The Coming of the GreeksMiddle to the Late Helladic period does not at all contradict
our thesis about "the coming of the Greeks."
The shaft-grave princes belonged to an international elite.
The same was true of the charioteers who took over lands in the
Fertile Crescent. The Indo-European and Hurrian princes in
the Levant maintained surprisingly close connections with each
other over distances of hundreds of miles, exchanging not only
lavish gifts but also daughters and sisters in marriage. Simi-
larly, the Kassite aristocracy of southern Mesopotamia, held
together by gifts, correspondence, and an interest in chariotry,
was also assiduous in cultivating personal and diplomatic rela-
tions with the rulers of lands as far away as Egypt. The hyksos
rulers in Egypt, at the beginning of the sixteenth century B.C. ,
seem to have been in touch with Crete as well as with Meso-
potamia and, of course, the Levant. (In contrast, Mesopota-
mian and Egyptian kings in the eighteenth century B.C. were
relatively parochial: in the voluminous documentation for Mes-
opotamia in the Age of Hammurabi there is no mention of
Egypt.) The rulers of Mitanni and the imperial kings of Hatti
likewise had close personal and diplomatic ties with their peers
in other lands. James Breasted fittingly named the Late Bronze
Age "The First International Civilization."
In utter contrast with the provincialism of Middle Helladic
Greece, the shaft-grave dynasts delighted in the foreign and
the exotic. In Emily Vermeule's catalog, we find "ostrich eggs
from Nubia sent through Egypt and Crete, lapiz lazuli from
Mesopotamia, alabaster and faience from Crete, raw ivory from
Syria, silver from Anatolia, amber from Prussia brought down
the Adriatic or out of Odessa across the north Aegean." 53 The
trading partners of the dynasty at Mycenae were obviously a
varied lot. Minoan artifacts and motifs are plentiful enough to
have convinced Sir Arthur Evans that the people buried in the
shaft graves were his Minoans. Several scholars have cited the
Egyptian material in the shaft graves as evidence that the shaft-
grave charioteers had fought in Egypt. The theories of Persson,
- Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age, 89—90.
179