It is a revealing piece of evidence for the importance of the surrounding cultures that in Greek most names of
musical instruments, and even those of many poetical forms, such as elegy, hymn, iambus, are loan-words from
languages which were not Indo-European. Poetry and literature always remained the supreme arts in Greece, both
in social prestige and in impact; and their forms, like their mythical content, went ultimately back to a time when
the ancestors of the Greeks found themselves arriving in a world of settled dwellings, palaces, frescoes, music.
That early contact must be a great part of the explanation for the Greek achievement. Their distant kinsmen who
invaded the Indus valley found there cities and temples, which gave a flying start to Aryan culture in India; the
first Greeks, similarly, were helped by contact with sophisticated societies to develop along lines very different
from the Germans and the Celts, wandering in the northern forests, who remained for centuries in something far
more like the original tribal society.
The Lion Gate At Mycenae. This monumental gateway to the citadel at Mycenae was built in the mid thirteenth
century B.C. and was never lost to view. It, and the massive walls, thought by classical Greeks to have been built
by giants, were a reminder to them of the achievements of their Age of Heroes, the period about which Homer
sang. It is shown in this old photograph as it may have appeared to the Greeks themselves.
The Greeks themselves were aware of their debt to Phoenicia for the origin of their alphabet, to Egypt for their
early style of sculpture, to Babylon for mathematics. In Greece all these things developed in a particular and
characteristic way, sculpture, for instance, achieving a realism and also a range quite different from Egyptian art,
while in mathematics a keen and novel interest arose in questions of proof and the basing of the whole system on
axiomatic foundations. The alphabet was perfected into a script which in its Roman form has satisfied the
western world ever since. Above all, the human scale, both in art and in society, characterized Greece. The