* See H. R. Hall, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 1905 (Pt. ii).  The Temple of the Sphinx at Giza may also be compared with those of Hawara and Knossos.  It seems most probable that the Temple of the Sphinx is a XIIth Dynasty building.

For it must be remembered that within the last few years we have learned from the excavations in Crete a new chapter of ancient history, which, it might almost seem, shows us Greece and Egypt in regular communication from nearly the beginnings of Egyptian history.  As the excavations which have told us this were carried on in Crete, not in Egypt, to describe them does not lie within the scope of this book, though a short sketch of their results, so far as they affect Egyptian history in later days, is given in Chapter VII.  Here it may suffice to say that, as far as the early period is concerned, Egypt and Crete were certainly in communication in the time of the XIIth Dynasty, and quite possibly in that of the VIth or still earlier.  We have IIId Dynasty Egyptian vases from Knossos, which were certainly not imported in later days, for no ancient nation had antiquarian tastes till the time of the Saites in Egypt and of the Romans still later.  In fact, this communication seems to go so far back in time that we are gradually being led to perceive the possibility that the Minoan culture of Greece was in its origin an offshoot from that of primeval Egypt, probably in early Neolithic times.  That is to say, the Neolithic Greeks and Neolithic Egyptians were both members of the same “Mediterranean” stock, which quite possibly may have had its origin in Africa, and a portion of which may have crossed the sea to Europe in very early times, taking with it the seeds of culture which in Egypt developed in the Egyptian way, in Greece in the Greek way.  Actual communication and connection may not have been maintained at first, and probably they were not.  Prof.  Petrie thinks otherwise, and would see in the boats painted on the predynastic Egyptian vases (see Chapter I) the identical galleys by which, in late Neolithic times, commerce between Crete and Egypt was carried on across the Mediterranean.  It is certain, however, that these boats are ordinary little river craft, the usual Nile felukas and gyassas of the time; they are depicted together with emblems of the desert and cultivated land,-ostriches, antelopes, hills, and palm-trees,-and the thoroughly inland and Upper Egyptian character of the whole design springs to the eye.  There can be no doubt whatever that the predynastic boats were not seagoing galleys.

It was probably not till the time of the pyramid-builders that connection between the Greek Mediterraneans and the Nilotes was re-established.  Thence-forward it increased, and in the time of the XIIth Dynasty, when the labyrinth of Amenemhat III was built, there seems to have been some kind of more or less regular communication between the two countries.