A River Valley In Arcadia, east of Olympia. Rivers in such a landscape are treacherous in flood though
commonly dry in midsummer, and have earned away much cultivable soil even since antiquity when the land may
have been better wooded.
Mycenaean Greece was culturally dependent on the sophisticated arts of the Minoans, the non-Indo-European
people flourishing on Crete and some of the Aegean islands. It was in contact also with other ancient cultures of
the Near East: Hittites, Egyptians, Syrians. The sea made it natural for Greeks to turn to neighbouring maritime
peoples rather than to the hill-dwellers who lived on the European mainland. Egypt and Asia Minor were more
interesting than Macedonia or Illyria. From those already ancient cultures these early Greeks learned many
things: the names of exotic gods and goddesses such as Hera and Athena, who became fully naturalized, part of
the classic pantheon; luxury arts; music and poetry. When all the other arts were temporarily lost in the dark age
which followed the fall of the Mycenaean citadels about 1150 B.C., poetry and song survived and kept alive the
memory of an age of great kings and heroes, of Mycenae, not an abandoned ruin but rich in gold, the seat of
Agamemnon king of men. The Bronze Age Mycenaean culture was the setting of the myths, whose importance
for classical Greece cannot be exaggerated. In the dark age which followed its fall the complex inheritance from
the earlier centuries was digested and organized. At its end the pantheon is virtually complete, and religion has
taken its lasting form; contact with the East is restored; and the polis, the independent city-state, is settling into its
classic shape.