Athens: Its Rise and Fall | Page 7

and unsatisfactory research. I
believe it,
First--Because, what is more probable than that at very early periods
the more advanced nations of the East obtained communication with
the Grecian continent and isles? What more probable than that the
maritime and roving Phoenicians entered the seas of Greece, and were
tempted by the plains, which promised abundance, and the mountains,
which afforded a fastness? Possessed of a superior civilization to the
hordes they found, they would meet rather with veneration than
resistance, and thus a settlement would be obtained by an
inconsiderable number, more in right of intelligence than of conquest.
But, though this may be conceded with respect to the Phoenicians, it is
asserted that the Egyptians at least were not a maritime or colonizing
people: and we are gravely assured, that in those distant times no
Egyptian vessel had entered the Grecian seas. But of the remotest ages
of Egyptian civilization we know but little. On their earliest
monuments (now their books!) we find depicted naval as well as
military battles, in which the vessels are evidently those employed at

sea. According to their own traditions, they colonized in a remote age.
They themselves laid claim to Danaus: and the mythus of the
expedition of Osiris is not improbably construed into a figurative
representation of the spread of Egyptian civilization by the means of
colonies. Besides, Egypt was subjected to more than one revolution, by
which a large portion of her population was expelled the land, and
scattered over the neighbouring regions [13]. And even granting that
Egyptians fitted out no maritime expedition--they could easily have
transplanted themselves in Phoenician vessels, or Grecian rafts--from
Asia into Greece. Nor can we forget that Egypt [14] for a time was the
habitation, and Thebes the dominion, of the Phoenicians, and that
hence, perhaps, the origin of the dispute whether certain of the first
foreign civilizers of Greece were Phoenicians or Egyptians: The settlers
might come from Egypt, and be by extraction Phoenicians: or Egyptian
emigrators might well have accompanied the Phoenician. [15]
2dly. By the evidence of all history, savage tribes appear to owe their
first enlightenment to foreigners: to be civilized, they conquer or are
conquered--visit or are visited. For a fact which contains so striking a
mystery, I do not attempt to account. I find in the history of every other
part of the world, that it is by the colonizer or the conqueror that a tribe
neither colonizing nor conquering is redeemed from a savage state, and
I do not reject so probable an hypothesis for Greece.
3dly. I look to the various arguments of a local or special nature, by
which these general probabilities may be supported, and I find them
unusually strong: I cast my eyes on the map of Greece, and I see that it
is almost invariably on the eastern side that these eastern colonies are
said to have been founded: I turn to chronology, and I find the
revolutions in the East coincide in point of accredited date with the
traditional immigrations into Greece: I look to the history of the Greeks,
and I find the Greeks themselves (a people above all others vain of
aboriginal descent, and contemptuous of foreign races) agreed in
according a general belief to the accounts of their obligations to foreign
settlers; and therefore (without additional but doubtful arguments from
any imaginary traces of Eastern, Egyptian, Phoenician rites and fables
in the religion or the legends of Greece in her remoter age) I see

sufficient ground for inclining to the less modern, but mere popular
belief, which ascribes a foreign extraction to the early civilizers of
Greece: nor am I convinced by the reasonings of those who exclude the
Egyptians from the list of these primitive benefactors.
It being conceded that no hypothesis is more probable than that the
earliest civilizers of Greece were foreign, and might be Egyptian, I do
not recognise sufficient authority for rejecting the Attic traditions
claiming Egyptian civilizers for the Attic soil, in arguments, whether
grounded upon the fact that such traditions, unreferred to by the more
ancient, were collected by the more modern, of Grecian writers--or
upon plausible surmises as to the habits of the Egyptians in that early
age. Whether Cecrops were the first--whether he were even one--of
these civilizers, is a dispute unworthy of philosophical inquirers [16].
But as to the time of Cecrops are referred, both by those who contend
for his Egyptian, and those who assert his Attic origin, certain advances
from barbarism, and certain innovations in custom, which would have
been natural to a foreigner, and almost miraculous in a native, I doubt
whether it would not be our wiser and more cautious policy to leave
undisturbed a long accredited conjecture, rather than to subscribe to
arguments which, however