tribes from the North was not to be permanently resisted, and the
end was the establishment of an alien race in power at Mycenae. The
Mycenaean stele, where the chief of the ancient stock pursues his
Northern assailant, has its _motif_ reversed in the archaic Greek
stele discovered by Dr. Pernier at Gortyna, where a big Northerner
with round shield and greaves threatens a tiny Minoan or Mycenaean,
crouching behind his figure-of-eight shield. The two rude pictures
may be taken as typical of the beginning and the end of the process
which resulted in the establishment of the race of Agamemnon at
'Golden Mycenae.' Pressed upon thus by the warlike Achaeans, perhaps
already forced from their homes on the mainland, the Mycenaeans
of Tiryns and Mycenae were obliged to fare forth in search of new
dwelling-places. Not unnaturally the emigrants may have turned to
the land from which their civilization had originally sprung, in
the expectation that the Cretans would not refuse a welcome and a
home to men of their own stock. Seemingly they were disappointed in
their expectation. The Minoans, or, at least, the Minoan rulers, were
not prepared to admit peacefully the incursion of this new element
into their kingdom; and the wanderers, under the spur of desperate
need, took by force what was denied to them as suppliants. So, in
all probability, the glory of the Minoan Empire was destroyed by
the hands of its own children, the descendants of men whom Knossos
herself had sent forth to hold her mainland colonies.[*]

[Footnote *: _Cf_. Dr. Mackenzie, _Annual of the British School
at Athens_, vol. xiii., pp. 424, 425.]

In such circumstances there would be no sudden eclipse of the ancient
culture. Modified slightly, if at all, by the influx of what, after
all, was a kindred element, it would persist, as the evidence shows
it persisted, until it perished of natural decay. Even when the
Achaeans, and, later still, the Dorians, followed in the wake of the
Mycenaean immigrants, though their advent brought, as we have seen,
important changes in customs and in art motives, the ancient native
culture remained the fundamental element of the newer civilization.
It has been pointed out by Mr. Hogarth that the Geometric vases
of the early Iron Age in Crete exhibit in their decoration merely
stylized Minoan motives, while 'the shields and other bronzes of the
Idaean Cave, the latest of which come down probably to the ninth
or even the eighth centur