mr. Lang’s "far-travelled tale" was similarly given widespread distribution at a remote period in the history of the human races. The culture of a particular people reached remote corners of the globe to which descendants of its originators may never have penetrated. We are familiar with this phenomenon even at the present day. It should be borne in mind, therefore, that although the mind of man may have in primitive times conceived similar ideas and invented similar tales in various regions widely separated, the masses of humanity on the whole have also been more prone to conserve what they have acquired than to welcome something new. Nothing impresses the student of comparative mythology more than the barrenness of the primitive mind. New ideas are the exception rather than the rule. Changes in religious ideas were forced upon ancient peoples either by intruding aliens or by the influence exercised by physical phenomena in new areas of settlement. Even when a change occurred the past was not entirely cut off. Rather a fusion was effected of the new ideas with the old.

In dealing with a mythology like that of Crete, which has not yet been rendered articulate, for the script has still to be deciphered, we expect to find traces of more than one stage of development in religious ideas, and also of the ideas of settlers on the island of peoples from different cultural centres. Certain relics suggest Egyptian influence and others point to an intimate connection with archaic Grecian beliefs. No doubt Crete inherited much from Egypt; and certain Greek States in which Cretan colonists settled borrowed much from Crete. It remains to be proved, however, that the Cretans, after settling on their island, developed on the same lines as primitive peoples elsewhere, or even that they previously passed through the different stages of religious culture regarding which evidence has been gleaned from various parts of the world.

It is sometimes assumed that the religious history of the human race is marked by well—defined layers of thought—Naturalism or Naturism, Totemism, Animism, Demonology, Tribal Monotheism which with the fusion of tribes leads to Polytheism, and then ultimately sole Monotheism. All these stages may be traced in a particular area. But we must not expect to find them everywhere. Human thought has not accumulated strata of ideas in regular sequence, like geological or archaeological strata. Sonic peoples, for instance, have never conceived of a personal god, or even of distinctive animistic spirit groups. Mr. Risley has shown that the jungle-dwellers of Chota Nagpur fear and attempt to propitiate "not a person at all in any sense of the word. If one must state the case in positive terms," he adds, "I should say that the idea which lies at the root of their religion is that of Power, or rather of many Powers. . . . Closer than this he does not seek to define the object to which he offers his victim, or whose symbol he daubs with vermilion at the appointed season. Some sort of Power is there, and that is enough for him. . . . All over Chota Nagpur we find sacred groves, the abode of equally indeterminate things, who are represented by no symbols and of whose form and function no one can give an intelligible account. They have not yet been clothed with individual attributes; they linger on as survivals of the impersonal stage of religion."  The Australian natives, on the other hand, and even those who are more primitive than the Chota Nagpur jungle-dwellers, have a god whose voice is imitated by the "bull roarer". Palæolithic man of the Reindeer Age, as has been said, had animal-headed deities and shaped, in ivory, figurines of the mother goddess. In Egypt and Babylonia there were composite deities, half animal and half human, from the earliest times of which we have knowledge. The Chinese have deities also, but have specialized as ancestor-worshippers. Argue as we may regarding well-defined "mental processes", it must be recognized that religious phenomena all over the world cannot be explained by a single hypothesis, and that we are not justified in assuming that the same stages, or all the recognized stages, of development can be traced everywhere. There may have been Totemic beliefs in Crete and Greece and there may not. Until definite proof is forthcoming that there were, the problem must remain an open one. Similarly, we should hesitate to accept the hypotheses that patriarchal conditions were preceded by matriarchal and that goddesses preceded gods everywhere. In India the gods were prominent in the Vedic period; during the post-Vedic period goddesses ceased to be vague and became outstanding personalities as "Great Mothers". 

This brings us to an interesting phase of Cretan religious and social life. From the evidence afforded by idols, pictorial art, symbols, and traditions it would appear that the goddess cult was supreme on the island, Priestesses were as prominent as they were at Dodona. In fact, women appear to have taken a leading part in religious ceremonies, as Jeremiah found was the case in Jerusalem, where women baked cakes which were offered to the "Queen of Heaven", the Eastern mother-goddess. "Probably in Minoan Crete", writes Mr. Hall, "women played a greater part than they did even in Egypt, and it may eventually appear that religious matters, perhaps even the government of the State itself as well, were largely controlled by women. It is certain they must have lived on a footing of greater equality with the men than in any other ancient civilization, and we see in the frescoes of Knossos conclusive indications of an open and easy association of men and women, corresponding to our idea of ’Society’, at the Minoan Court unparalleled till our own day."  Among the goddess worshippers of Sumeria women enjoyed a high social status also. But among the Semites of the god cult this was not the case. Women were not depicted in Assyria as in Crete. It was when Babylonian influences entered the Assyrian Court that Queen Sammu-ramat—the Semiramis of tradition-rose into prominence. Professor Sayce has drawn attention to the significant fact that when the Semites translated the Sumerian hymns they transposed "women and men" (equivalent to our "ladies and gentlemen") into "men and women". The law of descent by the female line which obtained in Egypt and elsewhere among peoples of the Mediterranean race was probably a relic of customs which had a religious significance.

The view has been strongly advocated that in all primitive communities matriarchal conditions preceded patriarchal conditions, and goddess worship the worship of gods. It is not now generally accepted, however: some peoples seem to have been worshippers of male deities and others of female deities from the earliest times. The fusion of the god and goddess cults in Egypt and Babylonia and elsewhere was probably one of the results of the fusion of peoples. In some countries, where patriarchal peoples formed military aristocracies, they may have ordered succession by the male line. But there is also evidence to show that they adopted the wiser method of marrying the heiresses of estates and thrones to win the allegiance of the masses. "Mother-right" prevailed in Egypt, for instance, until the end. The problem involved is too complex to be accounted for by a single hypothesis.

It would appear that the activities of the Cretan women were chiefly confined to indoor life. As in Egypt, they were depicted by painters with white skins, while the men were, with the exception of princes, given red skins. Women were also more elaborately attired and bejewelled than men.

In dealing with ancient civilizations it is of importance to take note of burial customs. There can be little doubt that these have been ever closely associated with religious beliefs. What are known to archæologists as "ceremonial burials" must have been performed, it is reasonable to suppose, with some degree of ceremony with purpose either to promote the welfare of the deceased or to secure the protection of the living. The Dynastic Egyptians, for instance, mummified their dead because they believed that the soul could not continue to exist in the Otherworld unless the body were preserved intact in the tomb. On the other hand, the Homeric Achæans burned their dead, so that the soul might be transferred by fire to Hades, from which it would never again return.  In pre-Dynastic Egypt the body was laid in a shallow grave in crouched position, with food-vessels, implements, and weapons beside it. A similar custom prevailed in Babylonia and throughout Europe in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Dwellers on the northern sea-coast of Europe set their dead adrift in boats, as was Balder in the Eddic legend and Sceaf in the Beowulf poem. Others buried their dead in caves, threw them to wild beasts, or ate them.

In some cases it would appear that the beliefs connected with burial were suggested by local phenomena. In Upper Egypt bodies are naturally mummified in the hot dry sands. It is possible, therefore, that the custom of embalming the dead may have grown up among that section of the Egyptian people whose religious beliefs were formulated in the area where the corpse was naturally preserved. They may have been horrified to find that bodies did not remain intact in new districts to which they migrated. But the custom of burning the dead cannot be explained in this way.

Burial customs may not always afford us definite clues regarding religious beliefs. It does not follow that the pre-Dynastic Egyptians, the Babylonian Sumerians, and the Neolithic Europeans who favoured crouched burials had all the same ideas regarding the destiny of men, or the same beliefs regarding the Otherworld. Different conceptions might be prevalent in a single country. It is found that in Wales, for instance, ideas about the future state varied considerably. Folk-lore and mediæval poetry have references to an Underworld in which the dead continue to live in organized communities and work and fight as they were accustomed to do upon earth, to happy islands situated far out to sea, to fairy dwellings below rivers and lakes where souls exist like fairies, and to the woods of Caledonia where shades wander about as did the ancestors of the people who migrated from Caledonia to Wales. In one Welsh poem the Otherworld is referred to as "the cruel prison of the earth, the abode of death, the loveless land".  The Babylonian Hades was similarly gloomy and was similarly dreaded. Ishtar descends to—

The house out of which there is no exit . . .
The house from whose entrance the light is taken,
The place where dust is their (the souls’) nourishment and their food mud.
Its chiefs are like birds covered with feathers.

But in pre-Dynastic Egypt the worshippers of Osiris, like a section of the Welsh folks, believed that the Otherworld was a land of plenty in which corn was sowed and crops reaped in season. A similar Paradise was believed in as far north as Scotland. It is referred to in a Perthshire fairy story. A midwife is taken to a fairy mound to nurse a fairy child, and is given a green fluid with which to anoint the eyes of the little one. The fairy woman moistens the right eye of the midwife with this fluid, and bids her look. "She looked", the narrative proceeds, and saw several of her friends and acquaintances at work, reaping the corn and gathering the fruit. ’This’, said the fairy, ’is the punishment of evil deeds.’"  In ancient Egypt the fairy would have said it was "the reward of good deeds".

Burial customs afford us no exact evidence regarding these varying beliefs, which grew up in localities and were imported from one country to another. In Egypt the adherents of the cults of Osiris and Ra who believed in different Paradises mummified their dead, although, in the one case, happiness in the after state was believed to be the reward of good conduct n this life, and, in the other, of those who by performing ceremonies obtained knowledge of the formulæ which were the "Open Sesames" required by departed souls to secure admission to the boat of the sun.

Similarly, it does not follow that the cremation custom had the same significance at all periods. In the Iliad the ghost of Patroklos declares that he will never again return from Hades when he has received his meed of fire. Modern Hindus burn their dead,  but the soul may either depart to Paradise or continue its round through other existences on this earth. In Sanskrit literature the fire-god, Agni, "the corpse devourer", conducts souls to the "land of the fathers". The Persian fire-worshippers do not cremate their dead, although they may have done so at one time, but expose them to be devoured by wild birds. Of special interest is the practice of the Mongolian Buriats. The bodies of those who die in autumn and winter are piled up in a log-house in the midst of a forest. When the cuckoo begins to call, in May, this house is set on fire and the accumulated bodies are cremated together. Persons who die during the summer are burned immediately.  That the Aryo-Indians had knowledge at one time of the belief involved is suggested by a reference in the Mahabharata. Describing the heaven of Yama, the sage Narada says that he saw there "all sinners among human beings as also (those) that have died during the winter solstice".  The explanation may be that there were lucky and unlucky hours, days, and months for death as for birth. The omens at birth which foretold an individual’s fate were supposed to give indication of his manner of death. One of the Scottish midwife prophecies runs:

Full moon, full sea,
Great man shalt thou be,
But ill deith shalt thou dee. 

Omens at death threw light on his fate in the after life. The Buriat custom has evidently a long history behind it. Perhaps it was originally believed that those who died in winter were doomed to exist ever afterwards in cold and darkness. Such a belief imported into India would in time cease to have any significance. The new country had new terrors which supplanted the old, and influenced the development of religious beliefs.

Among certain peoples who did not believe, like the Achæans, the Aryo-Indians, and others, that the soul was transferred to Paradise through the medium of fire, burning was a punishment. Erring wives in ancient Egyptian and Scottish folk-tales are burned at the stake.  Similarly, witches were burned alive. Sir Arthur Evans has brought together interesting evidence regarding "the revival of cremation in Europe in mediæval and modern times to get rid of vampires".  Bodies of persons whose ghosts had become vampires, which attacked sleepers and sucked the life-blood from their veins, were taken from tombs and publicly burned. The vampires were thus prevented from doing further harm. Herodotus tells that when Cambyses, the son of Cyrus, caused the mummy of Pharaoh Amasis to be burned, he displeased both the Persians and the Egyptians. "The Persians", he says, "hold fire to be a god, and never by any chance burn their dead. Indeed, this practice is unlawful, both with them and with the Egyptians—with them for the reason above mentioned, since they deem it wrong to give the corpse of a man to a god; and with the Egyptians, because they believe fire to be a live animal, which eats whatever it can seize, and then, glutted with the food, dies with the matter which it feeds upon. Now, to give a man’s body to be devoured by beasts is in no wise agreeable to their customs, and, indeed, this is the very reason why they embalm their dead, namely, to prevent them from being eaten in the grave by worms." 

The evidence afforded by the Cretan burial customs is of special significance. From the earliest times until the close of the Bronze Age the dead were buried. Then cremation was introduced by invaders, who are believed to have been identical with the Achæans of Homer. The new custom had, in this instance, not only a religious but an ethnic significance.

Like certain of the Palæolithic tribes in western Europe, the early Cretans buried their dead in caves and rock shelters. As caves were dwellings, this was a form of house-burial. House-tombs have been found in Cretan as in Babylonian towns. The custom is referred to in the Ethiopic version of the mythical life of Alexander the Great. That hero was reputed to have "asked one of the Brahmans, saying: ’Have ye no tombs wherein to bury any man among you who may die?’ And an interpreter made answer to him, saying: ’Man and woman and child grow up, and arrive at maturity and become old, and when any one (of them) dieth we bury him in the place wherein he lived; thus our graves are our houses. And our God knoweth that we desire this more than the lust for food and meat which all men have; this is our life and manner of dwelling in the darkness of our tombs.’"  This conversation can never have taken place in. India, but it is of interest in so far as it reflects a belief with which the author was familiar.

In Palæolithic times a cave was deserted after the head of the family was buried in it. There were also, however, burial-caves. The Cro-Magnon people, for instance, sometimes deposited whole families, or the members of tribes, in one of these. One cave has yielded no fewer than seventeen skeletons. Caves and rock-shelters were similarly utilized in Crete. It became customary, however, to construct chamber-tombs, which may have been imitations of caves. One at Aghia Triadha, near Phæstos, in south-central Crete, is some 30 feet in diameter. The remains of no fewer than 200 skeletons of men, women, and children were found in it. Other chambers adjoining added fifty to this number. Family tombs of this kind, which were entered by narrow passages, were sometimes circular, and developed into the beehive style of tomb found in Mycenæ and Tiryns. They date back to early Minoan times (C. 2800 B.C.). Others were of rectangular shape, like those found near Knossos. The Cretans also buried their dead in terracotta chests, in which the bodies Jay in crouched position as in the pre-Dynastic graves of Egypt. These larnakes or sarcophagi were probably of Egyptian origin. They have also been found in Sicily and Italy. Sometimes the Cretan sarcophagi were profusely decorated. Like the tombs, they contained vessels, seals, daggers, amulets, &c.

The Cretans were worshippers of the Great Mother goddess who inhabited the abode of the buried dead. She was the Earth Mother. Caves were entrances to the Underworld over which she presided. In Crete, where no temples were erected, votive offerings were deposited in caves, the most famous of which were those on Mount Dicte and Mount Ida. According to Greek legend, the mother-goddess Rhea gave birth to Zeus in a Cretan cave. The ferocious mother-goddesses of England and Scotland, as is shown (Chapter III), were cave-dwellers. Palæolithic artists drew and painted their magical figures of animals in the depths of great caves.

Demeter of the Grecian Phigalia—the Black Ceres—lived in a cave, which is still regarded as sacred. This deity, who is believed to be a form of the Cretan Great Mother, was also associated with stone circles. Pausanias, writing of the town of Hermione in the Peloponnese, says that near it "there is a circle of huge unhewn stones, and inside this circle they perform the sacred rites of Demeter". 

Stone circles, single standing-stones, and groups of stones like those at Carnac in Brittany were erected at burial-places. Offerings were made to the dead whose spirits had become associated with the Earth Mother. These spirits might be summoned from their tombs to make revelations. When Odin visited the Underworld to consult the Vala (witch or prophetess) regarding Balder’s fate—

Round he rode to a door on the eastward
Where he knew was a witch’s grave,
He sang there spells of the dead to the Vala,
Needs she must rise-a corpse-and answer. 

Folk-memories of the ancient custom of summoning the spirit of the dead still survive in rural districts. An archæologist who recently conducted investigations at a stone circle in northern Scotland asked a ploughman if he knew anything regarding it. The answer was to this effect: "It is said that if you walk round it three times against the sun at midnight, you will raise the devil." Our demonology is the last stage of pagan mythology. The summoning of the devil, or the spirits of the Underworld, was a ceremony performed for purposes of divination, or to compel the aid of infernal beings. As only one grave is sometimes found in stone circles, it may be that a circle was erected when a great chief, or great priest or priestess, died, so that the ghost might be propitiated and called up to assist his or her kinsfolk in times of need. A patriarch or teacher would thus be worshipped after death like a god, and especially as a guide to the spirit world. The Babylonian Gilgamesh was a hero who first entered the cave which led to Paradise. So was the Indian Yama; he was the first man to "find the path for many", and he became god of the dead. Osiris, as Apuatu, was "opener of the ways", and similarly reigned in Hades. The Cretan Minos is in the Odyssey a lawgiver, like Osiris, of the Underworld. In Greek mythology the guide of travellers, who conducts the soul on his last journey, is Hermes. His name appears to be derived from herma, which signifies a cairn or a standing-stone. The Thracian "square Hermes" was a pillar surmounted by a human head—a form which is evidently a link between a standing-stone and the statue of an anthropomorphic deity. It may be that some of the anthropomorphic deities were simply deified ancestors, priests, or priestesses.

The Great Mother, who was worshipped by the Cretans and other pre-Hellenic peoples in south-eastern Europe, was the goddess of birth and death, of fertility and fate. As the ancestress of mankind she gathered to her abode in the Underworld the ghosts of her progeny. She was the source of the food-supply, which she might withhold at will by raising storms, causing floods, or sending blight and disease. It was important that account should be taken of her varying moods—that her intentions should be ascertained by means of oracles, so that she might be propitiated, or controlled by the performance of magical ceremonies. She assumed various forms at different seasons and under different circumstances. Now she was the earth serpent, or the serpent of the deep—the Babylonian Tiamat—and anon the raven of death, or the dove of fertility; she might also appear as the mountain hag followed by savage beasts, or as a composite monster in a gloomy cavern, like the horse-headed Demeter of Phigalia. The beautiful northern goddess of the Greek sculptors was a poetic creation of post-Homeric times, when her benevolent character only was remembered. Still, Rhea ever retained her lion, which crouched beside her throne—a faint memory of her ancient savage character.

The Achæan conquerors who burned their dead were worshippers of the sky- and thunder-god, the Great Father. They believed that the souls of the dead ascended to a Paradise above the clouds. Hercules burned himself on a pyre and fled heavenwards as an eagle; the soul of the Roman Emperor ascended from the pyre on which his image was placed, on the back of an eagle. The eagle was the messenger of Zeus, and the god himself may have originally been an eagle. The Zu eagle of Babylonia and the Garuda eagle of India were ancient deities; indeed, Tammuz, in his Nin-girsu form at Lagash was depicted as a lion-headed eagle. Cyrus claimed to be an Achæmenian—that is, a descendant of the patriarchal Akhamanish, who was reputed to have been protected and fed during childhood by an eagle. The double-headed eagle of the Hittites, which now figures in the royal arms of Russia, was a deity of great antiquity. In Egypt one Paradise was the Underworld of Osiris and the other the Paradise above the sky to which Horus ascended in the form of a falcon. Babylonian mythology makes references to the Paradises of Anu and Bel and Ishtar, to which the patriarch Etana ascends on the back of an eagle, as well as to the island Paradise discovered by Gilgamesh and the gloomy Underworld where souls eat dust and drink muddy water. So do the beliefs of mingled peoples survive in complex mythologies.

The archæological evidence of Crete and Greece shows clearly that the cremation custom had an ethnic significance. Whence then came the Achæans of Homer who were the cremating people, or at any rate were identified with them in tradition? Professor Ridgeway  has summarized a mass of important archæological data regarding prehistoric burial customs, and writes: "From this rapid survey it is now clear to the reader that cremation was not developed in the countries lying around the Mediterranean, whilst on the other hand it was already practised in Central Europe, possibly even in the transition period from stone to bronze. But as the Achæans practised it at least 1000 B.C., there is a very high probability that they had come into Greece from Central Europe, where the fair-haired peoples were certainly burning their dead before the end of the Bronze Age, or at least 1200 B.C." He regards with favour the view that the ancestors of the cremating Hindus—the Aryans and Indo-Europeans of the philologists—migrated from Europe into Asia before the Iron Age.

The theory that the Achæans were a Germanic people and that the cremation custom originated in the forests of Germany has not received wide acceptance. Account must be taken of the archaic cremation custom of the Mongolian Buriats which has been referred to. No trace of seasonal burnings have been found in Europe. The Achæan dead might be cremated at any time of the year. Were the ancestors of the Buriats in touch at some remote period with a people among whom cremation was practised before it obtained in Central Europe?

The earliest evidence yet obtained of cremation comes from southern France. M. Verneau, who is the authority on the burial customs of the Palæolithic cave-dwellers of Grimaldi, has found that among the Cro-Magnon peoples of the Third Interglacial Period ceremonial interment by inhumation was the general rule. He found, however, a single instance of cremation. Offerings similar to those found with buried bodies were associated with the burned bones. Of course, we know nothing about the beliefs regarding the destiny of the soul which obtained among the Cro-Magnon peoples. The majority of these, it may be noted, were tall, averaging about 5 feet 10 inches in stature. M. Verneau, however, discovered two skeletons of alien type which he refers to as members of "a new race".

Next in chronological order, but separated by thousands of years, come the Early Neolithic cremating people of Palestine who dwelt in the Gezer caves. "One of the caves", writes Professor Macalister, "had evidently been used by this people as a place for the disposal of the dead. The body, placed at the sill of a chimney-aperture that provided a draught, was burnt, the remains becoming ultimately scattered and trampled over the whole surface of the floor. From one point of view this is unfortunate: the bones were too much destroyed by the action of the fire to make any very extensive examination of their ethnological character possible. All we can say is that we have to deal with a non-Semitic race, of low stature, with thick skulls, and showing evidence of the great muscular strength that is essential to savage life."  We have no knowledge of the beliefs connected with the Neolithic cremation custom in Palestine.

Among the Australian natives the body of the dead is sometimes cremated. The ashes are afterwards placed in a skin bag which is carried about. Various other funerary practices, including the eating of the corpse, have been recorded. The belief regarding the soul’s destiny, among the Australian cremators, is neither Aryo-Indian nor Achæan in character.

The cremation custom of the Bronze Age had in Europe a precise significance as a ceremony. It was not a punishment, or a safeguard against attack by vampires, but a process whereby the souls of the dead were enabled to pass to another state of existence. The cremating invaders swept westward and north and south and formed military aristocracies. In Sweden only the wealthy people were cremated. The evidence of British archæology shows that cremation and inhumation were practised in some districts simultaneously, and that even one member—perhaps the chief—of a family might be cremated while the others were buried. Ultimately cremation died out altogether in Ancient Britain. The earlier faith prevailed. In southern Europe, however, it lingered on until early Christian times, as did mummification in Egypt. The fact that the Christians were opposed to these distinctive burial customs emphasizes that they had a religious significance. Dr. Dörpfeld  has urged the hypothesis that the Achæans burned their dead only when engaged in distant wars, and practised inhumation in the homeland. He thinks that cremation arose from the custom of scorching bodies prior to burial for hygienic reasons.

No traces of partial burning have been found in the pre-Dynastic graves of Egypt, or in the vast majority of similar graves in Europe. Dr. Dörpfeld refers, however, to charred fragments found in tombs at Mycenæ and elsewhere in support of his theory. Here again the evidence of Crete is of special importance. In the tombs near Knossos have been found, in addition to food vessels, clay chafing-pans and a plaster tripod, filled with charcoal. These may have been portable hearths intended to warm and comfort the dead, or may, on the other hand, have been utilized in connection with magical rites. Deposits of charcoal are often found in Bronze Age graves throughout Europe, and it is suggested that the food intended for the nourishment of the dead was cooked in the grave. On the other hand, the grave fire may have been lit to charm the corpse against the attacks of evil spirits. As a rule, the charcoal deposits are not very considerable. That fires were associated with early burials is suggested by the folk-belief about "death lights" which are seen before a sudden death takes place travelling along a highway, entering a churchyard, and passing over the spot where a grave is to be opened. Early burials took place at night,  and the leader may have cast his torch into the open grave so that it might be used by the dead on the journey to the Otherworld. Hermes, the guide of souls, was at one time a god of night and dispensed sleep and dreams. The Cretan portable fire-vessels were, perhaps, substitutes for torches. Lamps are also found in graves. The few partial burnings in the graves of Mycenæ and elsewhere may have been due to accidents at burials. Of course, it is also possible that the individuals met their deaths in house fires.

It will be seen from the evidence passed under review that the theory of the Germanic origin of the cremation custom is hardly conclusive. Evidence may yet be forthcoming that it persisted somewhere in Europe or Asia from Palæolithic times. The evidence afforded by the Gezer cremation cave is suggestive in this connection. As cremation had during the Bronze Age a distinct religious significance, the theory is possible that it was an essential tenet of a cult formed by some great teacher-like Buddha, Zoroaster, or Mohammed, who welded together his followers by the strongest ties which bind humanity-the ties of a religious faith and organization. The cremating peoples were conquerors. They achieved ascendancy over the tribes of Indo-European speech who had been migrating into northern India for several centuries between 2000 B.C. and 1200 B.C.; they have left traces of their influence in northern Asia to the present day among the Mongolian Buriats, whose earth and air spirits are called Burkans or "masters". In Europe they appear to have subdued a considerable part of the Danubian cultural area, and formed there, as elsewhere, a military aristocracy. It is uncertain whether they owed their successes to superior organization or to the use of iron. The Aryo-Indians, in Rig-Vedic times, used a metal called ayas, a word which may have denoted bronze or iron, or both. In Brahmanic times iron was called syama ayas, "swarthy ayas", or simply syama and also karsnayasa , "black ayas", while copper or bronze was known as lohayasa, "red ayas".  The Homeric Achæans used bronze and iron, but the earlier bands of Achæans who drifted into southern Greece and reached Crete used bronze only, and, it is of significance to note, did not cremate their dead. Possibly, therefore, the late Achæans were led by the cremating intruders of Thrace and had adopted their religious beliefs, which they fused with their own. Geometric pottery and iron weapons were introduced into southern Greece when cremation began to be practised there.

The fusion of the various peoples who struggled for supremacy in Greece before and during the early Hellenic period culminated in the growth of its historic civilization. But the influence of its earliest culture, that of Crete, ever remained. It first entered the Peloponnesian peninsula, and although it was overshadowed there and elsewhere during the long period of unrest which followed the Dorian invasion, it continued to develop in contact with alien cultures in the Anatolian colony of Ionia, which in turn proved to be "the little leaven which leavened the whole lump" once again.

So far, nothing has been said regarding the evidence of language, of which so much was made by the scholars of a past generation. But can much really be said with certainty in this connection? The idea that the peoples of Indo-European speech were of common racial origin and inheritors of a common stock of religious beliefs no longer obtains. "Language is shown by experience", as Mr. Hogarth says, "to be changed by conquest more easily than type of civilization. . . . The Turkish conquering minority (of Asia Minor) has imposed its tongue on the aborigines of Ionia, Lydia, Phrygia, and Cappadocia alike. Yet the type of civilization and the fundamental cult-beliefs of the people are not those of the true Turks." Referring to Greece, he says that "later Greek speech may have been fundamentally mid-European, largely contaminated with Ægean survivals; or it may have been fundamentally Ægean with mid-European intrusions, as our own language is fundamentally Anglo-Saxon largely contaminated by the speech of Norman conquerors". 

The chapters which follow begin with the Palæolithic Age in Pleistocene times, and the reader is afterwards presented with a popular account of the archaeological discoveries in Crete and Greece which have thrown so much light on the growth of pre-Hellenic civilization. Classical traditions are also drawn upon, and comparisons made between Cretan and Greek deities. Comparative evidence is provided in dealing with the growth and significance of primitive beliefs, and various theories which have been advocated are either indicated or summarized. As environment has ever had a formative influence in the development of religious beliefs and in determining the habits of life of which these are an expression, descriptions of natural scenery in various parts of the Ægean area are given to enable the reader to visualize the conditions of life under which pre-Hellenic civilization grew and flourished. In the historical narrative the chief periods of the contemporary civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, and the land of the Hittites are noted, and there are frequent references to early Cretan connections along the trade routes, by land and sea, with the remote ancestors of the peoples of the present day in Central and Western Europe.

CHAPTER I. Primitive Europeans of the Glacial and Inter-glacial Periods

THE system which obtains among modern scientists, of dividing the history of the earth into geological epochs and the pre-history of man into cultural periods, was anticipated by the priestly theorists of ancient civilizations, who established the doctrine of the mythical Ages of the World. These early teachers were:, no doubt, as greatly concerned about justifying their own pretensions and the tenets of their cults as in gratifying the growing thirst for knowledge among the educated classes. When they undertook to reveal the process of creation and throw light on the origin and purpose of mankind, they exalted local deities in opposition to those regarded supreme at rival centres of culture and political influence. Many rival systems of a national religion were thus perpetuated. But the various city priesthoods of a particular country found it necessary to deal also with problems of common concern. Among other things, they had to account for the various races of whom they had knowledge and to give divine sanction to existing social conditions; nor could they overlook the accidental discoveries which were occasionally made of the relics of elder and unknown peoples and the bones of extinct animals.

These mythology-makers, of course, possessed but meagre knowledge of their country’s past, and were accordingly compelled to draw freely upon their imaginations; but they should not be regarded on that account as merely dreamers of dreams and inventors of miraculous stories. Indications are forthcoming which show that they were not wholly devoid of the scientific spirit. They were close observers of natural phenomena, and sometimes made deductions which, considering the narrowness of areas available to them for investigation, were not unworthy of thinking men. It seemed perfectly reasonable to the Babylonian and Egyptian scientists, who saw land growing from accumulations of river-borne silt, and desert wastes rendered cultivable by irrigation, to conclude, for instance, that water was the primary element and the source of all that existed.

This doctrine, which holds that the Universe is derived from one particular form of matter, has been called "Materialistic Monism". Ultimately, when mind was exalted above matter, the belief obtained that the inanimate forces of nature were subject to the control of the supreme Mind, which was the First Cause. This later doctrine is known as "Idealistic Monism". It was embraced by various cults in Babylonia, India, and Egypt. In the latter country, for instance, the great god of Memphis was addressed:

Ptah, the great, is the mind and tongue of the gods. . . .
It (the mind) is the one which bringeth forth every successful issue. . . .
It was the fashioner of all gods.
At a time when every divine word
Came into existence by the thought of the mind
And the command of the tongue. 

In Egypt and Babylonia, where inundations of river valleys were of periodic occurrence, and where, at rare intervals, floods of excessive volume caused great destruction and loss of life, and even brought about political changes, it was concluded that the old Ages were ended and new Ages inaugurated by world-devastating deluges.

The deductions of the early scientists in northern Europe were similarly drawn from the evidence afforded by environment, and similarly influenced by persistent modes of thought. They saw shoals formed and beaches overlaid by sand washed up by the sea from, as it appeared, some sand-creating source, and conceived that on the floor of ocean there stood a great "World Mill" propelled by giantesses, which ground the bodies of primeval world-giants into earth meal. "’Tis said", a saga author set forth, "that far out, off yonder ness, the Nine Maids of the Island mill stir amain the host-cruel skerry-quern—they who in ages past ground Hamlet’s meal. The good chieftain furrows the hull’s lair with his ship’s beaked prow."  In the Elder Edda the god of the mill, who appears to be identical with Frey and the original Hamlet, is called Mundlefore, "the handle-mover":

The Mover of the Handle is father of Moon
And the father eke of Sun.

This "World Mill" caused the heavens to revolve round a fixed point marked by the polar star, which was called veraldar nagli, the "world-spike".

Believing that sun and moon rose from the ocean, and that therefore light came from darkness, they concluded that winter preceded summer at the beginning.

Untold winters ere Earth was fashioned
    Roaring Bergelm was born;
His father was Thrudgelm of Mighty Voice,
    Loud-sounding Ymer his grandsire. 

In the north it was observed also that growth was promoted when the ice melted, and the teachers reasoned that the first being, Ymer, came into existence when sparks from the southland, or "poison drops from the sea", fell upon the primeval icebergs, and caused drops of trickling water to fertilize the clay.

From Stormy-billow sprang poison drops
Which waxed into Jotun form.

The Babylonians, on the other hand, who were familiar with the part played by reeds in accumulating mud and binding river-banks, taught that-

Marduk (Merodach) laid a reed upon the face of the waters.
He formed dust and poured it out beside the reed. . . .
He formed mankind. 

It may be, too, that the ancient teachers, who framed creation myths and expounded local forms of the doctrine of the World’s Ages, mingled at times with their pseudoscientific deductions and brilliant imaginings dim and confused racial traditions of early migrations and varied experiences in different areas of settlement. Some of these traditions may have had origin before the dawn of the Neolithic or Late Stone Age. As will be shown, certain customs, which are familiar to students of ancient civilizations, were prevalent among primitive peoples in the vast Palæolithic or Early Stone Age. With these customs may have survived in localities legends associated with or based upon them. The possibility remains, therefore, that in Persian mythology there are memories not only of an area of settlement among the mountains where severe winters were as greatly dreaded as exceptional floods in river valleys, but even of one of the last recurring phases of the Ice Age. A poetic narrative relates that the patriarch Yima, who afterwards became Lord of the Dead, constructed a shelter to afford safe protection for mankind and their domesticated animals during the "evil winter", with its "hard, killing frost". He had been forwarned of this approaching world-disaster by the supreme god Ahura Mazda (Ormuzd). Perhaps the "shelter" was a southern valley to which the proto-Persians were compelled to migrate on account of the growing severity of successive winters and the lowering of the perpetual snow-line around mountain-fringed plateaus they were accustomed to inhabit. It is related in the Avesta, one of the Persian sacred books, that "before the winter the land had meadows. . . . The water was wont to flow over it and the snow to melt." A similar prolonged winter is foretold in Icelandic mythology. According to the Prose Edda, which is a patchwork of fragmentary legends of uncertain origin and antiquity, it will precede the destruction of the universe by the giants of frost and fire (lightning). "In the first place will come the winter, called Fimbul winter, during which snow will fall from the four corners of the world; the frosts will be very severe, the wind piercing, the weather tempestuous, and the sun impart no gladness." 

From the Voluspa poem of the Elder Edda we gather details of—

A Sword Age, Axe Age—shields are cloven,
A Wind Age, Wolf Age, ere the world sinks.

Then, after describing a period of universal destruction, the soothsayer proceeds:

I see uprising a second time
Earth from the ocean, green anew:
The waters fall, on high the eagle
Flies o’er the fell and catches fish. 

Various accounts of universal cataclysms come from the New World. Representative of these are the legends of the Arawaks of North Brazil regarding periods of flood, storm, and darkness, and those of the Mexicans, which deal with the destruction of early races by deluges caused by several succeeding suns perishing from lack of sustenance.

The most highly developed doctrinal systems of World Ages which have survived from antiquity are found, however, in the Mythologies of India, Greece, and Ireland. There is more than one account in Aryo-Indian literature of the periodic Ages called Yugas. These are embraced in longer Ages of sufficient duration to satisfy the requirements of modern geologists. Four Yugas extend over a period of "divine years" equal to 4,320,000 years of mortals, and a thousand of the combined Yugas comprise a "Day of Brahma", the individualized "World Soul". The Yugas begin with the Krita or Perfect Age, which is White, and decline from that to the Treta, which is Red, and the Dwápara, which is Yellow, to Kali Yuga, "the Black or Iron Age".

Hesiod, in his Work and Days, begins the Greek system with the perfect Golden Age, which is followed by the Silver and Bronze Ages, and the two Ages of Heroes and Iron, which may have been local subdivisions of the fourth Age, represented in India by Kali Yuga.

Both in India and Greece, man it will be noted, was believed to have relapsed from a primitive state of perfection. The system found in Ireland, which was probably imported from Gaul with the doctrine of transmigration of souls and the custom of widow-burning or slaying, follows, on the other hand, an evolutionary process. The first Irish Age, that of Partholon and his race, is an Age of folly. It is followed by Nemed’s Age, which was distinguished for cruelty, and the Age of the Fir Bolgs, in which the power of evil was supreme. Then comes the Danann Age of benevolent deities and heroes, who are the reputed "ancestors of the men of learning in Erin". The last Age is the Milesian, and during it St. Patrick reached Ireland and preached Christianity.

This ancient doctrine of the World’s Ages, which may be traced in Egypt and Babylonia, where certain gods lived for periods upon earth as human. kings, was adapted to suit the needs of different cults in different areas of localization. In India the four great castes were each connected with a Yuga: the Brahmans had origin in the White Age, the Kshatriyas (military aristocrats) in the Red Age, the Vaisyas (traders and agriculturists) in the Yellow Age, and the Sudras (Dravidians and pre-Dravidians) in the Black Age. In Greece an Age was devoted to the Trojan heroes, and in Ireland the Fir Bolgs, Dananns, and Milesians were identified with existing racial types whom St. Patrick found there.

One of the versions of the Indian legend of Mythical Ages is related by the deathless sage Markandeya, who lived through all the Yugas, and was protected during the Deluge by the child-god Narayana. The Irish account was put into the mouth of Tuan MacCarell. He had been a contemporary of Partholon, and afterwards existed for periods as a stag, a boar, a vulture or eagle, and a salmon. In the end his salmon form was devoured by the wife of King Carell, with the result that he was reborn as her son. Another sage of this class is the famous Mágus of the Icelandic Bragda Mágus saga, who renewed his youth periodically by casting his skin. He also figures in the Charlemagne romances.

If the ancient teachers, who professed to have received revelations from sages like the "Wandering Jew", had been acquainted with the scientific data which is now available, their narratives of past Ages would have described greater changes than ever they conceived of. Nor would these be lacking either in picturesqueness or imaginative appeal. The priestly sages would have no cause to lament with the poet:

       Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof and texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.

Even greater and more ferocious monsters than were dreamt of in their philosophy might have figured in their wonder-compelling and fearsome legends. Instead of the composite demons of Egypt and Babylonia, the Eur-Asian dragons, the flying serpents of the Nile valley, and the great snakes of ocean, they could have told of the gigantic reptiles of the Triassic and Jurassic systems, the great mammals of the Tertiary Period, and those contemporaries of man in the Pleistocene Age, the hairy mammoths, bulky with fat and fur, the fierce woolly rhinoceroses, the huge cave-bears, and the immense sabre-toothed tigers. No ancient legend of fabled monsters surpasses the modern scientist’s account of extinct gigantic fauna. Nor can the creation-myths on Egyptian papyri, Babylonian bricks, or Indian palm-leaf books approach in grandness and charm the dramatic story of the four great geological Ages of the World.

The author of the Tuan MacCarell legend would in our day begin his narrative with the dawn of the Pleistocene Age, which endured for at least 620,000 years, and was yet much shorter than any of the four Tertiary Ages—the Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, or Pliocene.

In the post-Pliocene, or early Pleistocene period, Tuan, let it be supposed, awakens from magic sleep in Europe. He gazes with wonder on forests of strange and mighty trees. Monstrous wild animals come and go. Several resemble elephants, and the greatest of these is the long-tusked mastodon of colossal bulk. Hippopotami snort in the rivers, on the banks of which crouch, basking in sunshine, ponderous Dinotheriums, resembling sea-cows, with downward-curving tusks and short trunks. Across verdurous plains gallop herds of little horses with divided hoofs. The dreaded sabre-toothed tiger crouches in the jungle ready to pounce upon its prey.

Tuan, who alternately sleeps for long centuries and wanders about the earth like the legendary Jew, continues his narrative. "When next I awoke", he tells, "I found that Europe had been completely transformed. No great forests flourished on its central plains; bare stretches of frozen ground extended far and near. From northern Germany to the Pole, valleys and rivers were shrouded by ice and seas were frozen over. Great mountain-peaks towered grimly above curving glaciers like rocky islands in a foam-white ocean. Icebergs drifted down the Atlantic past the coast of Spain. This was the First Glacial Period.

"When next I awoke the ice was vanishing, the rivers surged from the melting glaciers) many valleys were flooded, and vegetation flourished. In the years that followed I saw the forests extending northward from the Mediterranean coast, and the ocean ebbing gradually farther and farther away, owing to the widespread elevation of land, until great islands became uplands in vast plains, and continents linked with continents around the world. I must describe Europe as it appeared to me before I next fell asleep. The Mediterranean Sea was divided into two great lakes when Italy became attached to a triangular plain which jutted out from the north African coast. The Strait of Gibraltar was closed, and a broad valley united Spain with Morocco. Corsica and Sardinia formed a promontory when the Gulf of Genoa vanished, and the Balearic Isles were mountains on a finger of land attached to western Spain. The Baltic Sea became a shrunken inland lake, the English Channel and the North Sea had disappeared. The British Isles were then joined to the Continent, and the plains which enclosed them extended far westward beyond Land’s End, the western coast-line of Ireland and that of the Scottish Hebrides, and stretched north-eastward beyond the Shetland Isles to the coast of Norway. A "land-bridge", which shrank to a narrow neck 100 miles north-west of Cape Wrath, united Scotland and Iceland) and narrowed again ere it met the extended coast of Greenland. The Rivers Elbe and Rhine drained the broad valley which had been the North Sea, and were united about 150 miles eastward from the Aberdeenshire coast after the Rhine had received the waters of the Forth and Tay. The Conon poured through the valley which had been the Moray Firth, and, sweeping eastward past the Orkney and Shetland Islands, entered the sea 20 miles westward from the mouth of the Elbe. The Seine cut through the valley of the English Channel, and the Severn united, 100 miles westward from Land’s End, with a river flowing from a long narrow loch which divided Ireland from Scotland, and extended southward to Carnsore Point in Wexford.

"Over the Eur-African land-bridges came many of the great animals which I saw during the first period of the Pleistocene Age. Attracted by the genial temperature, even the rhinoceros came north, and with the sabre-toothed tiger prowled on the upland plains of England, where I saw also the giant sloth, the hippopotamus, the mastodon, the triple-toed horse, great tortoises, the giant fallow deer, the well-armoured glyptodon,  as big as an ox, and numerous great snakes and nimble apes.

"For a long period I searched in vain for traces of mankind, but at length I discovered a tribe of most primitive savages at Mauer, on the banks of the River Neckar, then very broad and deep, near where Heidelberg now stands. They hunted down the horse and the elk, and dreaded greatly the rhinoceros and the cave-lion. Their homes were among the branches of high trees. In aspect they were extremely repulsive: they had low, sharply-retreating foreheads, squat noses, big bulging mouths, and chinless jaws.  I never saw these savages except in this First Interglacial Period.

"When next I awoke from the slumber of centuries I found that Europe had once more been transformed. The Mediterranean Sea had snapped the Italian land-bridge and flowed through the Dardanelles to the Black Sea; a blue strait separated Gibraltar from Morocco. The British Islands were entirely isolated. Roaring tides swept up and down the English Channel, and the broad North Sea, overswept by foam-churning tempest, was dotted over by innumerable icebergs. Each succeeding winter the ocean encroached farther and farther inland, burying in deep sand-banks the great trunks of forest trees, creeping up river valleys and forming stony beaches where wild flowers had bloomed and birds had carolled and built their nests. At length the advancing billows shaped out a rough shore-line round the island coasts over 40 feet above their present level. In time the land was re-elevated and the sea shrank back again.

"The snow-line of Scottish mountains crept down gradually lower and lower, and glaciers appeared once more. Ultimately vast fields of ice jutted across the North Sea, and the Baltic remained frozen during the months of summer. Icebergs were stranded on Dogger Bank and drifted down the English Channel in early summer through veils of white fog into the Bay of Biscay and round Cape Finisterre.

"Ere I went to sleep again the ice-fields had obliterated Holland and Belgium and crept up the Elbe valley almost to the plain of Bohemia, where the climate was sub-arctic and tundra conditions prevailed as in northern Siberia at the present time. Scotland, Ireland, and Wales were ice-locked, and England was covered over as far south as Essex on the east and Gloucester on the west, except where the battling glaciers left bare patches in the middle districts and in the East Riding of Yorkshire. This was the Second Glacial Period. When it had reached its maximum, I wandered southward through France, then a dreary waste, and saw herds of musk-oxen and reindeer, lumbering woolly rhinoceroses, and fat mammoths with great recurving tusks and shaggy red manes.

"I had sought shelter from a blinding dust-storm in a cave on a bare hill-side, and slept there. When next I awoke and crept forth, I found myself in a deep shady forest. It was a fragrant morning of bright sunshine, and although it seemed to be midsummer, the sweet spring season had not yet spent itself. The rivers at this, the dawn of the Second Inter-glacial Period, ran broad and deep, swollen by the melting glaciers, but they shrank gradually as weeks of heat and dryness went past. Wide shallow lakes grew smaller each succeeding summer until they vanished entirely, and their dark beds grew verdant with long grasses. When I went northward I found that the British Isles were once again a part of the Continent. The African hippopotamus snorted in the Thames, the rhinoceros lumbered along the plains of the English Channel, and through the forests of the North Sea valley herds of elephants ranged as far north as the banks of the Forth. I saw many tribes of human beings. I first met them at Chelles, on the banks of the Seine, 8 miles eastward from the site of Paris. The Chellean men were of higher type than the grotesque tree-dwellers of Mauer. Their dark skins bespoke their southern origin, and they resembled certain tribes of Australian savages. They were entirely devoid of clothing. The men carried long staves, which were sharpened to points, with which they speared fish and hunted the little wild horse. I saw them chipping flint and shaping "hand-axes",  which they used for a variety of purposes-cutting branches from trees, skinning and dividing animals, and weapons. They also made small flint scrapers and small flint daggers with rough curved hefts.

"I saw these men hunting in England and in Central and Western Europe. They crossed over to Africa by the Italian land-bridge, round the rock of Gibraltar, and along the Palestinian coast., and they were numerous in Persia and India. Ere I fell asleep I was transported round the world, and saw thousands of human beings following the edible animals over the northern land-bridge from Asia to Canada, and down the western sea-coast to South America. Then I slumbered again.

"Long centuries went past as I slept. When next I awoke I found that Europe had once again become changed. The sea was washing round the shores of the British Isles, and the Italian land-bridge to Africa had been severed. Crete was no longer a part of the main land, and the green mountains which had towered on the well-watered valley connecting Greece with Asia Minor were islands in the Ægean Sea. The temperature had suffered decline. Summer was shorter and winter longer and of growing severity. During the warm weather the southern animals wandered through France, and, when the snow began to fall, the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the reindeer came down from the north in search of food. I saw new types of humanity which had arrived from Asia. They mingled with Chellean men in some localities, and in others fought with them for possession of hunting-grounds. Many tribes were isolated in Britain when the land was lowered and the sea advanced. There were Asiatics in Sussex, and I saw some camping on the banks of the Ouse at Piltdown, near Uckfield.  During the winter these people sought shelter in caves.

"The change of climate had intensified the struggle for existence) and sharpened the wits of men. At St. Acheul, at Amiens, in the Somme valley, I found the flint-workers displaying increased skill and producing several new implements which the altered conditions of life had made necessary. Acheulian man had achieved a considerable degree of progress in other directions. Those tribes which remained in western and central Europe, owing to the winter season found it necessary to provide themselves with skin clothing, but the great majority migrated to genial climes, and these continued their old habits of life. I fell asleep at the close of this the Second Interglacial Period, which was longer and more genial than any of the others.

"The Third Glacial Epoch was well advanced when next I set forth a wanderer through the valleys of Europe. It was less widespread than the second. Two-thirds of England and about a fourth of Ireland were clear of ice, nor was the Zuyder Zee frozen during summer. The site of Berlin, however, was well within the glacial area, as was also that of Warsaw. The Alpine snow-line had crept down over 3000 feet. Yet although Europe resembled in some parts Greenland and in others North Siberia in the present Age, I saw numerous tribes of human beings. They were of small stature but muscular and active. Their heads were narrow but of great size, and their faces, although not devoid of intelligence, were exceedingly rugged; their big dark eyes were overshadowed by enormous brow ridges, they had broad flattened noses, projecting mouths, and chinless jaws.  They made their homes in caves, and in these they lit fires, round which they sat to chip their flints and fashion their skin garments.

"I will describe what I saw when I sought shelter with a tribe of these people at Le Moustier, in the valley of Dordogne, in south-western France. The River Vézère then flowed go feet higher than in modern times. I entered a cave on a damp and chilly summer day. Haunches of venison were being roasted on a fire-place constructed of upright stones, and near it several workmen were busily engaged chipping flints. They constructed a greater variety of implements than the men of the Chellean and Acheulean Periods, and showed greater skill in economizing their material: flakes were removed at a single blow and utilized for smaller artifacts, and when an implement was given form it was carefully dressed with minute chipping until it became an artistic product, exceedingly pleasing to the eye. Men took delight in their work and rivalled one another to gain the praises of their fellows. The tailors cut the dried skins with their sharp hand-axes. Then they squatted with crossed legs to sew the pieces together into not unshapely garments. They made holes, through which to thrust their dried thongs, with little flint awls. In the evening a company of hunters returned from the chase, dragging on a skin sledge the carcass of a musk-ox; and when they had feasted heavily, I heard them tell of battles with the cave-bear, of escapes from the cave-lion and the dreaded woolly rhinoceros, of the slaying of a great mammoth, and of how they guarded their food-supplies against the ravages of prowling hyenas, gluttons, and arctic foxes. Meanwhile the women busily engaged themselves at the mouth of the cave cutting up the body of the musk-ox and cleaning the skin with flint scrapers. Ere night fell, the chief announced that on the morrow they would go eastward to hunt reindeer. I gathered that these people migrated northward during the summer, and returned again, on the approach of cold weather, to their southern caves. Not infrequently they had to fight with other tribes who took possession of their winter homes.

"I went to sleep during this period, and when next I awoke I found that the Third Inter-glacial Period had dawned. The glaciers melted and again there were great floods in the valleys, and the ice retreated from the lowlands of Scotland. The summers in Central Europe were exceedingly pleasant, but never so warm as during the Chellean Age, and dust-storms were of frequent occurrence. Forests were once again flourishing, and I saw in the midst of them many southern animals which were migrating farther and farther northward. During winter the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros came as far south as Prussia. Mousterian man was able to pursue the hunt high among the mountains, where he found caves in which to shelter himself from wild animals by night. He returned to the valleys when the blizzards of winter drove southward the fierce and numerous beasts of prey he dreaded most.

"I saw new types of mankind. In the Dordogne valley were tribes of slender-limbed human giants who were fearless warriors and mighty huntsmen. Some were 6 feet 6 inches in height. But it was not only in stature that they contrasted sharply with the vanishing Mousterians, who were rarely higher than 5 feet 3 inches. They had big long heads and broad faces, high foreheads, deep-set brown eyes, prominent cheek-bones, sharply curved lips, and well-formed chins. They resembled modern Europeans more closely than any human beings I had yet met with. Their faces, tanned by wind and sun, were alert and keen, and, although rugged, were greatly softened when their ready smile laid bare their white gleaming teeth. I observed that the young men showed great respect for their elders. It was of common occurrence to see many gathered round a cave entrance listening to the counsel of some white-haired sage. An old man, who had achieved widespread renown as an explorer and leader of men, lived in a cave at Cro-Magnon, and was often approached to settle disputes and give advice regarding great undertakings; he was also skilled as a healer of wounds and a curer of disease. These men had greater regard for their dead than obtained among their Mousterian predecessors. I once saw them laying to rest a slain warrior in his family burial-grotto at Aurignac. He was clad in his skin robe. His headdress was adorned with a string of sea-shells and round his neck was a collar of the perforated teeth of a reindeer, the skeleton of the salmon of wisdom was laid on his breast, and the whole body was sprinkled with magic pigment. A fire was lit, and the warriors danced round the grave with slow, measured steps, while a sage recited the mighty deeds performed by the dead man. Women knelt near at hand, wailing a chorus of sorrow. Beside the warrior they laid his weapons and implements as well as food which had been cooked for him and water for refreshment; then the grotto was closed up with a large slab of limestone. Aurignacian man of Cro-Magnon type was a lover of his kind. saw other tribes which had entered southern France at this period from Africa. At a Grimaldi cave near Mentone I dwelt for a space with a family of dark-skinned people with broad noses and protruding mouths. They resembled somewhat the modern Bushmen of South Africa and were similarly of short stature, but their heads were larger and their faces more intelligent. Middle-aged women had enormous development of fatty tissue; their steatopygous figures were invariably exceedingly grotesque, but were yet greatly admired. 

"These Aurignacian peoples worshipped the mother-goddess, and there were among them clever artists who carved out of ivory and bone, limestone and steatite, female figures to represent their deity. Sometimes they depicted the slim-waisted, long-haired Cro-Magnon women, and sometimes the woolly-haired bulging forms of Grimaldi type. In those districts where the Bushmen-like people were the slaves of the tall huntsmen a steatopygous woman was sometimes selected at religious ceremonies to represent the mother-goddess.

The Aurignacian artists were wont to decorate their caverns with figures of wild animals, which they sketched in outline with pointed flints, and often coloured with crayons of red ochre or painted with pigment which they carried in bone tubes. In the deep cave of Altamira, in Spain, I saw a great picture-gallery in which various artists had exhibited their skill. One part of the vaulted roof was covered with lifelike representations of edible animals, including wild horses, deer, and boars, and elsewhere I saw artistic productions of similarly high merit. In some caves, which were constantly inhabited, were impressions of human hands. These were intended to avert the influences of the evil eye and the attacks of demons. Huntsmen left records of their experiences in summer hunting districts by inscribing symbols on cave walls, so that those who came nigh might know how they were likely to fare there.