Meanwhile we can only do our best with the means at our hand to trace
out the history of the relations of the oldest European culture with
the ancient civilization of Egypt. The tomb-paintings at Thebes are very
important material. Eor it is due to them that the voice of the doubter
has finally ceased to be heard, and that now no archaeologist questions
that the Egyptians were in direct communication with the Cretan
Mycenaeans in the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, some fifteen hundred years
before Christ, for no one doubts that the pictures of the Keftiu are
pictures of Mycenaeans.
As we have seen, we know that this connection was far older than the
time of the XVIIIth Dynasty, but it is during that time and the Hyksos
period that we have the clearest documentary proof of its existence,
from the statuette of Abnub and the alabastron lid of King Khian,
found at Knossos, down to the Mycenaean pottery fragments found at Tell
el-Amarna, a site which has been utterly abandoned since the time of
the heretic Akhunaten (B.C. 1430), so that there is no possibility of
anything found there being later than his time. That the connection
existed as late as the time of the XXth Dynasty we know from the
representations of golden _Buegelkannen_ or false-necked vases of
Mycenaean form in the tomb of Ramses III in the Biban el-Muluk, and of
golden cups of Vaphio type in the tomb of Imadua, already mentioned.
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