their culture, which is marked by the development of their art and their
writing, was too rapid and too great to have resulted only from new
commerce with the sea; nor can it have been due to any influence of the
Aramaean elements which were comparatively fresh from the Steppes. To
account for the facts in Syria we seem to require, not long previous to
this time, a fresh accession of population from some area of higher
culture. When we observe, therefore, among the earlier Phoenician and
south Syrian antiquities much that was imported, and more that derived
its character, from Cyprus and even remoter centres of the Aegean
culture of the latest Minoan Age, we cannot regard as fantastic the
belief of the Cretan discoverer, Arthur Evans, that the historic
Phoenician civilization, and especially the Phoenician script, owed
their being in great measure to an immigration from those nearest
oversea lands which had long possessed a fully developed art and a
system of writing. After the fall of the Cnossian Dynasty we know that a
great dispersal of Cretans began, which was continued and increased
later by the descent of the Achaeans into Greece. It has been said
already that the Pulesti or Philistines, who had followed the first
northern horde to the frontiers of Egypt early in the twelfth century,
are credibly supposed to have come from some area affected by Minoan
civilization, while the Tjakaray and Washasha, who accompanied them,
were probably actual Cretans. The Pulesti stayed, as we know, in
Philistia: the Tjakaray settled at Dor on the South Phoenician coast,
where Unamon, an envoy of Rameses XI, found them. These settlers are
quite sufficient to account for the subsequent development of a higher
culture in mid and south Syria, and there may well have been some
further immigration from Cyprus and other Aegean lands which, as time
went on, impelled the cities of Phoenicia, so well endowed by nature, to
develop a new culture apace about 1000 B.C.