till their fields and navigate their rivers at home, but others gave most of their energy to seamanship and foreign commerce. Side by side, for instance, dwelt the home-staying, corn-growing Egyptians and the adventurous Phœnicians. A longer and more sustained effort of organisation was therefore needed to weld all the kingdoms of the Mediterranean into a single political unit.
Modern research has made it plain that the leading seafaring race of antiquity came at all times from that square of water between Europe and Asia which is known alternatively as the Ægean Sea and the Archipelago, the 'Chief Sea' of the Greeks. Sailors from this sea would appear to have taught the Phœnicians their trade in days when as yet Greek was not spoken in the 'Isles of the Gentiles.' It is of deepest interest for our present purpose to note that the centre of civilisation in the pre-Greek world of the Ægean, according both to the indications of mythology and the recent excavations, was in the Island of Crete. Was that the first base of sea-power? From that home did the seamen fare who, sailing northward, saw the coast of the rising sun to their right hand, and of the setting sun to their left hand, and named the one Asia and the other Europe? Was it from Crete that
