products of its neighbors.  “Many of the favorite subjects, like the crocus and wild goat, are native to the islands....  Even where a motive was borrowed from Egyptian life, it was treated in a distinctive way,” made tender, dramatic, vital.  “In religion, as in art generally, Crete translated its loans into indigenous terms, and contributed as much as it received."[829] The curator of Egyptian antiquities in the New York Metropolitan Art Museum examined five hundred illustrations of second and third millenium antiquities from Gournia and Vasiliki in Crete, made by Mrs. Harriet Boyd Hawes during her superintendence of the excavations there, and pronounced them distinctly un-Egyptian, except one vase, probably an importation.[830] All this was achieved by a small insular segment of the Mediterranean race, in their Neolithic and Bronze Age, before the advent of those northern conquerors who brought in an Aryan speech and the gift of iron.  It was in Crete, therefore, that Aegean civilization arose.  On this island it had a long and brilliant pre-Hellenic career, and thence it spread to the Greek mainland and other Aegean shores.[831]

[Sidenote:  Limitation of small area in insular history.]

A small cup soon overflows.  Islands may not keep; they are forced to give, live by giving.  Here lies their historical significance.  They dispense their gifts of culture in levying upon the resources of other lands.  But finally more often than not, the limitation of too small a home area steps in to arrest the national development, which then fades and decays.  To this rule Great Britain and Japan are notable exceptions, owing partly to the unusual size of their insular territory, partly to a highly advantageous location.  Minoan Crete, in that gray antiquity when Homeric history was still unborn, gave out of its abundance in art, government, laws and maritime knowledge to the eastern Mediterranean world, till the springs of inspiration in its own small land were exhausted, and its small population was unable to resist the flood of northern invasion.  Then the dispenser of gifts had to become an alms-taker from the younger, larger, more resourceful Hellenic world.

The same story of early but short lived preeminence comes from other Aegean islands.  Before the rise of Athens, Samos under the great despot Polykrates became “the first of all cities, Hellenic or barbaric,” a center of Ionian manners, luxury, art, science and culture, the seat of the first great thalassocracy or sea-power after that of Cretan Minos, a distributing point for commerce and colonies.[832] Much the same history and distinction attached to the island of Rhodes long before the first Olympiad,[833] and to the little island of Aegina.[834] If we turn to the native races of America, we find that the Haida Indians of the Queen Charlotte Archipelago are markedly superior to their Tlingit and Tsimshean kinsmen of the nearby Alaskan and British Columbian coast.