If we sail from the Nile Delta northwestward across the Med iterranean, our first glimpse of Europe will be the eastern tip of Crete. Beyond it, we find a scattered group of small islands the Cyclades, and, a little farther on, the mainland of Greece, facing the coast of Asia Minor across the Aegean Sea. To archaeologists, "Aegean" is not merely a geographical term. They have adopted it to designate the civilizations that flour ished in this area during the third and second millenniums before the development of Greek civilization proper There are three of these, closely interrelated yet distinct from each other: that of Crete, called Minoan after the legendary Cretan King Minos; that of the small islands north of Crete(Cycladic); and that of the Greek mainland(Helladic), which includes Mycenaean civilization. Each of them has in turn been divided into three phases, Early, Middle, and Late, which correspond, very roughly, to the Old, Middle, and New King- doms in Egypt. The most important remains, and the great- est artistic achievements, date from the latter part of the Middle phase and from the Late phase. Aegean civilization was long known only from Homer's account of the Trojan War in the Iliad and the Odyssey as well as from Greek legends centering on Crete. The earliest exca vations(by Heinrich Schliemann during the 1870s in Asia Minor and Greece and by Sir Arthur Evans in Crete shortly before 1900) were undertaken to test the factual core of these tales. Since then, a great amount of fascinating material has been brought to light-far more than the literary sources would lead us to expect. But even now our knowledge of ean civilization is very much more limited than our knowl edge of Egypt or the ancient Near East. Unfortunately, our reading of the archaeological evidence has so far received lim ited aid from the written records of the Aegeans