The bronze age and the Celtic world - Universal History Library

GREEK LANDS AND THE BASIS OF CHRONOLOGY 109
These are details of which we cannot speak with certainty at present, but all the
isolated data available are best explained by believing that the great activities of the
trade in the ^gean and especially in Crete were organised by and were in the hands of
Prospectors, who had come originally, though not necessarily directly, from the Persian
Gulf, and who were employing the Mediterranean aborigines as mariners, miners and
craftsmen. When in Middle and Late Minoan times these Cretans made settlements
on the mainland, in the Argolid, in Boeotia, and at Pylos, settlements which are
recorded in the legends of Danaus, Cadmus and Neleus, we can well beUeve that,
while some of their subjects were of the Mediterranean race, and others, perhaps,
drawn from the Alpine aborigines of the mainland, the rulers were in all cases
Prospectors.
Professor Ure'* has recently shown us that in Greek lands, as well as in renaissance
Italy, we find two types of rulers, who may be described as Kings and Tyrants. The
king is a military chief, of aristocratic bearing and origin, and one more often interested
in the territory than in the city. The tyrant, on the other hand, is essentially a merchant
or a business man, his outlook bourgeois, and he rules over a city and its trading
connections, rather than over a wide expanse of land. In Greece, Ure believes, the
introduction of metal currency caused the earlier kings to be replaced by these tyrants
or merchant princes. He has supported his thesis by a vast mass of evidence, which we
need not repeat here, but in his conclusions I think we may see the supplanting of the
Nordic lord by the Prospector, as times became more settled and trade, rather than
fighting, became the more important occupation.
Many of Ure's arguments would apply equally to the Minoan age, when piracy
had been put down and oversea trade was booming. The rise of the Greek tyrants was
due, he thinks, to the rise of a coinage, just as the modern plutocrat has risen to power
on the development of paper currency ;
the Minoan tyrant comes to the front as metal,
an easily portable and exchangeable commodity, succeeds flint or obsidian. It was into
these trading cities, each governed by a Prospector tyrant, that I believe these Nordic
" Achaean " adventurers to have arrived from the Danube basin with their leaf-shaped
swords.
'* Ure (1922).