1450 B.C., Crete
became a great artistic manufacturing and distributing center for stone
carving, frescoes, pottery, delicate porcelain, metal work, and
gems.[825] By 1800 B. C., seven centuries before Phoenician writing is
heard of, the island had matured a linear script out of an earlier
pictographic form.[826] This script, partly indigenous, partly borrowed
from Libya and Egypt, gives Crete the distinction of having invented the
first system of writing ever practised in Europe.[827]

Yet all this wealth of achievement bore the stamp of the indigenous;
nearly every trace of its remote Asiatic or Egyptian origin was
obliterated. Here the isolation of an island environment did thoroughly
its work of differentiation, even on this thalassic isle which
maintained constant intercourse with Egypt, the Cyclades, the Troad and
the Greek peninsula.[828] Minoan art has a freshness, vivacity, and
modernity that distinguishes it fundamentally from the formal products
of its neighbors. "Many of the favorite subjects, like the crocus and
wild goat, are native to the islands.... Even where a motive was
borrowed from Egyptian life, it was treated in a distinctive way," made
tender, dramatic, vital. "In religion, as in art generally, Crete
translated its loans into indigenous terms, and contributed as much as
it received."[829] The curator of Egyptian antiquities in the New York
Metropolitan Art Museum examined five hundred illustrations of second
and third millenium antiquities from Gournia and Vasiliki in Crete, made
by Mrs. Harriet Boyd Hawes during her superintendence of the excavations
there, and pronounced them distinctly un-Egyptian, except one vase,
probably an importation.[830] All this was achieved by a small insular
segment of the Mediterranean race, in their Neolithic and Bronze Age,
before the advent of those northern conquerors who brought in an Aryan
speech and the gift of iron. It was in Crete, therefore, that Aegean
civilization arose. On this island it had a long and brilliant
pre-Hellenic career, and thence it spread to the Greek mainland and
other Aegean shores.[831]

[Sidenote: Limitation of small area in insular history.]

A small cup soon overflows. Islands may not keep; they are forced to
give, live by giving. Here lies their historical significance. They
dispense their gifts of culture in levying upon the resources of other
lands. But finally more often than not, the limitation of too small a
home area step