<P> In Egypt in 1887, Flinders Petrie found painted sherds of Cretan style at Kahun in the Fayum, and farther up the Nile, at Tell el - Amarna, chanced on bits of no fewer than 800 Aegean vases in 1889 . There have now been recognized in the collections at Cairo, Florence, London, Paris and Bologna several Egyptian imitations of the Aegean style which can be set off against the many debts which the centres of Aegean culture owed to Egypt . Two Aegean vases were found at Sidon in 1885, and many fragments of Aegean and especially Cypriot pottery have been found during recent excavations of sites in Philistia by the Palestine Fund . </P> <P> Sicily, ever since P. Orsi excavated the Sicel cemetery near Lentini in 1877, has proved a mine of early remains, among which appear in regular succession Aegean fabrics and motives of decoration from the period of the second stratum at Hissarlik . Sardinia has Aegean sites, for example, at Abini near Teti; and Spain has yielded objects recognized as Aegean from tombs near Cadiz and from Saragossa . </P> <P> One land, however, has eclipsed all others in the Aegean by the wealth of its remains of all the prehistoric ages--Crete; and so much so that, for the present, we must regard it as the fountainhead of Aegean civilization, and probably for long its political and social centre . The island first attracted the notice of archaeologists by the remarkable archaic Greek bronzes found in a cave on Mount Ida in 1885, as well as by epigraphic monuments such as the famous law of Gortyna (also called Gortyn). But the first undoubted Aegean remains reported from it were a few objects extracted from Cnossus by Minos Kalokhairinos of Candia in 1878 . These were followed by certain discoveries made in the S. plain Messara by F. Halbherr . Unsuccessful attempts at Cnossus were made by both W.J. Stillman and H. Schliemann, and A.J. Evans, coming on the scene in 1893, travelled in succeeding years about the island picking up trifles of unconsidered evidence, which gradually convinced him that greater things would eventually be found . He obtained enough to enable him to forecast the discovery of written characters, till then not suspected in Aegean civilization . The revolution of 1897--1898 opened the door to wider knowledge, and much exploration has ensued, for which see Crete . </P> <P> Thus the "Aegean Area" has now come to mean the Archipelago with Crete and Cyprus, the Hellenic peninsula with the Ionian islands, and Western Anatolia . Evidence is still wanting for the Macedonian and Thracian coasts . Offshoots are found in the western Mediterranean area, in Sicily, Italy, Sardinia and Spain, and in the eastern Mediterranean area in Syria and Egypt . Regarding the Cyrenaica, we are still insufficiently informed . </P>

Which two civilizations were most prominent during the bronze age in the area of the aegean sea