Page 288 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

Li44Q“137o b-c-J i ne uuu uj iriv ova iwug*
sal monuments of an almost mythical age. For the pyramids were
older than the beginnings of Cretan history (as old for them as
King Alfred is for us). Twelve centuries looked down on them,
said their guide, twelve centuries of continuous civilization, for

over half of which Memphis on the other side of the Nile had
been the capital of Egypt. And he took them to see the latest
excavations, where gangs of workmen were digging the Sphinx
free of its silted sand. The excavation was by order of the new
pharaoh, for it was here, in the shadow of the half-buried colos­
sus, that Ra had revealed himself to the young prince Thothmes

and promised him the throne of Egypt if he in return would free
the Sphinx of its covering of sand. Now the sun-god had fulfilled
his promise, and Thothmes was fulfilling his. Most interesting,
said the Cretan tourists, but somehow they felt that bull sacrifices

were a better way of showing one’s appreciation of divine favors
than was archaeology.
Even so, when they returned to Knossos they retained an ad­
miration for Egypt. And they found the contacts they had made
there of great use to them in a business way, just as did the other

travelers who had guested the rather barbaric princelets of the
Aegean, or done the grand tour of the Syrian coast—and had
had to return in a hurry, because a rebellion broke out once more
in Syria against the union with Egypt. Thothmes, like his father

and grandfather, led his army in person in a campaign of retri­
bution against the rebels, and for a while Syria was an unhealthy
place for foreign visitors—and for the natives.
The young men of Knossos, returned from their travels, con­

tracted, most of them, sensible marriages, devoted themselves se­
riously to their family businesses, and began to acquire a family
and a sense of responsibility.
And more years passed, prosperous peaceful years marked by

the yearly returning festivals. Only from the Greek mainland
was there news of trouble, and even this was only of family quar­
rels among and within the royal houses of the tiny principali­
ties, each proudly independent though tending now to unite into
leagues of equals under the leadership of one of their number,

one year perhaps Attica, another Mycenae. It was just as well,
thought the wiser Cretans, that they found it so difficult to stay