Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 44, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 April 1901 — ANCIENTS LIVED IN LUXURY. [ARTICLE]

ANCIENTS LIVED IN LUXURY.

Discoveries in Crete Show * Remote ClvUiaatlon of a High Order. In an article the North American Review Mr. Charles Waldstein Slade, professor of the fine arts in King’s College,' Cambridge, endeavors to interpret the significance of the results of the excavations recently made in the island of Crete by Messrs. Evans and Hogarth. Nothing, Prof. Waldstein thinks, of so striking a nature has been found - since the days of Schliemann. . The material unearthed in Crete belongs to a period as remote as the fifteenth century before Christ, and it gives the impression of a civilization of a very high order: “People lived in a developed social organization, in ease and comfort, nay, in luxury. The various handicrafts and arts were practiced with great variety and proficiency; wood, ivory and metals were carved, turned, beaten, soldered and combined in the most skillful manner; architecture and paintings and architectural sculpture reached a comparatively very high state of perfection, a stage higher than we have evidence of for several centuries succeeding this era. And now, through the most brilliant discovery of Mr. Evans, we learn that they even possessed the art of writing. For he has found written documents in the Hellenic lands at least seven centuries earlier than the first known monuments of historic Greek writing.”