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Title: The Sea-Kings of Crete
Author: James Baikie
Release Date: September 19, 2006 [EBook #19328]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEA-KINGS OF CRETE ***
Produced by Robert J. Hall
[Illustration I: THE THRONE OF MINOS (_p_. 72)]
THE SEA-KINGS
OF CRETE
BY REV. JAMES BAIKIE, F.R.A.S.
WITH 32 FULL-PAGE ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
SECOND EDITION
LONDON
ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK
1913
TO MY SISTERS AND MY BROTHERS
PREFACE
The object aimed at in the following pages has been to offer to
the general reader a plain account of the wonderful investigations
which have revolutionized all ideas as to the antiquity and the
level of the earliest European culture, and to endeavour to make
intelligible the bearing and significance of the results of these
investigations. In the hope that the extraordinary resurrection
of the first European civilization may appeal to a more extended
constituency than that of professed students of ancient origins,
the book has been kept as free as possible from technicalities
and the discussion of controverted points; and throughout I have
endeavoured to write for those who, while from their school days
they have loved the noble and romantic story of Ancient Greece,
have been denied the opportunity of a more thorough study of it
than comes within the limits of an ordinary education.
In the first chapter this standpoint may seem to have been unduly
emphasized, and the retelling of the ancient legends may be accounted
mere surplusage. Such, no doubt, it will be to some readers, but
perhaps they may be balanced by others whose recollection of the
great stories of Classic Greece has grown a little faint with the
lapse of years, and who are not unwilling to have it prompted again.
Reference to the legends was in any case unavoidable, since one
of the most remarkable results of the explorations has been the
disclosure of the solid basis of historic fact on which they rested;
and, if the book was to accomplish its purpose for the readers
for whom it was designed, reference seemed almost necessarily to
involve retelling.
I have to acknowledge extensive obligations to the writings and
reports of the various investigators who have accomplished so wonderful
a resurrection of this ancient world. My debt to the works of Dr.
A. J. Evans will be manifest to all who have any acquaintance with
the subject; but to such authors as Mrs. H. B. Hawes, Dr. Mackenzie,
Professors Burrows, Murray, and Browne, and Messrs. D. G. Hogarth
and H. R. Hall, to name only a few among many, my obligations are
only less than to the acknowledged chief of Cretan explorers.
To the Rev. James Kennedy, D.D., librarian of the New College,
Edinburgh, and to the Rev. C. J. M. Middleton, M.A., Crailing,
my thanks are due for invaluable help afforded in the collection
of material, and I have been not less indebted to Mr. A. Brown,
Galashiels, and to Messrs. C. H. Brown and C. R. A. Howden, Edinburgh,
and others, for their assistance in the preparation of the
illustrations. To Mr. A. Brown in particular are due plates II.,
III., IV., V., IX., X., XV., XVI., XX., XXIII., XXIV., and XXV.;
and to Messrs. C. H. Brown and C. R. A. Howden Plates I., VII.,
VIII., XI., XII., XVII. (I), and XXI. I have to record my hearty
thanks to the Council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic
Studies for the use of Plates XXIX. and XXX., reproduced by their
permission from the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_; to the Committee
of the British School at Athens for the use of Plate XIX. and the
plan of Knossos from their _Annual_; and to Dr. A. J. Evans and
Mr. John Murray for Plates VI., XIII., and XIV., from the _Monthly
Review_, March, 1901. For the redrawing and adaptation of the plan
of Knossos I am indebted to Mr. H. Baikie, B.Sc., Edinburgh, and
for the sketch-map of Crete to my wife.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
THE LEGENDS
CHAPTER II
THE HOMERIC CIVILIZATION
CHAPTER III
SCHLIEMANN AND HIS WORK
CHAPTER IV
THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS'
CHAPTER V
THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS'--_continued_
CHAPTER VI
PHÆSTOS, HAGIA TRIADA, AND EASTERN CRETE
CHAPTER VII
CRETE AND EGYPT
CHAPTER VIII
THE DESTROYERS
CHAPTER IX
THE PERIODS OF MINOAN CULTURE
CHAPTER X
LIFE UNDER THE SEA-KINGS
CHAPTER XI
LETTERS AND RELIGION
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATE
I. The Throne of Minos
II. (1) The Ramp, Troy, Second City; (2) the Circle-Graves, Mycenæ
III. Wall of Sixth City, Troy
IV. The Lion Gate, Mycenæ
V. (1) Vaulted Passage in Wall, Tiryns; (2) Beehive Tomb
(Treasury of Atreus), Mycenæ
VI. The Cup-Bearer, Knossos
VII. The Long Gallery, Knossos
VIII. A Magazine with Jars and Kaselles, Knossos
IX. (1) Magazine with Jars and Kaselles; (2) Great Jar with
Trickle Ornament
X. (1) Part of Dolphin Fresco; (2) A Great Jar, Knossos
XI. Pillar of the Double Axes
XII. (1) Minoan Paved Road; (2) North Entrance, Knossos
XIII. Relief of Bull's Head
XIV. Clay Tablet with Linear Script, Knossos
XV. (1) Palace Wall, West Side, Mount Juktas in Background;
(2) Bathroom, Knossos
XVI. A Flight of the Quadruple Staircase; (2) Wall with Drain
XVII. (1) Hall of the Double Axes; (2) Great Staircase, Knossos
XVIII. The King's Gaming-Board
XIX. Ivory Figurines
XX. (1) Main Drain, Knossos; (2) Terra-cotta Drain-Pipes
XXI. Theatral Area, Knossos: Before Restoration
XXII. Theatral Area, Knossos: Restored
XXIII. Great Jar with Papyrus Reliefs
XXIV. The Royal Villa: (1) The Basilica; (2) Stone Lamp
XXV. (1) Knossos Valley; (2) Excavating at Knossos
XXVI. Great Staircase, Phæstos
XXVII. The Harvester Vase, Hagia Triada
XXVIII. Sarcophagus from Hagia Triada
XXIX. Minoan Pottery
XXX. Late Minoan Vase from Mycenæ
XXXI. Kamares Vases from Phæstos and Hagia Triada
XXXII. Goldsmiths' Work from Beehive Tombs, Phæstos
SKETCH MAP OF CRETE
PLAN OF KNOSSOS
[Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF CRETE To Illustrate THE SEA KINGS OF
CRETE BY The Rev. James Baikie, F.R.A.S.]
THE SEA-KINGS OF CRETE
AND THE
PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATION OF GREECE
CHAPTER I
THE LEGENDS
The resurrection of the prehistoric age of Greece, and the disclosure
of the astonishing standard of civilization which had been attained
on the mainland and in the isles of the Ægean at a period at least
2,000 years earlier than that at which Greek history, as hitherto
understood, begins, may be reckoned as among the most interesting
results of modern research into the relics of the life of past
ages. The present generation has witnessed remarkable discoveries in
Mesopotamia and in Egypt, but neither Niffur nor Abydos disclosed a
world so entirely new and unexpected as that which has been revealed
by the work of Schliemann and his successors at Troy, Mycenæ, and
Tiryns, and by that of Evans and the other explorers--Italian,
British, and American--in Crete. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian
discoveries traced back a little farther streams which had already
been followed far up their course; those of Schliemann and Evans
revealed the reality of one which, so to speak, had hitherto been
believed to flow only through the dreamland of legend. It was obvious
that mighty men must have existed before Agamemnon, but what manner
of men they were, and in what manner of world they lived, were
matters absolutely unknown, and, to all appearance, likely to remain
so. An abundant wealth of legend told of great Kings and heroes,
of stately palaces, and mighty armies, and powerful fleets, and
the whole material of an advanced civilization. But the legends
were manifestly largely imaginative--deities and demi-gods, men
and fabulous monsters, were mingled in them on the same plane--and
it seemed impossible that we should ever get back to the solid
ground, if solid ground had ever existed, on which these ancient
stories first rested.
For the historian of the middle of the nineteenth century Greek
history began with the First Olympiad in 776 B.C. Before that the
story of the return of the Herakleids and the Dorian conquest of
the men of the Bronze Age might very probably embody, in a fanciful
form, a genuine historical fact; the Homeric poems were to be treated
with respect, not only on account of their supreme poetical merit,
but as possibly representing a credible tradition, though, of course,
their pictures of advanced civilization were more or less imaginative
projections upon the past of the culture of the writer's own period
or periods. Beyond that lay the great waste land of legend, in
which gods and godlike heroes moved and enacted their romances
among 'Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras dire.' What proportion of
fact, if any, lay in the stories of Minos, the great lawgiver,
and his war fleet, and his Labyrinth, with its monstrous occupant;
of Theseus and Ariadne and the Minotaur; of Dædalus, the first
aeronaut, and his wonderful works of art and science; or of any
other of the thousand and one beautiful or tragic romances of ancient
Hellas, to attempt to determine this lay utterly beyond the sphere
of the serious historian. 'To analyze the fables,' says Grote, 'and
to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts, appears to
me a fruitless attempt. The religious recollections, the romantic
inventions, and the items of matter of fact, _if any such there
be_, must for ever remain indissolubly amalgamated, as the poet
originally blended them, for the amusement or edification of his
auditors.... It was one of the agreeable dreams of the Grecian epic
that the man who travelled far enough northward beyond the Rhiphæan
Mountains would in time reach the delicious country and genial
climate of the virtuous Hyperboreans, the votaries and favourites of
Apollo, who dwelt in the extreme north, beyond the chilling blasts
of Boreas. Now, the hope that we may, by carrying our researches
up the stream of time, exhaust the limits of fiction, and land
ultimately upon some points of solid truth, appears to me no less
illusory than this northward journey in quest of the Hyperborean
elysium.' Grote's frankly sceptical attitude represents fairly
well the general opinion of the middle of last century. The myths
were beautiful, but their value was not in any sense historical;
it arose from the light which they cast upon the workings of the
active Greek mind, and the revelation which they gave of the innate
poetic faculty which created myths so far excelling those of any
other nation.
Within the last forty years all this has been changed. Opinions
like that so dogmatically expressed by our great historian are
no longer held by anyone who has followed the current of modern
investigations, and remain only as monuments of the danger of
dogmatizing on matters concerning which all preconceived ideas
may be upset by the results of a single season's spade-work on
some ancient site; and he would be a bold man who would venture
to-day to call 'illusory' the search for 'points of solid truth'
in the old legends, or to assert that 'the items of matter of fact,
if any such there be,' are inextricable from the mass of romantic
inventions in which they are embedded. The work, of course, is by
no means complete; very probably it is scarcely more than well
begun; but already the dark gulf of time that lay behind the Dorian
conquest is beginning to yield up the unquestionable evidences of
a great, and splendid, and almost incredibly ancient civilization,
which neither for its antiquity nor for its actual attainment has
any cause to shrink from comparison with the great historic
civilizations of Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley; and while the
process of disentangling the historic nucleus of the legends from
their merely mythical and romantic elements cannot yet be undertaken
with any approach to certainty, it is becoming continually more
apparent, not only that in many cases there was such a nucleus,
but also what were some of the historic elements around which the
poetic fancy of later times drew the fanciful wrappings of the
heroic tales as we know them. It is not yet possible to trace and
identify the actual figures of the heroes of prehistoric Greece:
probably it never will be possible, unless the as yet untranslated
Cretan script should furnish the records of a more ancient Herodotus,
and a new Champollion should arise to decipher them; but there
can scarcely be any reasonable doubt that genuine men and women
of Ægean stock filled the rôles of these ancient romances, and
that the wondrous story of their deeds is, in part at least, the
record of actual achievements.
In this remarkable resurrection of the past the most important
and convincing part has been played by the evidence from Crete.
The discoveries which were made during the last quarter of the
nineteenth century by Schliemann and his successors at Mycencæ,
Tiryns, Orchomenos, and elsewhere, were quite conclusive as to
the former existence of a civilization quite equal to, and in all
probability the original of, that which is described for us in the
Homeric poems; but it was not until the treasures of Knossos and
Phæstos began to be revealed in 1900 and the subsequent years that
it became manifest that what was known as the Mycenæan civilization
was itself only the decadence of a far richer and fuller culture,
whose fountain-head and whose chief sphere of development had been
in Crete. And it has been in Crete that exploration and discovery
have led to the most striking illustration of many of the statements
in the legends and traditions, and have made it practically certain
that much of what used to be considered mere romantic fable represents,
with, of course, many embellishments of fancy, a good deal of historic
fact.
Our first task, therefore, is to gather together the main features
of what the ancient legends of Greece narrated about Crete and its
inhabitants, and their relations to the rest of the Ægean world.
The position of Crete--'a halfway house between three continents,
flanked by the great Libyan promontory, and linked by smaller island
stepping-stones to the Peloponnese and the mainland of Anatolia'--marks
it out as designed by Nature to be a centre of development in the
culture of the early Ægean race, and, in point of fact, ancient
traditions unanimously pointed to the great island as being the
birthplace of Greek civilization. The most ambitious tradition
boldly transcended the limits of human occupation, and gave to
Divinity itself a place of nurture in the fastnesses of the Cretan
mountains. That many-sided deity, the supreme god of the Greek
theology, had in one of his aspects a special connection with the
island. The great son of Kronos and Rhea, threatened by his unnatural
father with the same doom which had overtaken his brethren, was said
to have been saved by his mother, who substituted for him a stone,
which her unsuspecting spouse devoured, thinking it to be his son.
Rhea fled to Crete to bear her son, either in the Idæan or the Dictæan
cave, where he was nourished with honey and goat's milk by the nymph
Amaltheia until the time was ripe for his vengeance upon his father.
(It has been suggested that in this somewhat grotesque legend we
have a parabolic representation of one of the great religious facts
of that ancient world--the supersession by the new anthropomorphic
faith of the older cult, whose objects of adoration, made without
hands, and devoid of human likeness, were sacred stones or trees.
Kronos, the representative of the old faith, clung to his sacred
stone, while the new human God was being born, before whose worship
the ancient cult of the pillar and the tree should pass away.)
In the Dictæan cave, also, Zeus grown to maturity, was united to
Europa, the daughter of man, in the sacred marriage from which
sprang Minos, the great legendary figure of Crete. And to Crete
the island god returned to close his divine life. Primitive legend
asserted that his tomb was on Mount Juktas, the conical hill which
overlooks the ruins of the city of Minos, his son, his friend,
and his priest. It was this surprising claim of the Cretans to
possess the burial-place of the supreme God of Hellas which first
attached to them the unenviable reputation for falsehood which
clung to them throughout the classical period, and was crystallized
by Callimachus in the form adopted by St. Paul in the Epistle to
Titus--'The Cretans are alway liars.'
It is round Minos, the son of Zeus and Europa, that the bulk of
the Cretan legends gathers. The suggestion has been made, with
great probability, that the name Minos is not so much the name
of a single person as the title of a race of kings. 'I suspect,'
says Professor Murray, 'that Minos was a name, like "Pharaoh" or
"Cæsar," given to all Cretan Kings of a certain type.' With that,
however, we need not concern ourselves at present, further than
to notice that the bearer of the name appears in the legends in
many different characters, scarcely consistent with one another,
or with his being a single person. According to the story, Minos
is not only the son but also the 'gossip' of Zeus; he is, like
Abraham, 'the friend of God.' He receives from the hand of God,
like another Moses, the code of laws which becomes the basis of all
subsequent legislation; he holds frequent and familiar intercourse
with God, and, once in every nine years, he goes up to the Dictæan
cave of the Bull-God 'to converse with Zeus,' to receive new
commandments, and to give account of his stewardship during the
intervening period. Finally, at the close of his life, he is transferred
to the underworld, and the great human lawgiver becomes the judge
of the dead in Hades.
That is one side of the Minos legend, perhaps the most ancient;
but along with it there exists another group of stories of a very
different character, so different as to lend colour to the suggestion
that we are now dealing, not with the individual Minos who first
gave the name its vogue, but with a successor or successors in the
same title. The Minos who is most familiar to us in Greek story
is not so much the lawgiver and priest of God as the great sea-King
and tyrant, the overlord of the Ægean, whose vengeance was defeated
by the bravery of the Athenian hero, Theseus. From this point of
view, Minos was the first of men who recognized the importance of
sea-power, and used it to establish the supremacy of his island
kingdom. 'The first person known to us as having established a
navy,' says Thucydides, 'is Minos. He made himself master of what
is now called the Hellenic sea, and ruled over the Cyclades, into
most of which he sent the first colonies, expelling the Carians,
and appointing his own sons governors; and thus did his best to
put down piracy in those waters, a necessary step to secure the
revenues for his own use.' To Herodotus also, Minos, though obviously
a shadowy figure, is the first great Thalassokrat. 'Polykrates
is the first of the Grecians of whom we know who formed a design
to make himself master of the sea, except Minos the Knossian.'
But the evidence for the existence of this early Sea-King and his
power rests on surer grounds than the vague tradition recorded by
the two great historians. The power of Minos has left its imprint
in unmistakable fashion in the places which were called by his
name. Each of the Minoas which appear so numerously on the coasts
of the Mediterranean, from Sicily on the west to Gaza on the east,
marks a spot where the King or Kings who bore the name of Minos
once held a garrison or a trading-station, and their number shows
how wide-reaching was the power of the Cretan sea-Kings.
But the great King was by no means so fortunate in his domestic
relationships as in his foreign adventures. The domestic skeleton
in his case was the composite monster the Minotaur, half man, half
bull, fabled to have been the fruit of a monstrous passion on the
part of the King's wife, Pasiphae. This monster was kept shut up
within a vast and intricate building called the Labyrinth, contrived
for Minos by his renowned artificer, Dædalus. Further, when his own
son, Androgeos, had gone to Athens to contend in the Panathenaic
games, having overcome all the other Greeks in the sports, he fell
a victim to the suspicion of Ægeus, the King of Athens, who caused
him to be slain, either by waylaying him on the road to Thebes,
or by sending him against the Marathonian bull. In his sorrow and
righteous anger, Minos, who had already conquered Megara by the
treachery of Scylla, raised a great fleet, and levied war upon
Athens; and, having wasted Attica with fire and sword, he at length
reduced the land to such straits that King Ægeus and his Athenians
were glad to submit to the hard terms which were asked of them.
The demand of Minos was that every ninth year Athens should send
him as tribute seven youths and seven maidens. These were selected
by lot, or, according to another version of the legend, chosen by
Minos himself, and on their arrival in Crete were cast into the
Labyrinth, to become the prey of the monstrous Minotaur.
The first and second instalments of this ghastly tribute had already
been paid; but when the time of the third tribute was drawing nigh,
the predestined deliverer of Athens appeared in the person of the
hero Theseus. Theseus was the unacknowledged son of King Ægeus
and the Princess Aithra of Trzen. He had been brought up by his
mother at Trzen, and on arriving at early manhood had set out
to make his way to the Court of Ægeus and secure acknowledgment
as the rightful son of the Athenian King. The legend tells how on
his way to Athens he cleared the lands through which he journeyed
of the pests which had infested them. Sinnis, the pine-bender,
who tied his miserable victims to the tops of two pine-trees bent
towards one another and then allowed the trees to spring back,
the young hero dealt with as he had dealt with others; Kerkuon,
the wrestler, was slain by him in a wrestling bout; Procrustes,
who enticed travellers to his house and made them fit his bed,
stretching the short upon the rack and lopping the limbs of the
over-tall, had his own measure meted to him; and various other
plagues of society were abated by the young hero. Not long after
his arrival at Athens and acknowledgment by his father, the time
came round when the Minoan heralds should come to Athens to claim
the victims for the Minotaur. Seeing the grief that prevailed in
the city, and the anger of the people against his father, Ægeus,
whom they accounted the cause of their misfortune, Theseus determined
that, if possible, he would make an end of this humiliation and
misery, and accordingly offered himself as one of the seven youths
who were to be devoted to the Minotaur. Ægeus was loth to part with
his newly-found son, but at length he consented to the venture;
and it was agreed that if Theseus succeeded in vanquishing the
Minotaur and bringing back his comrades in safety, he should hoist
white sails on his returning galley instead of the black ones which
she had always borne in token of her melancholy mission.
So at length the sorrowful ship came to the harbour in the bay below
broad Knossos where Minos reigned, and when the King had viewed
his captives they were cast into prison to await their dreadful
doom. But fair-haired Ariadne, the daughter of Minos, had marked
Theseus as he stood before the King, and love to him had risen
up in her heart, and pity at the thought of his fate; and so by
night she came to his dungeon, and when she could not persuade
him to save himself by flight, because that he had sworn to kill
the Minotaur and save his companions, she gave him a clue of thread
by which he might be able to retrace his way through all the dark
and winding passages of the Labyrinth, and a sword wherewith to
deal with the Minotaur when he encountered him. So Theseus was
led away by the guards, and put into the Labyrinth to meet his
fate; and he went on, with the clue which he had fastened to his
arm unwinding itself as he passed through passage after passage,
until at last he met the dreadful monster; and there, in the depths
of the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, who had slain so many, was himself
slain. Then Theseus and his companions escaped, taking Ariadne
with them, and fled to their black ship, and set sail for Attica
again; and landing for awhile in the island of Naxos, Ariadne there
became the hero's wife. But she never came to Athens with Theseus,
but was either deserted by him in Naxos, or, as some say, was taken
from him there by force. So, without her, Theseus sailed again
for Athens. But in their excitement at the hope of seeing once
more the home they had thought to have looked their last upon, he
and his companions forgot to hoist the white sail; and old Ægeus,
straining his eyes on Sunium day after day for the returning ship,
saw her at last come back black-winged as he had feared; and in
his grief he fell, or cast himself, into the sea, and so died, and
thus the sea is called the Ægean to this day. Another tradition,
recorded by the poet Bacchylides, tells how Theseus, at the challenge
of Minos, descended to the palace of Amphitrite below the sea, and
brought back with him the ring, 'the splendour of gold,' which
the King had thrown into the deep.
So runs the great story which links Minos and Crete with the favourite
hero of Athens. But other legends, not so famous nor so romantic, carry
on the story of the great Cretan King to a miserable close. Dædalus,
his famous artificer, was also an Athenian, and the most cunning of
all men. To him was ascribed the invention of the plumb-line and
the auger, the wedge and the level; and it was he who first set
masts in ships and bent sails upon them. But having slain, through
jealousy, his nephew Perdix, who promised to excel him in skill, he
was forced to flee from Athens, and so came to the Court of Minos.
For the Cretan King he wrought many wonderful works, rearing for him
the Labyrinth, and the Choros, or dancing-ground, which, as Homer
tells us, he 'wrought in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne.'
But for his share in the great crime of Pasiphae Minos hated him,
and shut him up in the Labyrinth which he himself had made. Then
Dædalus made wings for himself and his son Icarus, and fastened
them with wax, and together the two flew from their prison-house
high above the pursuit of the King's warfleet. But Icarus flew too
near the sun, and the wax that fastened his wings melted, and he
fell into the sea. So Dædalus alone came safely to Sicily, and was
there hospitably received by King Kokalos of Kamikos, for whom, as
for Minos, he executed many marvellous works. Then Minos, still
thirsting for revenge, sailed with his fleet for Kamikos, to demand
the surrender of Dædalus; and Kokalos, affecting willingness to
give up the fugitive, received Minos with seeming friendship, and
ordered the bath to be prepared for his royal guest. But the three
daughters of the Sicilian King, eager to protect Dædalus, drowned
the Cretan in the bath, and so he perished miserably. And many of
the men who had sailed with him remained in Sicily, and founded
there a town which they named Minoa, in memory of their murdered
King.
[Illustration II: (1) THE RAMP, TROY, SECOND CITY (_p_. 38)
(2) THE CIRCLE GRAVES, MYCENÆ (_p_. 43)]
Herodotus has preserved for us another echo of the story of Minos
in the shape of the reasons which led the Cretans to refuse aid to
the rest of the Greeks during the Persian invasion. The Delphian
oracle, which they consulted at this crisis, suggested to them that
they had known enough of the misery caused by foreign expeditions.
'Fools, you complain of all the woes that Minos in his anger sent you,
for aiding Menelaus, because they would not assist you in avenging
his death at Kamikos, and yet you assisted them in avenging a woman
who was carried off from Sparta by a barbarian.' In commentary
on this saying Herodotus gives the explanation which was given
to him by the inhabitants of Præsos, in Crete. After the death
of Minos, the Cretans, with a great armada, invaded Sicily, and
besieged Kamikos ineffectually for five years; but finding themselves
unable to continue the siege, and being driven ashore on the Italian
coast during their retreat, they founded there the city of Hyria.
Crete, being thus left desolate, was repeopled by other tribes,
'especially the Grecians'; and in the third generation after the
death of Minos the new Cretan people sent a contingent to help
Agamemnon in the Trojan War, as a punishment for which famine and
pestilence fell on them, and the island was depopulated a second
time, so that the Cretans of the time of the Persian invasion are
the third race to inhabit the island. In this tradition we may
see a distorted reflection of the various vicissitudes which, as
we shall see later, appear to have befallen the Minoan kingdom,
and of the incursions which, after the fall of Knossos, gradually
changed the character of the island population.
Such, then, are the most familiar of the legends and traditions
associated with prehistoric Crete. Some of these, touching on the
personality of Minos and his relationship with Zeus, have their
own significance in connection with the little that is known of
the Minoan religion, and will fall to be discussed later from that
point of view. The famous story of Theseus and the Minotaur, though
it, too, may have its connection with the religious conceptions
which gather round the name of Minos, seems at first sight to move
entirely in the realm of pure romance. Yet the conviction of its
reality was very strong with the Athenians, and was indeed expressed
in a ceremony which held its own to a late stage in Athenian history.
The ship in which Theseus was said to pave made his voyage was
preserved with the utmost care till at least the beginning of the
third century B.C., her timbers being constantly 'so pieced and
new-framed with strong plank that it afforded an example to the
philosophers in their disputations concerning the identity of things
that are changed by growth, some contending that it was the same,
and others that it was not.' It was this galley, or the vessel
which tradition affirmed to be the galley of Theseus, which was
sent every year from Athens to Delos with solemn sacrifices and
specially nominated envoys. One of her voyages has become for ever
memorable owing to the fact that the death of Socrates was postponed
for thirty days because of the galley's absence; for so great was
the reverence in which this annual ceremony was held that during
the time of her voyage the city was obliged to abstain from all
acts carrying with them public impurity, so that it was not lawful
to put a condemned man to death until the galley returned. The
mere fact of such a tradition as that of the galley is at least
presumptive evidence that some historic ground lay behind a belief
so persistent, however the story may have been added to and adorned
with supernatural details by later imagination; and it is difficult
to see how Grote, on the very threshold of recounting the Athenians'
conviction about the ship, and their solemn sacrificial use of
her, should pause to reaffirm his unbelief in the existence of any
historic ground for the main feature of the legend--the tribute
of human victims paid by Athens to Crete.
[Illustration III: WALL OF SIXTH CITY, TROY (_p_. 41)]
Later Athenian writers of a rationalizing turn endeavoured to bring
down the noble old legend to the level of the commonplace by
transforming the Minotaur into a mere general or famous athlete
named Taurus, whom Theseus vanquished in Crete. But the rationalistic
version never found much favour, and the Athenian potter was always
sure of a market for his vases with pictures of the bull-headed
Minotaur falling to the sword of the national hero. No more fortunate
has been the German attempt to resolve the story of Minos and the
Minotaur, the Labyrinth and Pasiphae, into a clumsy solar myth.
The whole legend of the Minotaur, on this theory, was connected
with the worship of the heavenly host. The Minotaur was the Sun;
Pasiphae, 'the very bright one,' wife of Minos, was the Moon; and
the Labyrinth was the tower on whose walls the astronomers of the
day traced the wanderings of the heavenly bodies, 'an image of
the starry heaven, with its infinitely winding paths, in which,
nevertheless, the sun and moon so surely move about.' Among
rationalizing explanations this must surely hold the palm for
cumbrousness and complexity, and we may be thankful that the explorer's
spade has demolished it along with other theories, and given back
to us, as we shall see, at least the elements of a romance such
as that which was so dear to the Athenian public.
CHAPTER II
THE HOMERIC CIVILIZATION
Between the Greece of such legends as those which we have been
considering and the Greece of the earliest historic period there
has always been a great gulf of darkness. On the one side a land
of seemingly fabulous Kings and heroes and monsters, of fabulous
palaces and cities; on the other side. Greece as we know it in
the infant stages of its development, with a totally different
state of society, a totally different organization and culture; and
in the interval no one could say how many generations, concerning
which, and their conditions and developments, there was nothing
but blank ignorance. So that it seemed as though the marvellous
fabric of Greek civilization as we know it were indeed something
unexampled, rising almost at once out of nothing to its height of
splendour, as the walls of Ilium were fabled to have risen beneath
the hands of their divine builders. Indeed, a certain section of
students seemed rather to glory in the fact of this seeming isolation
of Greek culture, and to deem it little short of profanity to seek
any pre-existing sources for it. 'The fathering of the Greek on
the pre-existing profane cultures has been scouted by perfervid
Hellenists in terms which implied that they hold it little else
than impiety. Allowing no causation more earthly than vague local
influences of air and light, mountain and sea, they would have
Hellenism born into the world by a miracle of generation, like
its own Athena from the head of Zeus.'[*] But a great civilization
can never be accounted for in this miraculous fashion. The origins
of even Egyptian culture have begun to yield themselves to patient
research, and it is not permissible to believe that the Greek nation
was born in a day into its great inheritance, or that it derived
nothing from earlier ages and races.
[Footnote *: D. G. Hogarth, 'Ionia and the East,' p. 21.]
Indeed, the supreme monument of the matchless literature of Hellas
bore witness to the fact that, prior to the beginnings of Greek
history, there had existed on Greek soil a civilization of a very
high type, differing from, in some respects even superior to, that
which succeeded it, but manifestly refusing to be left out of
consideration in any attempt to describe the beginnings of Greek
culture. The Homeric poems shone like a beacon light across the
dark gulf which separated the Hellas of myth from the Hellas of
history, testifying to a splendour that had been before the darkness,
and prophesying of a splendour that should be when the darkness
had passed. But the very brilliance of their pictures and the
magnificence of the society with which they dealt only added to
the complication of the question, and emphasized the difficulty
of deriving the culture of historic Greece by legitimate filiation
from a past which seemed to have no connection and no community of
character with it. For the Homeric civilization was not a different
stage of development of that same civilization which appears when
the first beginnings of what we are accustomed to call Hellenism
are presented to us; it was totally diverse, and in many respects
more complex and more splendid.
From the eighth century onwards we are on moderately safe ground
when dealing with the history of Hellas and its culture. We know
something of the actual facts of its history, literary and political.
The chronicles of the more important cities are known with a
definiteness fairly comparable to what we might expect at such
a stage of development. But the Homeric poems take us away from
all that into a world in which a totally different state of things
prevails. The very geography is not that of the historical Hellenic
period. The names that are familiar to us as those of the chief
Greek cities and states are of comparatively minor importance in
the Homeric world; Athens is mentioned, but not with any prominence;
Corinth is merely a dependency of its neighbour Mycenæ; Sparta
only ranks along with other towns of Laconia; Delphi and Olympia
have not yet assumed anything like the place which they afterwards
occupy as religious centres during the historic period. The chief
cities of Hellas are Mycenæ, Tiryns, and Orchomenos. Crete, although
its chiefs, Idomeneus and Meriones, are only of secondary rank among
the heroes of the Iliad, is obviously one of the most important
of Grecian lands. It sends eighty ships to the Achæan fleet at
Troy, it is described both in the Iliad and the Odyssey as being
very populous (a hundred cities, Iliad II.; ninety cities, Odyssey
XIX.), and to its capital, Knossos, alone among Greek cities does
Homer apply the epithet 'great.' All which offers a striking contrast
to the comparative insignificance of the towns of the Argolid in
later Greek history, and to the uninfluential part played by Crete.
The centres of power, then, in the Homeric story are widely different
from those of the historic period. The same divergence from later
realities is manifest when we come to look at the social organization
contemplated in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Homeric state of
society is, in some respects, rude enough. Piracy, for instance,
is recognized as, if not a laudable, at all events a quite ordinary
method of gaining a livelihood. 'Who are you?' says Nestor to
Telemachus. 'Whence do you come? Are you engaged in trade, or do
you rove at adventure as sea-robbers who wander at hazard of their
lives, bringing bane to strangers?' The same question is addressed
to Odysseus by Polyphemus, and was plainly the first thing thought of
when a seafaring stranger was encountered. As among the Highlanders
and Borderers of Scotland, cattle-lifting was looked upon as a
perfectly respectable form of employment, and stolen cattle were
considered a quite proper gift for a prospective bridegroom to
offer to his father-in-law. The power of the strong hand was, in
most respects, supreme, and the rights of a tribe or a city were
respected more on account of the ability of its men to defend them
than because of any moral obligation. 'We will sack a town for you,'
says Menelaus to Telemachus, as an inducement to him to settle in
Laconia.
Along with this primitive rudeness goes, on the other hand, a strongly
aristocratic constitution of society. The great leaders and chiefs,
the long-haired Achæans, are absolutely separated from the common
people, not in rank only, but to all appearance in race. They are
a superior caste, and of a different breed. Even to their King
their subjection is not much more than nominal, and he has to be
very careful of offending their susceptibilities or wounding their
sense of their own importance, while their treatment of the commons
beneath them is sufficiently disdainful. Though the commons are
summoned sometimes to the Council, their function there is merely a
passive one; they are called to hear what has been determined, and
to approve of it, if they so desire, but in no case have they any
alternative to accepting it, even should they disapprove. Altogether
the superiority of the Achæan nobles, and the haughtiness with
which they bear themselves, is such as to suggest that they hold
the position, not of tribal chieftains ruling over clansmen of the
same stock as themselves, but of a separate and conquering race
holding dominion over, and using the services of, the vanquished,
much after the manner of the Norman lordship in Sicily.
All this is sufficiently different from the state of things during
the historic period. It is not an undeveloped condition of the
same society that is in contemplation; it is a totally distinct
social organization. With regard to the position of woman, the
facts are even more remarkable, for if the Homeric picture be a
true one, historic Hellas, instead of representing an advance upon
the prehistoric age, presents a distinct retrogression. In the
Homeric poems woman occupies a position, not only important, but
even comparable in many respects to that held by her in modern
life. She is not secluded from sight and kept in the background, as
in later Hellenic society; on the contrary, she mixes freely with
the other sex in private and in public, and is uniformly depicted
as exercising a very strong, and generally beneficent, influence.
The very names of Andromache, Penelope, Nausicaa, stand as types
of all that is purest and sweetest in womanhood. The fact that a
wife is purchased by bride-gifts does not militate against the
respect in which she is held or the regard which is paid to her
rights. The contrast between this state of affairs and that prevailing
in later Greek society is sufficiently marked to render comment
unnecessary.
But perhaps the most striking feature of the setting of the Homeric
story is the type of material civilization which is described in
the poems. We are confronted with a society not by any means in a
primitive stage of development, but, on the contrary, far advanced
in the arts of peace, and capable of the highest achievements in
art and architecture. Some of the proofs of its advancement may
be briefly noticed. Into the vexed question of the Homeric palace,
its form, and the conditions of life thereby indicated, there is
no need to enter; for about the point which chiefly concerns our
immediate purpose there is no question at all. The Homeric palace,
described at some length in at least three instances, is a building
not merely large and commodious, but of somewhat imposing magnificence.
The palace of Alcinous, for example, is pictured for us as gleaming
with the splendour of the sun and moon, with walls of bronze, a
frieze of _kuanos_ (blue glass paste), and golden doors, with lintels
and door-posts of silver, while the approaches to it are guarded
by dogs wrought in silver. The whole reminds one rather of the
description of one of the vast Egyptian temples of the Eighteenth
or Nineteenth Dynasty than of what one would have imagined the
palace of an island chieftain. The Palaces of Priam at Troy, and
of Odysseus at Ithaca, less gorgeously adorned in detail, are not
less stately, and even the abode of Menelaus in comparatively
insignificant Sparta is described as 'gleaming with gold, amber,
silver, and ivory.' The minor appointments of these splendid homes
are in keeping with their structural magnificence. Great vessels
of gold, silver, and bronze are in common use, the richly dyed
and wrought robes of the chiefs and their wives and daughters are
stored in chests splendidly decorated and inlaid, and the adornments
of the women are of costly and beautiful fabric in gold and silver.
In the manners and customs of the inhabitants of these stately
houses there is a certain patriarchal simplicity. The Princess
Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous, conducts the family washing as
a regular and expected part of her work, while the great chieftains
themselves are men of their hands not only on the battle-field,
but in the common labours of peace. Odysseus is a capable plough
man, carpenter, and shipwright, as well as a good soldier. But
the simplicity is by no means rudeness; it consists with a highly
developed code of manners, and even a considerable refinement.
Brutes like Penelope's suitors may, in half-drunken anger, fling
the furniture or an ox-hoof at the object of their scorn; but there
are brutes in every society, and the manners of the Achæans in
general are stately and dignified.
On the field of war there is still evidence of an advanced stage
of civilization. The whole question of the equipment of the Homeric
heroes has been the subject of perhaps even more dispute than that
of the Homeric house. Infinite pains have been spent in the effort
to show, on the one hand, that the equipment worn by the heroes
of the Iliad was of the more ancient type, consisting mainly of
a great shield of ox-hide large enough to cover the whole body,
behind which the warrior crouched, wearing for defensive armour
no more than a linen corselet and leathern cap and gaiters, and
on the other that the hero wore practically the complete panoply
of the later Hellenic hoplite, the small round shield, the bronze
helmet, with metal cuirass, belt, and greaves; while the question
of whether the offensive weapons were of iron or of bronze has been
debated with equal pertinacity. The discussion of such details
is beyond our purpose, and it is sufficient to say that the poems
seem to contemplate both forms of defensive equipment, the old
form of large shield and light body armour, and the later form of
small shield and metal panoply, as being in common use, while on
the question of iron versus bronze, the evidence seems to indicate
that the age contemplated by the bulk of the references is, in the
main, a bronze-using one, though the knowledge of the superiority
of iron is beginning to make itself evident.
But the point which is of importance for our present purpose is the
magnificence with which the arms of the Hellenic heroes, when of
metal, are wrought and decorated. The polished helmets, with their
horse-hair plumes of various colours, the in-wrought breastplates,
and the greaves with their silver fastenings, are not only weapons,
but works of art as well. The supreme instance is, of course, the
armour of Achilles, fabricated, according to the poet, by the hands
of Hephæstos, but none the less to be regarded as the ideal of
what the highly wrought armour of the time should be. The shield
of Achilles, with its gorgeous representations of various scenes
of peace and war, seems almost to transcend the possibilities of
actual metal work at such a period; yet we may believe that the
poet was not merely drawing upon his imagination, but giving a
heightened picture of what he had himself witnessed in the way
of the armourer's art. Chiefly to be noticed with regard to it
is the way in which he describes the method used by Hephæstos in
producing his effects--the inlaying of various metals to get the
colours desired, for instance, in the vineyard scene with its dangling
clusters of purple grapes, its poles, and ditch, and fence. Would
any poet have imagined this had he been entirely unacquainted with
similar products of the armourer's art? As we shall see, it is
precisely this use of the inlaying of metal with metal, to represent
the different colours of the various figures involved, which is
characteristic of the skilled armourer's work in the Mycenæan period.
Such, then, are a few of the outstanding features of the state
of society described for us in the Homeric poems. We are brought
by them face to face with a civilization which has very distinct
and pronounced characteristics of its own. It is certainly not the
civilization of the earliest historic period of Greece; political
organization, the relative importance of states and cities, social
life, art and warfare--all are different from anything we find in
the Hellas of history; in many respects this world of the poems
is at a higher stage of development than that which succeeded it;
but certainly it is different. Now, the question of importance for
us is--Had this poetic world of the Iliad and Odyssey any basis
in fact, or was it merely the creation of the poet or poets who
were responsible for the tales of Ilium and of Odysseus? Were they
describing things which they had seen, or of which the tradition
at least had been handed down to them by those who had seen them,
or were they telling of things which never had any existence save
in their own minds?
This question, of course, is plainly quite distinct from that of
whether the tales they tell are history or romance. The stories of
the flight of Helen, of the siege of Troy, the anger of Achilles,
the valour of Hector, and the love of Andromache, of the wanderings
of much-enduring Odysseus, and the trials of his faithful wife,
Penelope, may be fact, or they may be fiction, or, more probably
perhaps than either, they may be fact largely mingled with fiction;
but that is not the point. It is the medium in which these stories
are set, the background of human life and society upon which they
are projected. Here is a world, astonishingly real in appearance,
and, if real, supremely interesting to us, as representing what
the subsequent ages knew or had heard by tradition of the earliest
phases of the greatest European civilization. Can we trust the
picture, or must we believe it to be but a dream of a state of
things which never really existed? It is, to say the least of it,
extremely hard to believe that the Homeric world is entirely the
product of the poetic imagination. Imagination can work wonders,
but it requires to have a certain amount of material in fact to
start upon in its workings. If it creates a world entirely out
of its own consciousness, that world may be one of extreme beauty
and splendour, but it is most unlikely that it will present any
verisimilitude to actual life. It will be either vague and shadowy,
or else so grandiose and unearthly in its magnificence as to have
no point of connection with ordinary terrestrial life. But it is
exactly here that the realism of the Homeric world strikes the
student. It is not vague--on the contrary, the preciseness of its
detail is almost as striking, sometimes almost as prosaic, as the
detail which makes Robinson Crusoe the most realistic of all works
of fiction; and while its splendours are such as we look for in
vain in early historic Greece, and are certainly not borrowed from
the great civilizations of Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley, they are
such as we can perfectly well believe to have existed, and such
as can be perfectly well paralleled, though in widely different
styles, by Babylonia or by Thebes.
Was it not more likely that a picture so precise in its outlines,
and so coherent, so thinkable and possible even in its most gorgeous
details, should have had behind it something, probably a great
deal, of fact actually seen and known, than that it should have
been the mere mirage of a poet's dream? 'The picture presented
to us of the Homeric heroes and their surroundings,' says Father
Browne, 'is not merely vivid and complete; it is grand, though
with a grandeur which is homely and simple. Hence the fascination
which we find in the subject of the poems as distinct from the
poems themselves. It may be that this effect is due to the art
of the bards, which well knew how to efface itself in order to
ravish the listener the more. But allowing much to the power of
art, the mind was not yet satisfied. We have said the poems seemed
to carry with them their own evidence that they were not undiluted
fiction, but contained at least an element of objective, perhaps
traditional, truth. It was a beautiful world they told of, and yet
it was a world apart. Agamemnon in the field and Achilles in his
tent; Priam in his palace; Odysseus in his travels; Alcinous with
his retainers, and Arete with her daughter; Penelope and Telemachus
in the midst of the wicked suitors, and the old swineherd and the
faithful nurse; the very shades of the Dead beyond the streams of
Oceanus--how could the bards describe all these wonders if they
had not lived in a world of their own, or at least acquired the
knowledge of it from their immediate predecessors? The gorgeous
palaces of the Kings, with their walls of bronze, their gold and
silver ewers and basins, and their carven bedsteads and chairs
of state and footstools; and all the glittering raiment and the
golden-studded sceptres, and golden-hilted swords, and silvern
ankle-bands, and the ivory and amber and inlaid metal-work, and
the iron-axled chariots with eight spokes to the wheel, and the
crimson-cheeked ships and the fair-cheeked maidens, and the stateliness
and grace amid the splendour of it all--why should we obstinately
refuse to believe that these bards knew more than we--that they
had seen the vision with their mortal eye before they took the
brush in hand to paint the picture?[*]
[Footnote *: H. Browne, 'Homeric Study,' pp. 242, 243.]
Two lines of evidence, then, if given their fair weight, seemed
to point in the same direction. On the one hand, there were the
legends of a prehistoric age of heroes, with their travels and
expeditions and wars, legends with which Greek literature teemed,
and which, however inextricably blended with fancy, and with details
obviously monstrous and impossible, can scarcely be supposed to
have sprung into being without something behind them to account
for their existence. On the other hand, there was this strange,
wonderful, realistic world of the Homeric poems, no longer existing,
it is true, even at the earliest stage of Greek history, but almost
absolutely refusing to be dismissed as a mere figment of the
imagination. Was it, then, impossible to believe that in the bosom
of the great gulf which separated the Hellas of legend from the
Hellas of history there lay a civilization, real, and once living,
of which the legends and the Homeric pictures preserved but the
scanty surviving ruins and relics?
[Illustration IV: THE IRON GATE, MYCENÆ (_p_. 42)]
Here we have to recall two facts of importance. First, that universal
Greek tradition affirmed that before the birth of historic Greece
there lay a Dark Age, its darkness caused by the descent from the
North of the rude, iron-using Dorian tribes, who found in the lands
which they invaded a civilization of the Bronze Age, far more advanced
than their own, and, by the help of their superior weapons, conquered
and indeed destroyed it. And second, that even in the gorgeous
picture given by the Homeric poems of the period with which they
deal, there is a constant tendency to regard that period as being
only the decadent and inferior heir of a civilization which had
preceded it. Nothing is plainer in Homer than the suggestion that
the men of the age before the Trojan Wars were greater, stronger,
wiser, better in every respect than even the heroes who fought on
'the ringing plains of windy Troy,' even as these were greater
than the men of the poet's own degenerate days. Does it not seem
as though we were being led towards the conclusion that the Homeric
civilization is itself the representation of a very real fact of
history, the picture of a state of things which was submerged and
swept away by the coming of the Dorians, or by whatever inrush of
wild northern tribes the Greeks may have called by that general
title, but which was itself only the last decadent stage of an
antecedent culture, still greater and more highly developed--that
of the legendary period? The answer to this question has come in
the most surprising and romantic fashion from the archæological
discoveries of the last forty years.
CHAPTER III
SCHLIEMANN AND HIS WORK
The man whose labours were to give a new impetus to the study of
Greek origins, and to be the beginning of the revelation of an
unknown world of ancient days, was born on January 6, 1822, at
Neu Buckow in Mecklenburg-Schwerin. He was the son of a clergyman
who himself had a deep love for the great tales of antiquity, for
his son has told how his father used often vividly to narrate the
stories of the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and of the
Trojan War. When Schliemann was barely seven years old he received
a present of a child's history of the world, in which the picture
of the destruction of Troy and the flight of Æneas made a profound
impression upon his young mind, and roused in him a passionate desire
to go and see for himself what remained of the ancient splendours
of Ilium. He found it impossible to believe that the massive
fortifications of Troy had vanished without leaving a trace of
their existence. When his father admitted that the walls were once
as huge as those depicted in his history book, but asserted that
they were now totally destroyed, he retorted: 'Father, if such walls
once existed, they cannot possibly have been completely destroyed;
vast ruins of them must still remain, but they are hidden beneath
the dust of ages.' Already he had made the resolution that some
day he would excavate Troy.
The romance of bygone days and of hidden treasure surrounded the
boy's early years, and no doubt had its own influence in determining
his bent. A pond just behind his father's garden had its legend of
a maiden who rose from its waters each midnight, bearing a silver
bowl. In the village an ancient barrow had its story of a robber
knight who had buried his favourite child there in a golden cradle;
and near by was the old castle of Henning von Holstein, who, when
besieged by the Duke of Mecklenburg, had buried his treasures close
to the keep of his stronghold. On such romantic legends Schliemann's
young imagination was nourished. By the time he was ten years old
he had produced a Latin essay on the Trojan War. Such things, which
in another might have been mere childish precocities, were in him
the indications of an enthusiasm for antiquity, which was destined
to be the ruling passion of his whole life.
Yet the beginnings of his career in the world were unromantic to
the last degree. His father's poverty forced him to give up the hope
of a learned life, and at the age of fourteen he was apprenticed
to a small grocer in a country village, in whose employment, surely
uncongenial enough for such a spirit, he spent five and a half
years, selling butter, herrings, potato-brandy and the like, and
occupying his spare moments in tidying out the little shop. Even in
such circumstances his passion for the Homeric story found means,
sufficiently quaint, for its gratification. There came one evening
to the shop a miller's man, who had been well educated, but had
fallen into poor circumstances, and had taken to drink, yet even
in his degradation had not forgotten his Homer. 'That evening,'
says Schliemann, 'he recited to us about a hundred lines of the
poet, observing the rhythmic cadence of the verses. Although I
did not understand a syllable, the melodious sound of the words
made a deep impression upon me, and I wept bitter tears over my
unhappy fate. Three times over did I get him to repeat to me those
divine verses, rewarding his trouble with three glasses of whisky,
which I bought with the few pence that made up my whole wealth.
From that moment I never ceased to pray God that by His grace I
might yet have the happiness of learning Greek.'
To one whose heart was filled with such a passion for learning, no
obstacle could prove insuperable. Yet for many a day the Fates seemed
most unpropitious. Ill-health drove him to emigrate to Venezuela,
but his ship was wrecked on the Dutch coast, and he became the
errand-boy of a business house in Amsterdam. Here in his first
year of service he managed, while going on his master's errands,
to learn English in the first six months and French in the next,
and incidentally to save for intellectual purposes one half of
his salary of 800 francs. The mental training of the first year
enabled him to learn Dutch, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese with
much greater rapidity, each language being acquired in six weeks. In
1846 he was sent by another firm as their agent to St. Petersburg,
where in the next year he founded a business house of his own, and
from that time all went well with him. The Crimean War brought him
opportunities which he utilized with such ingenuity as to derive
considerable profit from them. By 1858 he considered that the fortune
he had made was sufficient to warrant him in devoting himself entirely
to archæology, and though exceptional circumstances obliged him to
return to business for a little, he finally cut himself loose from
it in 1863, and took up the task which was to occupy the remainder
of his busy life.
[Illustration V: WALLED PASSAGE IN WALL, TIRYNS (_p_. 49)
BEEHIVE TOMB (TREASURY OF ATREUS), MYCENÆ (_p_. 46)]
His Greek studies had led him to two convictions on which his whole
exploring work was based. First, that the site of ancient Troy was on
the spot called in classical days New Ilium, the Hill of Hissarlik,
near the coast of the Ægean; and second, that the Greek traveller,
Pausanias, was right in stating that the murdered Agamemnon and
his kin were buried within the walls of the Acropolis at Mycenæ,
and not without it. In both these opinions he ran counter to the
prevailing views of his time. It was generally believed that, if
Troy had ever any real existence at all, its site was to be looked
for not at Hissarlik, but far inland near Bunarbashi; while the
authority of Pausanias as to the graves of the Atreidæ was held
to be quite unreliable.
Schliemann resolved to put his convictions to the test of actual
excavation. In April, 1870, he cut the first sod of his excavation
at Hissarlik. The work went on with varying, but never brilliant,
fortune, until the year 1873, when his faith and constancy began
at last to meet with their reward. On the south-west of the site
a great city gate was uncovered, lines of wall, already partly
disclosed, began to show themselves more plainly, and quite close
to the gate there was discovered the famous 'Treasure of Priam,'
so called, a considerable mass of vessels and ornaments in gold
and silver, with a number of spearheads, axes, daggers, and cups,
wrought in copper. As the excavations progressed, it became evident
that not one city, but many cities, had stood upon this ancient
site. The First City, reached, of course, at the lowest level of the
excavation, immediately above the virgin soil, belonged to a very
early stage of human development. Its remains yielded such objects
as stone axes and flint knives, together with the black, hand-made,
polished pottery, known as 'bucchero,' which is characteristic of
Neolithic sites in the Ægean, ornamented frequently with incised
patterns which are filled in with a white chalky substance. The
stratum of débris belonging to the First City averages about 8
feet in depth.
Above this lay a layer of soil about 1 foot 9 inches in depth,
and then, on the top of a great layer of débris, by which the site
had been levelled and extended, came the walls of the Second City.
Here were the remains of a fortified gate with a ramp, paved with
stone, leading up to it (Plate II. 1), and a strong wall of sun-dried
brick resting upon a scarped stone substructure. This, with its
projecting towers, had evidently once formed the enclosure of an
Acropolis; and within the wall lay the remains of a large building
which appeared to have been a house or palace. The separate finds
included the great treasure already mentioned, and numerous other
articles of use and adornment, golden hair-pins, bracelets,
ear-pendants, a very primitive leaden idol of female form, and
abundance of pottery, of which some specimens belong to the class
of vases with long spouts, known to archæologists as 'Schnabelkanne,'
or 'beak-jugs.' Above the stratum of the Second City lay the remains
of no fewer than seven other settlements, more or less clearly
marked, ending at the uppermost layer with the ruins of Roman Ilium,
and its marble temple of Athena.
The gate and walls of the Second City--the fact that it had been
undoubtedly destroyed by fire, and the evidence of wealth and artistic
faculty offered by the golden treasure--seemed to Dr. Schliemann
decisive evidence of the fact that this had been the Ilion of the
Homeric poems. The treasure was named 'Priam's Treasure,' the largest
building, 'Priam's Palace,' and the gate, 'The Scæan Gate.' It
quickly became apparent, however, that the Second City could not
claim Homeric honours, but must be of yet more venerable antiquity.
The style, alike of the city buildings and of the articles found,
was much too primitive for the Homeric period, and pointed to a
date much earlier--probably, indeed, about a thousand years earlier
than that of the Trojan War. The great treasure, whose workmanship
seemed to militate against this conclusion, was suspected to have
somehow slipped down during the excavations from the level of the
Sixth City to that of the Second, as it seemed impossible that such
fine work could belong to the very early period of the Burnt City;
but subsequent discoveries, particularly those of Mr. Seager on the
little island of Mokhlos, off the coast of Crete, have paralleled
the splendour of the Trojan treasure with work which is undoubtedly
of the same early date as the Second City, so that Schliemann's
accuracy has been confirmed in this instance. The citadel itself
seemed far too small to fill the place which Troy occupies in Homer's
description, even allowing for poetic exaggeration. In 1890, the
year of his death, Schliemann was on the way to the solution of the
problem, and in 1892, his coadjutor, Professor Dörpfeld, finally
proved that the Sixth City, lying four strata above Schliemann's
Troy, was the true Ilion of the great epic. Its wider circuit had
been missed by Schliemann in his earlier excavations owing to the
fact that, at the centre of the site where he was working, the
débris had been planed and levelled away by the Romans to make
room for the buildings of their New Ilium. The pottery of the Sixth
City was of the type which in the meantime had come to be called
Mycenæan, from the discoveries in the plain of Argos, and its massive
circuit wall, enclosing an area two and a half times greater than
that of the Second City, is quite worthy of the fame of Homeric
Troy. Without much risk of mistake, we may conclude that we have
before us in Plate III. the actual wall from whose summit Andromache
beheld the corpse of the gallant Hector dragged behind the chariot
of his relentless foe. The mere fact of his having to some extent
misinterpreted the evidence of his discoveries can scarcely be
said, however, to take anything from the credit justly due to
Schliemann. Had he been spared for but a year or two longer he
could not have failed to complete his work, and to prove, as his
fellow-worker did, that on the site which he had from the first
contended to be that of Troy, there had stood a large and splendidly
built city, which assuredly belongs to the period of the Trojan War.
The work at Troy, however, had not gone on uninterruptedly between
1870 and Schliemann's death in 1890, and the discoveries which
occupied some of the intervening years were of even greater scientific
importance, though the glamour of romance attaching to the name of
Troy drew perhaps more attention to the work there. A dispute with
the Turkish Government over the disposal of 'Priam's Treasure' led
to obstacles being placed by the Porte in the way of the resumption
of work on the plain of Troy, and in July, 1876, he settled down
to excavate at Mycenæ, the historic capital of the King of men,
Agamemnon, with a view to the proving of his second theory--the
burial of the Atreidæ within the Acropolis of Mycenæ. The ancient
citadel of Agamemnon stands in the plain of Argos, on an isolated
hill 912 feet in height. Before Schliemann turned his attention to
it, it was already well known to students of archæology from the
remains of its walls, and particularly from the splendid Lion Gate
(Plate IV.) with its famous relief of the sacred pillar supported by
two colossal lions, and from the great beehive tombs of the lower
city--the so-called 'Treasuries.' But the chief thing which drew
the explorer to Mycenæ was not these remains; it was the statement
of Pausanias already referred to. 'Some remains of the circuit
wall,' says Pausanias, 'are still to be seen, and the gate which
has lions over it. These were built, they say, by the Cyclopes,
who made the wall at Tiryns for Proitos. Among the ruins at Mycenæ
is the fountain called Perseia, and some subterranean buildings
belonging to Atreus and his children, where their treasures were
kept. There is the tomb of Atreus, and of those whom Aigisthos
slew at the banquet, on their return from Ilion with Agamemnon....
There is also the tomb of Agamemnon, and that of Eurymedon the
charioteer, and the joint tomb of Teledamos and Pelops, the twin
children of Kassandra, whom Aigisthos slew with their parents while
still mere babes.... Klytemnestra and Aigisthos were buried a little
way outside the walls, for they were not thought worthy to be within,
where Agamemnon lay and those who fell with him.'
Persuaded in his own mind of the truth of this statement, Schliemann,
while clearing the Lion Gate, and investigating the already rifted
tomb known as the Treasury of Atreus, caused a great pit, 113 feet
square, to be dug within the walls at a distance of about 40 feet
from the Lion Gate. With the most extraordinary good fortune he
had hit upon the exact spot which he sought, and had even almost
exactly proportioned his pit to the area within which the treasures
lay. After only a few days' digging, slabs of stone, vertically
placed, began to come to light, and before long a complete double
ring of stone slabs, 87 feet in diameter, was disclosed (Plate
II. 2). Schliemann's first idea was that he had discovered the
Agora of Mycenæ, the 'well-polished circle of stones' on which
the elders of the city sat for councilor judgment, as Hephæstos
depicted them on the shield of Achilles; but even this discovery
did not satisfy him; he was resolved to go down to virgin soil
or rock, and his perseverance was rewarded.
First there came into view a circular altar, and several steles
of soft stone with rude carvings in relief, which seemed to point
to interments beneath, and a system of offerings to, or on behalf
of, the dead. Three feet below the altar, and 23 feet below the
surface level, there came to light the top of the first of a group
of five rock-hewn graves. The graves were rectangular, varied in
depth from 10 to 16 feet, and ranged in size from 9 by 10 feet
to 16 by 22 feet. They had been carefully lined with a wall of
small quarry-stones and clay, and roofed over with slate slabs; but
the roofing had broken down, owing to the decay of the beams which
supported it, and the graves were filled with earth and pebbles.
Mingled with the débris brought down by the collapse of the roofs
lay human bodies, one in the smallest grave, five in the largest,
and three in each of the others; and along with them had been buried
one of the most remarkable hoards of treasure that ever greeted
the eye of a discoverer.
[Illustration VI: THE CUP-BEARER, KNOSSOS (_p_. 67)
From 'The Palace of Minos,' by Arthur J. Evans, in _The Monthly
Review_]
Gold was there in profusion, beaten into masks for the faces of the
dead (perhaps to protect them from the evil eye), into head-bands,
breast-pieces, plaques of all shapes and sizes, and wrought into
bracelets, rings, pins, baldrics, and dagger and sword hilts. Along
with the gold was store of wrought ivory, amber, silver, bronze,
and alabaster. One grave alone contained no fewer than sixty swords
and daggers; another, in which women only were buried, held six
diadems, fifteen pendants, eleven neck-coils, eight hair ornaments,
ten gold grasshoppers with gold chains, one butterfly, four griffins,
four lions, ten ornaments, each consisting of two stags, ten with
representations of two lions attacking an ox, three fine intaglios,
two pairs of gold scales, fifty-one embossed ornaments, and more
than seven hundred ornaments for sewing on garments! A few scattered
objects and a sixth grave were found later, the latter, however,
not by Dr. Schliemann. The mere money-value of the finds amounted
to something like four thousand pounds sterling!
Money-value, however, was nothing in Schliemann's eyes compared
with the thought that he had discovered the actual graves which
Pausanias saw, and in which Agamemnon and his companions were buried
after their tragic end at the hands of Aigisthos and Klytemnestra.
To his eager enthusiasm many of the circumstances of the discovery
seemed to lend probability to such a supposition. The disorder in
which the bodies were found, one with its head crushed down upon
the bosom, the half-shut eye of one of the mute company, and other
indications, seemed to point to such haste in the interment as might
have been expected in the case of a King and his companions who had
met with so tragic a fate. Accordingly, the discoverer announced
in his famous telegram to the King of the Hellenes, and maintained
in his works, that he had found Agamemnon and his household. For a
time this view and his enthusiastic advocacy of it gained the ear
of the public; but gradually it became apparent that the disorder
of the graves and the condition of the corpses was due, not to hasty
interment, but to the collapse of the roofs of the graves; the grave
furniture was shown not to belong by any means entirely to one period;
and the number and sex of the persons interred did not agree with
the legend, or with the account of Pausanias. Admiration turned
to incredulity, and even to undeserved ridicule of the enthusiastic
explorer; but the lapse of time has made critics less inclined
to mock at Schliemann's eager belief, and it is largely conceded
now that while perhaps the tombs may not be actually those of the
great King of the Achæans and his friends, they are at least those
which were long held to be such by tradition, and which Pausanias
intended to denote by his descriptions. In any case, the question
of whether the explorer discovered the body of one dead King or of
another is of entirely minor importance. To find Agamemnon would
have been a romantic exploit thoroughly in accordance with the
bent of Schliemann's mind, and a fitting crown to a life which
in itself was the very romance of exploration. But Schliemann had
done something infinitely more important than to make the find
of a dead King, even though that King had reigned for more than
two and a half millenniums in the greatest poem of the world; he
had begun the resurrection of a dead civilization.
Besides the great discovery of the Shaft-Graves, Schliemann carried
on the exploration of the famous beehive tombs in the lower city
of Mycenæ. One of these, the largest, was already well known by
the name of the 'Treasury of Atreus' (Plate V. 2). It consists
of a long entrance passage running back into the hillside, and
leading to a great vaulted chamber excavated out of the hill, and
shaped like a beehive. The entrance passage is 20 feet broad and
115 feet long, and is lined on either side with walls of massive
masonry which increase in height as the hill rises. This passage
leads to a vertical façade 46 feet high, pierced by a door between
17 and 18 feet in height, which was bordered by columns carrying a
cornice, above which was a triangular relieving space, masked by
slabs of red porphyry adorned with spiral decorations, while the
whole façade appears to have been enriched with bronze ornaments
and coloured marbles. The massive lintel of the door is 29 feet 6
inches long, 16 feet 6 inches deep, and 3 feet 4 inches high, with
a weight of about 120 tons--a mass of stone fairly comparable with
some of the gigantic blocks in which Egyptian architects delighted.
It is, for instance, about ten tons heavier than the quartzite block
which forms the sepulchral chamber in the pyramid of Amenemhat III.
at Hawara. The great chamber of the tomb consists of an impressive
circular vault 48 feet in diameter and in height. Its construction
is not that of true vaulting; but each of the thirty-three courses
projects a little beyond the one below it, until at last they approach
closely at the apex, which is closed by a single slab. The courses,
after being laid, were hewn to a perfectly smooth curve, and carefully
polished, and it appears that the whole of the dome was decorated
with rosettes of bronze, a scheme of adornment which recalls the
bronze walls of the Palace of Alcinous. From the great chamber a
side door, bearing traces of rich decoration, leads to a square
room, 27 feet square by 19 feet high, which may possibly have been
the actual place of interment. Curtius found 'this lofty and solemn
vault' the most imposing of all the monuments of ancient Greece.
In the same hillside as the Treasury of Atreus, but some 400 yards
north of it, stands the tomb known as the 'Tomb of Klytemnestra,' or
'Mrs. Schliemann's Treasury'--the latter title being due to the fact
that it was partially excavated in 1876 by Dr. Schliemann's wife. In
size it very closely corresponds to the better known tomb, while
its columns of dark green alabaster, its door-lintel of leek-green
marble, and the slabs of red marble which closed the relieving
triangle above the door show that it had been not less magnificent
than its neighbour.
[Illustration VII: THE LONG GALLERY, KNOSSOS (_p_. 68)]
Following up his excavations at Mycenæ, Schliemann, in 1880-81,
excavated at Orchomenos in Botia the so-called 'Treasury of Minyas,'
discovering in its square side-chamber a beautiful ceiling formed
of slabs of slate sculptured with an exquisite pattern of rosettes
and spirals, which shows very distinct traces of Egyptian artistic
influence (unless, as Mr. H. R. Hall has now come to believe, we
are to trace the origin of the spiral as a decorative motive, not
to Egypt, but to the Minoans of Crete). At Tiryns, Schliemann began
in 1884 another series of excavations which laid bare the whole
ground-plan of the citadel palace of that ancient fortress town
with its halls and separate apartments for men and women, and the
colossal enclosing wall, in some parts 57 feet thick, with its
towers and galleries and chambers constructed in the thickness of
the wall (Plate V. 1). The palace revealed evidences of considerable
skill in the decorative arts. A beautiful frieze of alabaster carved
in rosettes and palmettes, inlaid with blue paste, made plain what
Homer meant when he wrote of the Palace of Alcinous: 'Brazen were
the walls which ran this way and that from the threshold to the
inmost chamber, and round them was a frieze of blue' (_kuanos_);
while fresco paintings in several of the rooms exhibited the spiral
and rosette decoration of Orchomenos and Egypt. But perhaps the
most interesting find was the remains of a great wall-painting in
which a mighty bull is represented charging at full speed, while
an athlete, clinging to the monster's horn with one hand, vaults
over his back--a picture which is the first important example of
the now well-known and numerous set of similar representations
which have given us a clue to something of the meaning of the old
legend of the man-destroying Minotaur and his tribute of human
victims.
Schliemann's discoveries, notwithstanding all the incredulity aroused
by his sometimes rather headlong enthusiasm, created an extraordinary
amount of interest among scholars and students of early European
culture. It was felt at once that he had brought the world face to
face with facts which must profoundly modify all opinions hitherto
held as to the origins of Greek civilization; for the advanced and
fully ripened art which was disclosed, especially in the wonderful
finds from the Shaft- or Circle-Graves, stood on an entirely different
plane from any art which had hitherto been associated with the
early age of Greece; and it was evident, not only that the date
at which civilization began to reveal itself in Hellas must be
pushed back several centuries, but also that the great differences
between the mature Mycenæan art and the infant art of Greece required
explanation. To the discoverer himself, the supreme interest of his
finds always lay in the thought that they were the direct prototypes,
if not the actual originals, of the civilization described in the
Homeric poems; but to the question whether this was so or not, a
question interesting in itself, but largely academic, there succeeded
a much more important one. Here was proof of the existence of a
civilization, obviously great and long-enduring, whose products
could not be identified with those of any other art known to exist.
To what race of men were the achievements of this early culture
to be ascribed, and what relation did they hold to the Hellenes
of history?
The work of Schliemann was continued and extended by successors
such as Dörpfeld, Tsountas, Mackenzie, and others, and by the end
of the nineteenth century it had become apparent that the culture
of which the first important traces had been found at Mycenæ had
extended to some extent over all Hellas, but chiefly over the
south-eastern portion of the mainland and over the Cyclades. The
principal find-spots in Greece proper were in the Argolid and in
Attica; but, besides these, abundant material was discovered at
Enkomi (Cyprus) and at Phylâkopi (Melos), while from Vaphio, near
Amyklæ in Laconia, there came, among other treasures, a pair of
most wonderful gold cups, whose workmanship surpassed anything
that could have been imagined of such an early period, and is only
to be matched by the goldsmith work of the Renaissance. Hissarlik,
under Dr. Dörpfeld's hands, yielded from the Sixth City the evidence
of an Asiatic civilization truly contemporaneous with that of Mycenæ.
Even before the end of the century it became apparent that Crete was
destined to prove a focus of this early culture, and the promise, as
we shall see later, has been more than fulfilled. In Egypt Professor
Petrie found deposits of prehistoric Ægean pottery in the Delta, the
Fayum, and even in Middle Egypt, proving that this civilization,
whatever its origin, had been in contact with the ancient civilization
of the Nile Valley, while even in the Western Mediterranean, in
Sicily particularly, in Italy, Sardinia, and Spain, finds, less
plentiful, but quite unmistakable, bore witness to the wide diffusion
of Mycenæan culture.
Roughly, the result came to this: 'that before the epoch at which
we are used to place the beginnings of Greek civilization--that is,
the opening centuries of the last millennial period B.C.--we must
allow for an immensely long record of human artistic productivity,
going back into the Neolithic Age, and culminating towards the close
of the age of Bronze in a culture more fecund and more refined
than any we are to find again in the same lands till the age of
Iron was far advanced. Man in Hellas was more highly civilized
before history than when history begins to record his state; and
there existed human society in the Hellenic area, organized and
productive, to a period so remote that its origins were more distant
from the age of Pericles than that age is from our own. We have
probably to deal with a total period of civilization in the Ægean
not much shorter than in the Nile Valley.[*]
[Footnote *: Hogarth, 'Authority and Archæology,' p. 230.]
The estimate in Hogarth's last sentence, which was published in
1899, before Evans's great discoveries in Crete, was one that must
have seemed extravagant to those who, while familiar with the great
antiquity of Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, had been accustomed
to think of Greek civilization as having its beginning not so very
long before the First Olympiad. It has been fully justified, however,
by the event, and it may now be accepted as an established fact that
the earliest civilization of Greece meets the two great ancient
civilizations of Babylon and Egypt on substantially equal terms.
In antiquity it appears to be practically contemporary with them;
in artistic merit it need not shrink from comparison with either
of them.
In the earlier stages of the discussion which followed on the
discoveries, it was assumed, perhaps somewhat hastily, that such
a culture could not have been indigenous, resemblances to Egyptian
and Mesopotamian work were pointed out, and it was suggested that
the impulse and the skill which gave rise to the art of Mycenæ were
not native but borrowed, the Phnicians being generally held to
be the medium through which the influence of the East had filtered
into the Ægean area. As time has gone on, however, the Phnicians
have gradually come to bulk less and less in the view of students
of the Ægean problem. It is no longer held that they contributed
anything original to the development of Mycenæan culture, and even
as middlemen the tendency is to allow them an influence far smaller
than was once held to be theirs. It has become manifest that, in
at least the case of Crete and Egypt, communication need not have
been through Phnician media at all, but was far more probably
direct. And with regard to the whole question of the debt owed
to the East by this early European civilization, it is probable
that the Ægean gave quite as much as it borrowed, and that its
artists were sufficiently great to have originated their own culture.
Mycenæan, and still more the great Minoan art of which Mycenæan has
proved to be only a decadent phase, needed no Oriental crutches.
With regard to Egypt, the obligations of the two cultures were
certainly mutual; each influenced the other; it was not a case of
master and scholar, but of two contemporary civilizations, each
fully inspired with a native spirit, each ready to use whatever
seemed good to it in the work of the other, but both perfectly
original in their genius.
The question which was of such supreme interest to Schliemann still
survives, however, though in a wider and more important form than
that in which he conceived of it. It is no longer a question of
whether the graves which he found were actually those of Agamemnon
and his fellow-victims in the dark tragedy of Mycenæ, but of whether
the people and the civilization whose remains have been brought
to light are, or are not, the people and the civilization from
which the Homeric bards drew the whole setting of their poems.
Were the Mycenæans the Greeks of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and
was it their culture that is depicted for us in these great poems?
The arguments in favour of such a supposition are of considerable
strength. For one thing, we have the remarkable coincidence between
the geography of the poems and the localities over which the Mycenæan
culture is seen to have extended. The towns and lands which occupy
the foremost place in the Homeric story are also those in which the
most convincing evidences of Mycenæan culture have been discovered.
Foremost, of course, we have Mycenæ itself. To Homer, 'golden,'
'broad-wayed' Mycenæ is the seat of the great leader of all the
Achæans, the King of men, Agamemnon; it is also the chief seat of
the culture which goes by its name. Orchomenos, Pylos, Lacedæmon,
Attica, all prominent in the poems, are also well-known seats of
Mycenæan civilization. Crete, whose prominent position in the Homeric
world has been already referred to, we shall shortly see to have been
in point of fact the supreme centre of that still greater and richer
civilization of which the Mycenæan is a later and comparatively
degenerate form. There is no need to enter into further detail; but
broadly it is the fact that the distribution of Mycenæan remains
practically follows, at least to a great extent, the geography of
the poems. The world with which the Homeric bards were familiar was,
in the main, the world in which the civilization of the Mycenæans
prevailed.
The Homeric house also finds a striking parallel in the details
of the Mycenæan palaces whose remains have been preserved. Leaving
aside all disputed points, the broad fact remains that 'all the
structural features described, the courtyard, with its altar to
Zeus and trench for sacrifices; the vestibule; the ante-chamber;
the hall, with its fireplace and its pillars; the bathroom, with
passage from the hall; the upper story, sometimes containing the
women's quarters; the spaciousness; the decoration; even the furniture,
have been most wonderfully identified at Tiryns and Mycenæ, and
in Crete.' In Crete, along with the resemblances above referred
to, are found important differences, such as the position of the
hearth, and the details of the lighting. These, which are probably
due to differences of climate, do not, however, invalidate the
fact of the general correspondence.
In details, we have the frieze of _kuanos_ of the Palace of Alcinous,
paralleled by the fragments discovered, as already mentioned, at
Tiryns, and by similar friezes at Knossos, while the bronze walls
of the same palace have been, if not paralleled, at all events
illustrated, by the bronze decorations of the vaults of the great
bee-hive tombs at Mycenæ and Orchomenos. The parallel is, perhaps,
even closer when we come to the details of metal-working, which
are described for us in Homer, and of which illustrations have
been found in such profusion among the Mycenæan relics. We are
told, for example, that on the brooch of Odysseus was represented
a hound holding a writhing fawn between its forepaws, and we have
the elaborate workmanship of the cup of Nestor--'a right goodly
cup, that the old man brought from home, embossed with studs of
gold, and four handles there were to it, and round each two golden
doves were feeding, and to the cup were two bottoms. Another man
could scarce have lifted the cup from the table, but Nestor the
Old raised it easily.' The Mycenæan finds have yielded examples of
metal-working which seem to come as near to the Homeric pictures as
it is possible for material things to come to verbal descriptions.
One of the golden cups from the Fourth Grave at Mycenæ might almost
have been a copy on a small scale of Nestor's cup, save that it
had only two handles instead of four. On the handles, as in the
Homeric picture, doves are feeding, and like Nestor's, the Mycenæan
cup is riveted with gold.
Or, take again such examples of another form of art-work in metal
as are given by the scenes of the lion hunt and the hunting-cats
on the dagger-blades found in Graves IV. and V. at Mycenæ. In the
first of these scenes we have a representation of five men attacking
three lions. The foremost man has been thrown down by the assault
of the first lion, and is entangled in his great shield. His four
companions are coming to his help, one armed with a bow, the others
carrying spears and huge shields, two of them of the typical Mycenæan
figure-eight shape. Only the first lion awaits their onset, the
other two are in full flight. The whole work is characterized by
extraordinary vivacity; but it is the technique that is of interest.
The picture is made up out of various metals inlaid on a thin bronze
plate, which is let into the dagger-blade. The lions and the bare
skin of the men are inlaid in gold, the loin-cloths and the shields
are of silver, all the accessories, such as shield-straps and the
patterns on the loin-cloths, are given in a dark substance, while the
ground is coated with a dark enamel to give relief to the figures.
The hunting-cat scene, which presents remarkable resemblances to a
well-known scene from a wall-painting at Thebes, represents cats
hunting wild-fowl in a marsh intersected by a winding river, in
which fish are swimming and papyrus plants growing. 'The cats,
the plants, and the bodies of the ducks are inlaid with gold, the
wings of the ducks and the river are silver, and the fish are given
in some dark substance. On the neck of one of the ducks is a red
drop of blood, probably given by alloyed gold.' Here we have the
very type of art in which the decorations of the shield of Achilles
were carried out. 'Also he set therein a vineyard teeming plenteously
with clusters, wrought fair in gold; black were the grapes, but
the vines hung throughout on silver poles. And around it he ran
a ditch of _kuanos_, and round that a fence of tin.... Also he
wrought therein a herd of kine with upright horns, and the kine
were fashioned of gold and tin.'
Such are some of the points which countenance the idea that in
the Mycenæan people we have the originals of the people of the
Homeric poems. On the other hand there are difficulties, by no
means inconsiderable, in the way of such a belief. Of these the
chief is the question of the method in which the bodies of the dead
are disposed of. The men of the Homeric poems burned their dead;
the men of the Mycenæan civilization buried theirs. Undoubtedly this
is a serious difficulty in the way of identification, presupposing,
as it does, a different view of the destiny of the soul after death.
The men who burned the bodies of their dead believed that the soul
had no further use for its body after death, but departed into
a distant, shadowy, immaterial region, so that the body, if it
had any connection with the soul, acted rather as a drag and a
defilement, from which it was well that the soul should be released.
Therefore they dematerialized the body, and often the things used
by the body during life, by the action of fire. On the other hand,
those who buried their dead believed that the spirit of the dead
man dwelt in some fashion in the tomb, or at least hovered around
the body, waiting, perhaps, for a reincarnation, and capable of
using the weapons, the utensils, and the foods of its former life.
Therefore the body was carefully interred, sometimes even embalmed,
and its weapons and foods, or at all events simulacra of these,
were laid beside it.
The distinction between the two lines of thought is clear and strong;
but it does not necessarily presuppose an absolute distinction of
race. It is not improbable that towards the end of the Mycenæan
period, to which in any case the connection with the Homeric poems
would belong, cremation was beginning to supersede the older practice
of interment. In late Mycenæan graves at Salamis evidences of cremation
are found, and at Mouliana, in Crete, there are instances of uncremated
bones being found along with bronze swords on one side of a tomb,
while on the other were found an iron sword and cremated bones
in a cinerary urn. The distinction, then, is not necessarily one
of race, but of custom, gradually changing, perhaps within a
comparatively short period. It has even been suggested that no
interval of time of any great extent is needed, as the practice
of cremation may quickly develop among any race, being prompted
by the comfortable idea that when the flesh is disposed of, the
possibly inconvenient, possibly even vampire, ghost of a disagreeable
ancestor goes along with it.
Another difficulty arises from the fact that the Homeric poems
certainly contemplate a much wider use of iron than can be found
among the remains of the Mycenæan people. But the weight of this
objection may easily be exaggerated. Certainly the equipment
contemplated for the Homeric heroes is in most cases of bronze,
though the well-known line from the Odyssey, 'iron does of itself
attract a man,' bears witness to a time when iron had become the
almost universal fighting metal. But even in some of the Mycenæan
tombs iron appears in the shape of finger-rings; and in East Cretan
tombs of the latest Minoan period iron swords have been found. And
if, as is generally agreed, the Homeric poems represent the work
of several bards covering a considerable period of time, there is
nothing out of the way in the supposition that, while the earlier
writers represented bronze as the material for weapons, because
it was actually so in their time, the later ones, writing at a
period when iron was largely superseding, but had not altogether
superseded, the older metal, should, while clinging in general
to the old poetic word used by their predecessors, occasionally
introduce the name of the metal which was becoming prevalent in their
day. From this point of view the difficulty seems to disappear. The
Homeric age proper is one of bronze-using people; but, in the later
stages of the development of the poems, iron makes its appearance,
just as it had been gradually doing in the generally bronze-using
Mycenæan civilization.
The same remark applies to the differences of equipment between
the warriors of the Mycenæan and those of the Homeric period. The
Mycenæans used the great hide-shield, either oblong or 8-shaped,
covering its bearer from head to foot, with a leather cap for the
head, and no defensive armour of metal. In the Iliad, on the other
hand, what is obviously contemplated in general is a metal helmet,
a metal cuirass, and a comparatively small round shield. But, again,
in later Mycenæan work, such as the famous Warrior Vase, there is
evidence of the use of the small round shield, while, moreover,
in some parts of the poem there are evidences of the use of the
true Mycenæan shield 'like a tower.' Periphetes of Mycenæ is slain
by Hector owing to his having tripped over the lower edge of his
great shield, and his slayer himself bears a shield of no small
proportions. 'So saying, Hector of the glancing helm departed,
and the black hide beat on either side against his ankles and his
neck, even the rim that ran uttermost about his bossed shield.' So
that the poems represent a gradual development in the use of armour
which may not unfairly be compared with the similar development
traceable in the Mycenæan remains.
On the whole, then, our conclusion is something like this: The
civilization which Schliemann discovered is not precisely that
of the Homeric poems, for the bloom of it belongs to a period
considerably anterior to the period of Achæan supremacy in Greece,
and was the work of a race differing from that of the chiefs who
fought at Troy; but, broadly speaking, what Homer describes is the
same civilization in its latest stage, when the men of Mycenæan
or Minoan stock who created it had passed under the dominion of the
invading Achæan overlords. The Achæan invasion was not, like that
which succeeded it, subversive of the great culture that belonged to
the conquered Mycenæan race; on the contrary, the invaders entered
into and became partakers of it, carrying on its traditions until
the gradual decay, which had begun already before they made their
appearance in Greece, was terminated by the Dorian invasion, or
whatever process of gradual incursion by ruder tribes may correspond
to what the later Greeks called by that name. And it is this last
stage of the Mycenæan culture, still existing, though under Achæan
supremacy, which is depicted in the Homeric poems. 'Take away from
the picture,' says Father Browne, 'all the features which have
been borrowed from the Dorian invasion, give the post-Dorian poets
the credit of the references to iron and other post-Dorian things,
and nothing remains to disprove the view of those who hold that
Schliemann found--not, indeed, the tomb of Agamemnon--but the tomb
of that Homeric life which Agamemnon represents to us. In the Mycenæan
remains we have uncovered before our eyes the material form of that
impulse of which we had already met the spiritual in the Homeric
page.'[*]
[Footnote *: H. Browne, 'Homeric Study,' pp. 313, 314.]
CHAPTER IV
THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS'
In the revival of interest in the origins of Greek civilization
it was manifest that Crete could not long be left out of account,
for the traditions of Minos and his laws, and of the wonderful
works of Dædalus, pointed clearly to the fact that the great island
must have been an early seat of learning and art. Most of these
traditions clustered round Knossos, the famous capital of Minos,
where once stood the Labyrinth, and near to which was Mount Juktas,
the traditional burying-place of Zeus. The remains apparent on the
site of the ancient capital were by no means imposing. In 1834
Pashley found that 'all the now existing vestiges of the ancient
metropolis of Crete are some rude masses of Roman brick-work';
and Spratt in 1851 saw very little more, mentioning only 'some
scattered foundations and a few detached masses of masonry of the
Roman time,' though in the time of the Venetian occupation there
was evidently more to be seen, as Cornaro speaks of 'a very large
quantity of ruins, and in particular a wall, many paces long and
very thick.' But expectation still fixed on Knossos as the most
probable site for any Cretan discoveries.
[Illustration VIII: A MAGAZINE WITH JARS AND KASELLES, KNOSSOS (_p_. 69)]
The attention of Schliemann and Stillman had been drawn to a hill
called 'Kephala,' overlooking the ancient site of Knossos, on which
stood ruined walls consisting of great gypsum blocks engraved with
curious characters; but attempts at exploration were defeated by
the obstacles raised by the native proprietors. In 1878 Minos
Kalochærinos made some slight excavations, and found a few great
jars or _pithai_, and some fragments of Mycenæan pottery; but up
to the year 1895, when Dr. A. J. Evans secured a quarter of the
Kephala site from one of the joint proprietors, nothing of any
real moment had been accomplished. Dr. Evans had been attracted
to Crete by the purchase at Athens of some seal-stones found in
the island, engraved with hieroglyphic and linear signs differing
from Egyptian and Hittite characters. In the hope that he might be
led to the discovery of a Cretan system of writing, and relying upon
the ancient Cretan tradition that the Phnicians had not invented
letters, but had merely changed the forms of an already existing
system, he began in 1894 a series of explorations in Central and
Eastern Crete. On all hands more or less important evidence of
the existence of such a script came to light, especially from the
Dictæan Cave, where a stone libation-altar was found, inscribed with
a dedication in the unknown writing. But Dr. Evans was persuaded
that Knossos was the spot where exploration was most likely to
be rewarded, and his purchase of part of the site of Kephala in
1895 was the beginning of a series of campaigns which have had
results not less romantic than those of Schliemann, and even more
important in their additions to our knowledge of the prehistoric
Ægean civilization.
The political troubles of the time were unfavourable to exploration.
Fighting was going on in the island, and religious prejudices ran
very high. When the new political order came into being with the
appointment of Prince George of Greece as Commissioner, an obstacle
was still found in the way in the shape of a French claim to prior
rights of excavation. This, however, was finally withdrawn on the
advice of Prince George, and in the beginning of 1900 Dr. Evans
was at last able to secure the remainder of the site, and on March
23 in that year excavation began, and was carried on with a staff
of from 80 to 150 men until the beginning of June.
Almost at once it became apparent that the faith which had fought
so persistently for the attainment of its object was going to be
rewarded. The remains of walls began to appear, sometimes only a
foot or two, sometimes only a few inches below the surface of the
soil, and by the end of the nine weeks' campaign of exploration
about two acres of a vast prehistoric building had been unearthed--a
palace which, even at this early stage in its disclosure, was already
far larger than those of Tiryns and Mycenæ. On the eastern slope
of the hill, in a deposit of pale clay, were found fragments of
the black, hand-made, polished pottery, known as 'bucchero,'
characteristic of neolithic sites, some of it, as usual, decorated
with incised patterns filled in with white. This pottery was coupled
with stone celts and maces, obsidian knives, and a primitive female
image of incised and inlaid clay. All over the palace area, as the
excavations went farther and farther down, the neolithic deposit
was found to overlie the virgin soil, sometimes to a depth of 24
feet, showing that the site had been thickly populated in remote
prehistoric times.
But the neolithic deposit was not the most striking find. On the
south-west side of the site there came to light a spacious paved
court, opening before walls faced with huge blocks of gypsum. At
the southern corner of this court stood a portico, which afforded
access to this portion of the interior of the palace. The portico
had a double door, whose lintel had once been supported by a massive
central column of wood. The wall flanking the entrance had been
decorated with a fresco, part of which represented that favourite
subject of Mycenæan and Minoan art--a great bull; while on the
walls of the corridor which led away from the portal were still
preserved the lower portions of a procession of life-size painted
figures. Conspicuous among these was one figure, probably that of
a Queen, dressed in magnificent apparel, while there were also
remains of the figures of two youths, wearing gold and silver belts
and loin-cloths, one of them bearing a fluted marble vase with a
silver base. At the southern angle of the building, this corridor--the
'Corridor of the Procession'--led round to a great southern portico
with double columns, and in a passage-way behind this portico there
came to light one of the first fairly complete evidences of the
outward fashion and appearance of the great prehistoric race which
had founded the civilization of Knossos and Mycenæ. This was the
fresco-painting, preserved almost perfectly in its upper part, of a
youth bearing a gold-mounted silver cup (Plate VI.). His loin-cloth
is decorated with a beautiful quatrefoil pattern; he wears a silver
ear-ornament, silver rings on the neck and the upper arm, and on
the wrist a bracelet with an agate gem.
'The colours,' says Dr. Evans in teat brilliant article in the
_Monthly Review_ which first gave to the general public the story
of his first season's discoveries, 'were almost as brilliant as
when laid down over three thousand years before. For the first
time the true portraiture of a man of this mysterious Mycenæan race
rises before us. The flesh-tint, following, perhaps, an Egyptian
precedent, is of a deep reddish-brown. The limbs are finely moulded,
though the waist, as usual in Mycenæan fashions, is tightly drawn
in by a silver-mounted girdle, giving great relief to the hips.
The profile of the face is pure and almost classically Greek....
The lips are somewhat full, but the physiognomy has certainly no
Semitic cast.... There was something very impressive in this vision
of brilliant youth and of male beauty, recalled after so long an
interval to our upper air from what had been, till yesterday, a
forgotten world. Even our untutored Cretan workmen felt the spell
and fascination. They, indeed, regarded the discovery of such a
painting in the bosom of the earth as nothing less than miraculous,
and saw in it the icon of a Saint! The removal of the fresco required
a delicate and laborious piece of under-plastering, which necessitated
its being watched at night, and old Manolis, one of the most trustworthy
of our gang, was told off for the purpose. Somehow or other he
fell asleep, but the wrathful saint appeared to him in a dream.
Waking with a start, he was conscious of a mysterious presence;
the animals round began to low and neigh, and "there were visions
about"; "[Greek: phautazei]," he said, in summing up his experiences
next morning, "the whole place spooks!"'[*]
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, pp. 124, 125.]
[Illustration IX: MAGAZINE WITH JARS AND KASELLES
GREAT JAR WITH TRICKLE ORNAMENT]
The Southern Portico gave access to a large court which turned out,
from later investigation, to have been really the Central Court
of the palace, the focus of the life of the whole huge building.
The block of building between the West and the Central Courts was
divided into two by a long gallery (Plate VII.), 3.40 metres in
breadth, running almost the whole length of the structure, and
paved with gypsum blocks. Between this gallery and the western
wall of the palace lay a long range of what had evidently been
magazines for the storage of oil, and perhaps of corn. They were
occupied by rows of huge earthenware jars, or _pithoi_, sufficiently
large to have held the Forty Thieves, or to have accommodated the
soldiers of Tahuti in their venture on Joppa (Plates VIII. and
IX.). In one of the magazines no fewer than twenty of these jars
were found. They were all ornamented, some of them very elaborately,
with spiral and rope-work patterns; one of them, found, not in a
magazine, but in a small room near the Central Court, was particularly
elaborate in its adornment, and stood almost five feet in height
(Plate X. 2). Down the centre line of each magazine ran a row of
small square openings in the floor--'kaselles,' as they came to be
called--which at one time had evidently been receptacles, some of
them, perhaps, for oil, but some of them certainly for valuables.
They were carefully lined with lead, and in some cases the slabs
of stone covering them could not be removed without lifting the
whole pavement. In spite of such precautions, however, they had
been well rifled in ancient days, and little was left to tell of
what their contents may once have been. The magazines were well
fitted to convey a strong impression, not only of the size, but
also of the splendour of the palace which needed such storerooms.
There was no meanness or squalor about the domestic offices of the
House of Minos. The doorways leading into the magazines from the
Long Corridor were of fine stone-work, and the side-walls, both
of the gallery and the magazines, had been covered with painted
plaster, presenting a white ground on which ran a dado of horizontal
bands of red and blue, further bands of the same colours forming a
frieze below the ceiling level. This, of course, had been merely
the basement of the palace, and had been surmounted by another
storey or storeys, of which nothing was left except fragments of
the painted plaster which had once decorated the walls.
To the rooms composing the block of building between the Long Gallery
and the Central Court, access had been given from the latter area;
and it was in these rooms that, as the excavations progressed, some
of the most remarkable features of the palace began to disclose
themselves. About halfway along the court were found two small
rooms, connected with one another, in the centre of each of which
stood a single column composed of four gypsum blocks, each block
marked with the sign of the Double Axe; and these pillars suggested
a connection with ancient traditions about Minos and his works
(Plate XI.). They were apparently sacred emblems connected with
the worship of a divinity, and the Double Axe markings pointed
to the divinity in question. For the special emblem of the Cretan
Zeus (and also apparently of the female divinity of whom Zeus was
the successor) was the Double Axe, a weapon of which numerous votive
specimens in bronze have been found in the cave-sanctuary of Dicte,
the fabled birthplace of the god. And the name of the Double Axe
is Labrys--a word found also in the title of the Carian Zeus, Zeus
of Labraunda. But tradition linked the names of Minos and Knossos
with a great and wonderful structure of Dædalus which went by the
name of the Labyrinth; and the coincidence between that name and
the Labrys marks on the sacred pillars and on many of the blocks
in the palace at once suggested that here was the source of the
old tradition, and here the actual building, the Labyrinth, which
Dædalus reared for his great master. 'There can be little remaining
doubt,' says Dr. Evans, 'that this vast edifice, which in a broad
historic sense we are justified in calling the "Palace of Minos,"
is one and the same as the traditional "Labyrinth." A great part
of the ground-plan itself, with its long corridors and repeated
successions of blind galleries, its tortuous passages and spacious
underground conduit, its bewildering system of small chambers,
does, in fact, present many of the characteristics of a maze.'[*]
The connection thus suggested even by the first year's excavations
has grown more and more probable with the work of each successive
season.
[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, p. 131.]
Passing farther north along the line of the Central Court, access
was given by a row of four steps to an ante-chamber, which opened
upon another room, of no great size in itself, but of surpassing
interest from the character of its appointments. 'Already, a few
inches below the surface, freshly preserved fresco began to appear.
Walls were shortly uncovered, decorated with flowering plants and
running water, while on each side of the doorway of a small inner
room, stood guardian griffins with peacock's plumes in the same
flowery landscape. Round the walls ran low stone benches, and between
these, on the north side, separated by a small interval, and raised on
a stone base, rose a gypsum throne with a high back, and originally
covered with decorative designs. Its lower part was adorned with
a curiously carved arch, with crocketed mouldings, showing an
extraordinary anticipation of some most characteristic features
of Gothic architecture. Opposite the throne was a finely wrought
tank of gypsum slabs--a feature borrowed perhaps from an Egyptian
palace--approached by a descending flight of steps, and originally
surmounted by cypress-wood columns, supporting a kind of _impluvium_.
Here truly was the council chamber of a Mycenæan King or Sovereign
Lady.'[*] The discovery of the very throne of Minos, for such we may
fairly term it, was surely the most dramatic and fitting recompense
for the explorer's patience and persistence. No more ancient throne
exists in Europe, or probably in the world, and none whose associations
are anything like so full of interest (Plate I.).
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, pp. 123, 124.]
The Throne Room still preserved among its débris many relics of
former splendour. Fragments of blue and green porcelain, of gold-foil,
and lapis lazuli and crystal, were scattered on the floor, and
several crystal plaques with painting on the back, among them an
exceedingly fine miniature of a galloping bull on an azure ground;
while an agate plaque, bearing a relief of a dagger laid upon a
folded belt, almost equalled cameo-work in the style and delicacy
of its execution. In a small room on the north side of the Central
Court was found a curiously quaint and delicate specimen of early
fresco painting--the figure of a Little Boy Blue--more thoroughly
deserving of the title than Gainsborough's famous picture, for,
strangely enough, he is blue in his flesh-tints, picking and placing
in a vase the white crocuses that still dapple the Cretan meadows.
The northern side of the palace was finished with another portico,
and in this part of the building there came to light a series of
miniature frescoes, valuable, not only as works of art, but as
contemporary documents for the appearance, dress, and surroundings
of the mysterious people to whom this great building was once home.
Here were groups of ladies with the conventional white complexion
given by the Minoan artists to their womankind, wonderfully bedizened
with costumes resembling far more closely the evening dress of our own
day than the stately robes of classic Greece with their severe lines.
In their very low-necked dresses, with puffed sleeves, excessively
slender waists, and flounced skirts, and their hair elaborately
dressed and curled, they were as far as possible removed from our
ideas of Ariadne and her maids of honour, and might almost have
stepped out of a modern fashion-plate. 'Mais,' exclaimed a French
savant, on his first view of them, 'Mais ce sont des Parisiennes.'
These fine Court ladies were seated, or perhaps rather squatted,
according to the curious Minoan custom, in groups, conversing in
the courts and gardens, and on the balconies of a splendid building.
In the spaces beyond were groups of men, of the same reddish-brown
complexion as the Cup-bearer, wearing loin-cloths and footgear with
puttees halfway up the leg, their long black hair done up into a
crest on the crown of the head. In one group alone thirty men appear
close to a fortified post; in another, youths are hurling javelins
against a besieged city. 'The alternating succession of subjects
in these miniature frescoes suggests the contrasted episodes of
Achilles' shield. It may be that we have here parts of a continuous
historic piece; in any case these unique illustrations of great
crowds of men and women within the walls of towns and palaces supply
a new and striking commentary on the familiar passage of Homer
describing the ancient populousness of the Cretan cities.'[*] Only
the wonderful tomb paintings of ancient Egypt can excel these vivid
miniatures in bringing before us the life of a bygone civilization;
nothing else to approach them has come down from antiquity.
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, p. 126.]
The main entrance of the palace seemingly lay on the north side,
where the road from the harbour, three and a half miles distant, ran
up to the gates. Here was the one and only trace of fortification
discovered in all the excavations. The entrance passage was a stone
gangway, on the north-west side of which stood a great bastion,
with a guard room and sally-port--a slender apology for defence in
the case of a prize so vast and tempting as the Palace of Knossos.
Obviously the bastion, with its trifling accommodation for an
insignificant guard, was never meant to defend the palace against
numerous assailants, or a set siege; it could only have been sufficient
to protect it against the sudden raid of a handful of pirates sweeping
up from the port (Plate XII. 2). How was it that so great and rich a
structure came to be left thus practically defenceless? The mainland
palaces of the Mycenæan Age at Tiryns and Mycenæ are, so to speak,
buried in fortifications. Their vast walls, 57 feet thick in some
parts at Tiryns, 46 feet at Mycenæ, towering still after so many
centuries of ruin to a height of 24-1/2 feet in the case of the
smaller citadel, and of 56 feet at the great stronghold of Agamemnon;
their massive gateways, and the ingenious devices by which the
assailant was obliged to subject himself in his approach to a
destructive fire on his unshielded side--everything about them points
to a land and a time in which life and property were continually
exposed to the dangers of war, and the only security was to be
found within the gates of an impregnable stronghold. But Knossos,
far richer, far more splendid, than either Tiryns or Mycenæ, lies
virtually unguarded, its spacious courts and pillared porticoes
open on every side. Plainly, the Minoan Kings lived in a land where
peace was the rule, and where no enemy was expected to break rudely
in upon their luxurious calm. And the reason for their confidence
and security is not far to seek, if we remember the statements
of Thucydides and Herodotus.
[Illustration X: PART OF DOLPHIN FRESCO
A GREAT JAR, KNOSSOS]
'The first King known to us by tradition as having established
a navy is Minos,' says the great Athenian historian. The Minoan
Empire, like our own, rested upon sea-power; its great Kings were
the Sea-Kings of the ancient world--the first Sea-Kings known to
history, over-lords of the Ægean long before 'the grave Tyrian
trader' had learned 'the way of a ship in the sea,' or the land-loving
Egyptian had ventured his timid squadrons at the command of a great
Queen so far as Punt. And so the fortifications of their capital
and palace were not of the huge gypsum blocks which they knew so
well how to handle and work. They were the wooden walls, the long
low black galleys with the vermilion bows, and the square sail,
and the creeping rows of oars, that lay moored or beached at the
mouth of the Kairatos River, or cruised around the island coast,
keeping the Minoan peace of the Ægean. So long as the war-fleet of
Minos was in being, Knossos needed no fortifications. No expedition
of any size could force a landing on the island. If the crew of a
chance pirate-galley, desperate with hunger, or tempted by reports
of the wealth of the great palace, succeeded in eluding the vigilance
of the Minoan cruisers, and made a swift rush up from the coast,
there was the bastion with its armed guard, enough to deal with
the handful of men who could be detached for such a dare-devil
enterprise. But in the fleet of Knossos was her fate; and if once
the fleet failed, she had no second line of defence on which to
rely against any serious attack. There is every evidence that the
fleet did fail at last. The manifest marks of a vast conflagration,
perhaps repeated more than once during the long history of the
palace, and the significant fact that vessels of metal are next
to unknown upon the site, while of gold there is scarcely a trace,
with the exception of scattered pieces of gold-foil, appear to
indicate either that the Minoan Sovereigns failed to maintain the
weapon which had made and guarded their Empire, or that the Minoan
sailors met at last with a stronger fleet, or more skilful mariners.
Sea-power was lost, and with it everything.
Near the main north entrance of the palace was found one of the
great artistic treasures of the season's work. This was a plaster
relief of a great bull's head, which had once formed part of a
complete figure. These figures of bulls, as we have already seen in
connection with the Palace of Tiryns, were among the most favourite
subjects of Mycenæan and Minoan art; but nothing so fine as the
Knossos relief had yet been discovered. 'It is life-sized, or somewhat
over, and modelled in high relief. The eye has an extraordinary
prominence, its pupil is yellow, and the iris a bright red, of
which narrower bands again appear encircling the white towards the
lower circumference of the ball. The horn is of greyish-blue, and
both this and the other parts of the relief are of exceptionally
hard plaster, answering to the Italian _gesso duro_.... Such as
it is, this painted relief is the most magnificent monument of
Mycenæan plastic art that has come down to our time. The rendering
of the bull, for which the artists of the period showed so great
a predilection, is full of life and spirit. It combines in a high
degree naturalism with grandeur, and it is no exaggeration to say
that no figure of a bull, at once so powerful and so true, was
produced by later classical art.'[*] Plate XIII. shows that this
high praise is not undeserved; to match the naturalism of this
magnificent Minoan monster one must turn to the Old Kingdom tomb
reliefs of Egypt, or to the exquisite Eighteenth Dynasty statue of
a cow unearthed in 1906 by Naville from the Temple of Mentuhotep
Neb-hapet-Ra, at Deir-el-Bahri.
[Footnote *: _Annual of the British School at Athens_, vol. vi.,
p. 52.]
But the discovery which will doubtless prove in the end to be of
greater importance than any other, though as yet the main part of
its value is latent, was that of large numbers of clay tablets
incised with inscriptions in the unknown script of the Minoans. By
the end of March the finding of one tablet near the South Portico
gave earnest of future discoveries, and before the season ended
over a thousand had been collected from various deposits in the
palace. Of these deposits, one contained tablets written in
hieroglyphic; but the rest were in the linear script, 'a highly
developed form, with regular divisions between the words, and for
elegance scarcely surpassed by any later form of writing.' The
tablets vary in shape and size, some being flat, elongated bars
from two to seven and a half inches in length, while others are
squarer, ranging up to small octavo. Some of them, along with the
linear writing, supply illustrations of the objects to which the
inscriptions refer. There are human figures, chariots and horses,
cuirasses and axes, houses and barns, and ingots followed by a
balance, and accompanied by numerals which probably indicate their
value in Minoan talents. It looks as though these were documents
referring to the royal arsenals and treasuries. 'Other documents,
in which neither ciphers nor pictorial illustrations are to be
found, may appeal even more deeply to the imagination. The analogy
of the more or less contemporary tablets, written in cuneiform
script, found in the Palace of Tell-el-Amarna, might lead us to
expect among them the letters from distant governors or diplomatic
correspondence. It is probable that some of them are contracts or
public acts, which may give some actual formulæ of Minoan legislation.
There is, indeed, an atmosphere of legal nicety, worthy of the
House of Minos, in the way in which these records were secured.
The knots of string which, according to the ancient fashion, stood
in the place of locks for the coffers containing the tablets, were
rendered inviolable by the attachment of clay seals, impressed
with the finely engraved signets, the types of which represented a
great variety of subjects, such as ships, chariots, religious scenes,
lions, bulls, and other animals. But--as if this precaution was not
in itself considered sufficient--while the clay was still wet the
face of the seal was countermarked by a controlling official, and
the back countersigned and endorsed by an inscription in the same
Mycenæan script as that inscribed on the tablets themselves.'[*]
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, pp. 129, 130.]
The tablets had been stored in coffers of wood, clay, or gypsum.
The wooden coffers had perished in the great conflagration which
destroyed the palace, and only their charred fragments remained;
but the destroying fire had probably contributed to the preservation
of the precious writings within, by baking more thoroughly the clay
of which they were composed. As yet, in spite of all efforts, it
has not proved possible to decipher the inscriptions, for there has
so far been no such good fortune as the discovery of a bilingual
inscription to do for Minoan what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian
hieroglyphics. But it is not beyond the bounds of probability that
there may yet come to light some treaty between Crete and Egypt
which may put the key into the eager searcher's hands, and enable
us to read the original records of this long-forgotten kingdom
(Plate XIV.).
[Illustration XI: PILLAR OF THE DOUBLE AXES (_p_. 70)]
Even as it is, the discovery of these tablets has altered the whole
conception of the relative ages of the various early beginnings
of writing in the Eastern Mediterranean area. The Hellenic script
is seen to have been in all likelihood no late-born child of the
Phnician, but to have had an ancestor of its own race; and the old
Cretan tradition on which Dr. Evans relied at the commencement of
his work, has proved to be amply justified. 'In any case,' said Dr.
Evans, summing up his first year's results, 'the weighty question,
which years before I had set myself to solve on Cretan soil, has
found, so far at least, an answer. That great early civilization
was not dumb, and the written records of the Hellenic world were
carried back some seven centuries beyond the date of the first-known
historic writings. But what, perhaps, is even more remarkable than
this, is that, when we examine in detail the linear script of these
Mycenæan documents, it is impossible not to recognize that we have
here a system of writing, syllabic and perhaps partly alphabetic,
which stands on a distinctly higher level of development than the
hieroglyphs of Egypt, or the cuneiform script of contemporary Syria
and Babylonia. It is not till some five centuries later that we
find the first dated examples of Phnician writing.'[*]
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, p. 130.]
Among the other finds of this wonderful season's work were several
stone vases, of masterly workmanship, in marble, alabaster, and
steatite, a few vases in pottery of the stirrup type (a type common
on other Mycenæan sites, but noticeably rare at Knossos, probably
because in the great palace the bulk of such vases were of metal,
and were carried off by plunderers in the sack), and a noble head of
a lioness, with eyes and nostrils inlaid, which had evidently once
formed part of a fountain. One other discovery was most precious,
not for its own artistic value, which is slight enough, but for the
link which it gives with one of the other great sister civilizations
of the ancient world. This was the lower part of a small diorite
statuette of Egyptian workmanship, with an inscription in hieroglyphic
which reads: 'Ab-nub-mes-Sebek-user maat-kheru' (Ab-nub's child,
Sebek-user, deceased). The name of the individual and the style
of the statuette point to Sebek-user, whoever he may have been,
having been an Egyptian of the latter days of the Middle Kingdom,
probably about the Thirteenth Dynasty. This is the first link in
the chain of evidence, which, as we shall see later, shows the
continuous connection between the Minoan and Nilotic civilizations.
Nine weeks after the excavations on the hill of Kephala had begun,
the season's work was closed, and, surely, never had a like period
of time been more fruitful of fresh knowledge, more illuminative
as to the conditions of ancient life, or more destructive of hoary
prejudices. It was a new world, new because of its very ancientry,
that had begun to rise out of the buried past at the summons of
the patient explorer.
CHAPTER V
THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS' (_continued_)
The discoveries of 1900, important as they were, were evidently
far from having exhausted the hidden treasures of the House of
Minos; but even the explorer himself, who spoke of his task as
being 'barely half completed' by the first year's work, had no
conception of the magnitude of the task which yet lay before him,
or of the richness of the results which it was destined to produce.
The early work in the second year led to a further disclosure of
the large area of the Western Court of the palace, which seems
to have formed the meeting-place between the citizens of Knossos
and their royal masters. Here probably all the business between
the town and the palace-folk was transacted; stores were brought
up, received and paid for by the palace stewards, and passed into
the great magazines; and here, perhaps, the ancients of the Knossian
Assembly gathered in council to discuss affairs, as the men of the
Greek host gathered in the Iliad, while the King sat in state in
the Western Portico, presiding over their deliberations. The Portico
itself, with its wooden central pillar, 16 feet in height, must have
been a sufficiently imposing structure, while the great court on
which it opened, more than 160 feet in length, must have formed a
stately meeting-place for the citizens. Whether as market-place or
open-air council-room, this West Court must have presented a gay
and animated spectacle when the prosperity of the Minoan Empire
was at its height. Along the outer wall of the palace fronting the
court ran a projecting base, which served as a seat where merchants
or suppliants might wait, sheltered from the sun by the shadow of
the vast building at their backs, till their business fell to be
disposed of (Plate XV. 1). Meanwhile they could beguile the time
by watching the ever-changing picture in front of them, where gay
courtier figures, with gold and jewels on neck and arm, mingled with
grave citizens of substance from the town, or gathered round some
Egyptian visitor, newly arrived on board one of the Keftiu ships,
to discuss some matter of trade--a clean-cut and austere-looking
figure, in his garb of pure white linen, beside the more gaudily
clothed Minoans. When their eyes wearied of the glare of sunlight
on the red cement pavement and the brilliant crowd, they could
turn to the wall behind them, where above their heads ran a broad
zone of paintings in fresco--shrines with scenes of religion,
conventional decorations, and lifelike representations of the great
bulls which played so conspicuous, and sometimes so tragic, a part
in the Minoan economy.
But the main discoveries of the season were to lie on the opposite
side of the building from the Western Court. The Central Court,
instead of being, as it had seemed at first, the boundary of the
building on the eastern side, was now found to have been the focus
of the inner life of the palace. For on its eastern margin, as the
excavations progressed, there came to light a mass of building,
fully equal in importance to that on the western side, and perhaps
of even greater interest. Here the slope of the ground had been
such that storey had been piled above storey, even before the level
of the Central Court had been reached, so that on this side it was
not only the basement of the building that had been preserved, but
a whole complex of rooms going down from the central area to different
levels, and connected with one another by a great staircase, which,
in the course of this and subsequent seasons' excavations, was found
to have had no fewer than five flights of steps. Of this staircase,
thirty-eight steps are still preserved, and good fortune had so
brought it about that at the destruction of the palace some of
the upper chambers had fallen in such a manner that their débris
actually propped up the staircase and some of the upper floorings,
and kept them in place; and thus it has been possible to reconstruct
a large part of the arrangement of the various rooms and floors in
this quarter of the building (Plate XVI. 1). Far down below the
level of the Central Court lay a fine Colonnaded Hall about 26 feet
square, from which the great staircase, with pillars and balustrades,
led to the upper quarter (Plate XVII. 2), while adjoining it was
a stately and finely-proportioned hall--the Hall of the Double
Axes--about 80 feet in length by 26 feet in breadth, and divided
transversely by a row of square-sided pillars (Plate XVII. 1). In
this part of the building, and especially in the Colonnaded Hall,
the conflagration in which the glories of Knossos found their close
had been extremely severe, and the evidences of fierce burning
were everywhere. In a small room in an upper storey, whose floor
was near the present surface of the ground, there came to light
also evidence which suggested that the catastrophe of the palace,
in whatever form it may have come, came suddenly and unexpectedly.
The room had evidently been a sculptor's workshop, and the artist
who used it had been employed in the fabrication of those splendid
vessels of carved stone in which the Minoan magnates delighted. One
of them still stood in the room, finished and ready for transport.
It was carved from a veined limestone approaching to marble in
texture, and was of noble proportions, standing 27-1/4 inches in
height, while its girth was 6 feet 8-3/4 inches, and its weight
such that it took eleven men to carry it from the room where it had
waited so long for its resurrection. Its workmanship was superb.
The upper rim was decorated with a spiral band, while round the
bulging shoulder ran another spiral, whose central coils rose up
in bold relief into forms like the shell of a snail, and its three
handles bore another spiral design. But beside it stood another
amphora, smaller than its neighbour, and giving unmistakable proof
that the artist's work had been suddenly interrupted, for it had
only been roughed out, and its decoration had not been begun. The
skilful hand that should have finished it had perhaps to grasp
sword or spear in the last vain attempt to repel the assault of
the invader, and we can only wonder over his half-done work, and
imagine what untoward fate befell the worker, and for what unknown
master, if he survived the sack, he may have exercised the skill
that once gratified the refined taste of his Minoan lord.
Not far from the sculptor's workshop, and in the same quarter of
the palace, was found a splendid and convincing proof of the
magnificence of the appointments of the House of Minos in its palmy
days. This was a board which had evidently been designed for use
in some game, perhaps resembling draughts or chess, in which men
were moved to and fro from opposite ends. The board was over a
yard in length, and rather more than half a yard in breadth. Its
framework was of ivory, which had originally been overlaid with thin
gold plate, and it was covered with a mosaic of strips and discs
of rock-crystal, which in their turn had been backed alternately
with silver and blue enamel paste. Round its margin ran a border of
marguerites whose central bosses were convex discs of rock-crystal
which had probably been set originally in a blue paste background.
At the top of the board were four beautiful reliefs representing
nautilus shells, set round with crystal plaques, and bossed with
crystal. Below them came four large medallions, set among crystal
bars backed with silver plate, and then eleven bars of ribbed crystal
and ivory, alternating with one another. Eight shorter bars of
crystal backed with blue enamel fill spaces on either side of the
topmost section in the lower part of the board, which consists of
a two-winged compartment with ten circular openings, the medallions
of which have been broken out, but were probably of crystal backed
with silver. The remaining space of the board was filled with flat
bars of gold-plated ivory alternating with bars of crystal on the
blue enamel setting. The mere summary of its decoration conveys
no idea of the splendour of a piece of work which, as Professor
Burrows says, 'defies description, with its blaze of gold and silver,
ivory and crystal.' The Late Minoan monarch who used it--for so
gorgeous a piece of workmanship can scarcely have been designed
for anyone but a King--must have been as splendid in his amusements
as in all the other appointments of his royalty (Plate XVIII.).
The gaming-board suggested the lighter and more innocent side of
the palace life. A darker and more tragic aspect of it was hinted
at by the fresco which was found in the following season among
débris fallen from a chamber overlooking the so-called Court of
the Olive Spout. This was a picture of those sports of the arena in
which the Minoan and Mycenæan monarchs evidently took such delight,
and in which the main figures were great bulls and toreadors. In
this case the picture is one of three toreadors, two girls and
a boy, with a single bull. The girls are distinguished by their
white skins, their more vari-coloured costumes, their blue and
red diadems, and their curlier hair, but are otherwise dressed
like their male companion. In the centre of the picture the great
bull is seen in full charge. The boy toreador has succeeded in
catching the monster's horns and turning a clean somersault over
his back, while one of the girls holds out her hands to catch his
as he comes to the ground. But the other girl, standing in front
of the bull, is just at the critical moment of the cruel sport.
The great horns are almost passing under her arms, and it looks
almost an even chance whether she will be able to catch them and
vault, as her companion has done, over the bull's back, or whether
she will fail and be gored to death. With such a sport, in which
life or death depended upon an instant, in which a slip of the
foot, a misjudgment of distance, or a wavering of hand or eye meant
horrible destruction, we may be sure that the tragedies of the
Minoan bull-ring were many and terrible, and that the fair dames
of the Knossian Palace, modern in costume and appearance as they
seem to us, were as habituated to scenes of cruel bloodshed as
any Roman lady who watched the sports of the Colosseum, and saw
gladiators hack one another to pieces for her pleasure.
That the sport of the bull-ring, and particularly this exciting
and dangerous game of bull-grappling, or [Greek: taurokathapsia],
was an established and habitual form of Minoan sport is proved by
the multitude of representations of it which have survived. The
charging bull of Tiryns, the first to be discovered, was a mystery
so long as it stood alone; but it is only one of a succession of
such pictures--painted upon walls, engraved upon gems, and stamped
on seal impressions--which show that the Cretans and Mycenæans
were as fond of their bull-fights as a modern Spaniard of his.
Where did they get the toreadors, male and female, whose lives
were to be devoted to such a terrible sport--a sport practically
bound to end fatally sooner or later? We may be fairly sure, at
all events, that bull-grappling was not taken up voluntarily even
by the male, and still less by the female, toreadors; and one of
the discoveries made in the excavations of 1901, and followed up
later, gave its own suggestion of an explanation. Not very far from
the North Entrance of the palace, beneath the room where, the year
before, had been found the fresco of the Little Boy Blue gathering
crocuses--an innocent figure to cover so grim a revelation--there
came to light the walls of two deep pits, going right down, nearly
25 feet, to the virgin soil. The pits were lined with stone-work
faced with smooth cement, and it seems most probable that these
were the dungeons of the palace, in which we may imagine that the
miserable captives brought back by the great King's fleet from its
voyages of conquest and plunder, and the human tribute paid by the
conquered states, dragged out their existence until the time came
for them either to be trained for the cruel sport to which they
were devoted, or actually to take their places in the bull-ring.
If it be so, then the dungeons of Minos would keep their captives
securely enough; escape from the deep pits, with their smooth and
slippery walls, must have been practically impossible, save by
connivance on the part of the guards, or by the intervention of
some tender-hearted Ariadne.
If those dark walls could only reveal the story of the doomed lives
which they once imprisoned, we should probably be able to realize,
even more fully than we do, the shadowed side of all the glittering
splendour of Knossos, and the grim element of barbaric cruelty
which mingled with a refined artistic taste and a delight in all
forms of beauty. In none of these great civilizations of the ancient
world were splendour and cruelty separated by any great interval
from one another, nor was a very remarkable degree of refinement
inconsistent with a carelessness of life, and even such a thirst
for blood, as we would consider more natural in a savage state;
but it is seldom that the evidences of the two things lie so close
to one another as where at Knossos the innocent figure of the
crocus-gatherer almost covers the very mouth of the horrible pit
in which the captives of Minos waited for the day when their lives
were to be staked on the hazard of the arena.
Among the other treasures recovered by this season's work was a
quantity of fine painted pottery which had fallen from the upper
rooms into the basement when the palace floors collapsed. Some of
the fragments were of that early polychrome style known as 'Kamares
ware,' from the cave on the southern slope of Mount Ida, where it
was first discovered by Mr. J. L. Myres. Its designs are purely
conventional and largely geometric--zigzags, crosses, spirals, and
concentric semicircles--and are executed in beautiful tints of
brown, red, yellow, black, and white, the design being sometimes
in dark on a light ground, and sometimes in light upon dark. The
extraordinary thinness of the walls of these polychrome vessels,
and the fineness of the clay from which they are fabricated, show to
what a pitch the potter's craft had reached at the early period to
which they belong. Of the later pottery of Knossos, which substituted
naturalistic motives, executed in monochrome, for the conventional
polychrome designs of the Kamares period, many specimens were also
found during the excavations of this season.
The frescoes of the previous year were supplemented by the discovery
of a number of others, representing zones of human figures, about
one-third of life-size, set out on blue and yellow fields with
triple borders of black, red, and white bands. One well-preserved
figure is that of a girl with very large eyes, lips of brilliant
red, and curling black hair. Her high-bodied dress is looped up
at the shoulder with a bunch of blue, with red and black stripes,
and fringed ends. A border of the same robe, adorned with smaller
loops, crosses the bosom, and between its blue and red bands the
white tint of the skin displays itself, showing that the material
of the robe was diaphanous. Relief work in stucco was represented
by fragments of a life-sized figure, since pieced together by M.
Gilliéron, which must have been that of some Minoan King. The head
wears a fleur-de-lys crown and peacock plumes, and round the neck
of the finely modelled torso there runs a collar of fleur-de-lys
ornament.
Again the connection of Knossos with Egypt was evidenced, and this
time in most interesting fashion. Near the wall of a bathroom which
was unearthed by the north-west side of the North Portico, there was
found the lid of an Egyptian alabastron, bearing the cartouche of
a King, which reads, 'Neter nefer S'user-en-Ra, sa Ra Khyan.' These
are the names of one of the most famous Kings of the enigmatical
Hyksos race--Khyan--'the Embracer of the Lands,' as he called himself,
one of whose memorials, in the shape of a lion figure, carved in
granite, and bearing his cartouche upon its breast, was found as
far east as Baghdad, and is now in the British Museum. The statuette
of Sebek-user, son of Ab-nub, evidenced a connection between Knossos
and Egypt in the time of the later Middle Kingdom. This cartouche
of Khyan shows that the connection was maintained in that dark
period of Egyptian history which lay between the fall of the Middle
Kingdom and the rise of the Empire. The intercourse between Crete
and Egypt, however, goes much farther back than either the domination
of the Hyksos or the Middle Kingdom. The discovery of various stone
vessels in translucent diorite, and other hard materials familiar
to the student of Early Egyptian work as characteristic of the
taste of the earliest dynasties, shows that for the beginning of
the connection between the two great Empires we must go back to
the early days of the Old Kingdom in Egypt. The two civilizations,
as we shall see later, can be equated period by period from the
earliest times until the catastrophe of Knossos.
Among the seal impressions in clay, which were found in considerable
numbers this season, were two worthy of attention: the one of great
importance, the other scarcely of importance, but at least of interest.
The first was an impression of the figure of a female divinity,
dressed in the usual flounced garb of the Mycenæan period, standing
upon a sacred rock on which two guardian lions rest their forefeet,
the arrangement of the design being very much the same as that of
the relief on the Lion Gate at Mycenæ, only with the figure of
the goddess taking the place of the sacred pillar. In her hands the
goddess holds something which may be either a weapon or a sceptre,
and before her stands a male votary in an attitude of adoration.
In the background is a shrine with sacred columns, in front of
which rise the 'horns of consecration,' which were characteristic
of Minoan temples, as apparently also of other Eastern religious
structures. The second discovery was a clay matrix, formed from
the impression of an actual seal, and evidently designed for the
purpose of providing counterfeit impressions. In fact, we have
here an evidence, brought to light after three millenniums, of some
very ancient attempt at forgery in the very palace of the great
law-giver.
The main result of the season of 1902 was the practical reconstruction
of a large part of the Eastern or Domestic Quarter of the palace.
The chief room in this part of the building was the Queen's Megaron,
an inner chamber divided transversely by a row of pillars, along
whose bases ran a raised seat, where, no doubt, the maids of honour
of the Minoan Court were wont to sit and gossip. The pillared portico
opened upon another elongated area, a characteristic feature of
Minoan architecture, which served the purpose of a light-shaft,
illuminating the inner room. The light-well had been covered with
a brilliant white plaster, on which were the remains of a bird
fresco--a long, curving wing, with feathers of red, blue, yellow,
white, and black. Adjacent to the Queen's Megaron was a small bathroom,
constructed for a portable bath--a fragment of which, in painted
terra-cotta, was found in the portico of the adjoining hall.
The fresco of the bull-fight, already referred to, was paralleled in
subject, and more than matched in artistic quality, by the discovery,
in a small secluded room which had apparently served as a treasury,
of a deposit of ivory figurines of the most exquisite workmanship.
The height of the best preserved specimen is about 11-1/2 inches,
and it is hard to say whether the boldness of the design or the
precision with which the details of the tiny figure are wrought out
is the more admirable. The attitude is that of a man flinging himself
forth in the abandon of a violent leap, with legs and arms extended.
His straining muscles are indicated with perfect faithfulness, and
even the veins in the diminutive hand and the nails of the tiny
fingers are clearly marked. The hair had been formed by curling
strands of thin gold wire inserted in the skull. There can be no doubt
that these figures formed part of a scene like that of the toreador
fresco, for the violent motion suggested is consistent with nothing
but some desperate feat of agility like bull-grappling. Probably the
leaping figures were suspended by thin gold wires over the backs of
ivory bulls, and thus presented a realistic miniature reproduction
of the Minoan bull-ring. The extraordinary multiplication of such
scenes, in painting, in the round, on gems and seal impressions,
helps one to realize the hold which the passion of bull-fighting,
or, rather, bull-grappling, had upon the Cretan mind, a hold no
doubt connected with the important part which the bull appears
to have played in the Minoan religion (Plate XIX.).
[Illustration XII: MINOAN PAVED ROAD (_p_. 110)
NORTH ENTRANCE, KNOSSOS (_p_. 75)]
One of the season's finds was peculiarly useful and interesting, as
having yielded a considerable mass of material for reconstructing
the appearance of a Minoan town. A great chest of cypress wood--in
which perhaps some Knossian Nausicaa once kept her store of linen--had
been decorated with a series of enamelled plaques, depicting a
Minoan town, with its towers and houses, its fields and cattle
and orchards. The chest itself had perished in the conflagration
of the palace, leaving only a charred mass of woodwork; but the
plaques survived. Some of them represent houses, evidently of wood
and plaster fabric, for the round ends of the beams show in the
frontage. On the ground-floor are the doors, in some cases double;
above are second and third storeys, with rows of windows fitted with
some red material, which may have been oiled and tinted parchment,
while some of the houses have an attic storey with windows above the
third floor. It is evident that the houses of the Minoan burghers
were not the closely-packed mud hovels, separated from one another
only by narrow alleys, which characterize the plan of the Egyptian
town discovered by Petrie at Illahun, but were substantial structures,
giving accommodation which, even to modern ideas, would seem
respectable. Of course, one must suppose that the poorer quarters
of the town would scarcely be represented on a fabric designed
for use in the palace; but the actual remains of a Minoan town,
unearthed at Gournia by Mrs. H. B. Hawes, show that that town,
at least, was largely composed of houses which must have pretty
closely resembled those on the porcelain plaques of Knossos.
Most surprising of all, however, in many respects, was the revelation
of the amazingly complete system of drainage with which the palace
was provided. The gradient of the hill which underlay the domestic
quarter of the building enabled the architect to arrange for a
drainage system on a scale of completeness which is not only
unparalleled in ancient times, but which it would be hard to match
in Europe until a period as late as the middle of the nineteenth
century of our era. A number of stone shafts, descending from the
upper floors, lead to a well-built stone conduit, measuring 1 metre
by 1/2 metre, whose inner surface is lined with smooth cement.
These shafts were for the purpose of leading into this main conduit
the surface-water from the roofs of the palace buildings, and thus
securing a periodical flushing of the drains. In connection with
this surface-water system, there was elaborated a system of latrines
and other contrivances of a sanitary nature, which are 'staggeringly
modern' in their appointments.
In the north-eastern quarter, under the Corridor of the Game-Board,
are still preserved some of the terra-cotta pipes which served as
connections to the main drain. They are actually faucet-jointed
pipes of quite modern type, each section 2-1/2 feet in length and
6 inches in diameter at the wide end, and narrowing to 4 inches at
the smaller end. 'Jamming was carefully prevented by a stop-ridge
that ran round the outside of each narrow end a few inches from the
mouth, while the inside of the butt, or broader end, was provided
with a raised collar that enabled it to bear the pressure of the
next pipe's stop-ridge, and gave an extra hold for the cement that
bound the two pipes together'[*] (Plate XX. 2).
[Footnote *: R. M. Burrows, 'The Discoveries in Crete,' p. 9.]
Indeed, the hydraulic science of the Minoan architects is altogether
wonderful in the completeness with which it provided for even the
smallest details. On a staircase near the east bastion, on the
lower part of the slope, a stone runnel for carrying off the surface
water follows the line of the steps. Lest the steepness of the
gradient should allow the water to descend too rapidly and flood
the pavement below, the runnel is so constructed that the water
follows a series of parabolic curves, and the rapidity of its fall
is thus checked by friction. The main drains are duly provided
with manholes for inspection, and 'are so roomy,' says Dr. Evans,
'that two of my Cretan workmen spent days within them clearing out
the accumulated earth and rubble without physical inconvenience.'
Those who remember the many extant descriptions of the sanitary
arrangements, or rather the want of sanitary arrangements, in such
a town as the Edinburgh of the end of the eighteenth century, will
best appreciate the care and forethought with which the Minoan
architects, more than 3,000 years earlier, had provided for the
sanitation of the great Palace of Minos (Plates XVI. 2 and XX. 1).
Turning from the material to the spiritual, evidence as to the
religious conceptions of the inhabitants of the palace was forthcoming
in two instances. In one early chamber there was found a little
painted terra-cotta object consisting of a group of three columns
standing on an oblong platform. The square capitals of the columns
each carried two round beams, their ends showing, exactly as in
the case of the pillar on the Lion Gate at Mycenæ; and on the top
of the beams doves were perched. Here is the evidence of a cult in
which a Dove Goddess--a Goddess of the Air--was worshipped under
the form of a trinity of pillars; and confirmation of the existence
of such a form of belief was afforded by the discovery, in the
south-east corner of the palace, of a little shrine, in which,
along with the usual 'horns of consecration' and sacred Double
Axes, were found three figures of a goddess, of very archaic form,
on the head of one of which there was also perched a dove. The Double
Axes in the shrine again emphasized the importance in the palace
worship of the Labrys, and underlined the suggestion that the Palace
of Knossos is nothing more nor less than the legendary Labyrinth of
Minos. 'That the _Labrys_ symbol should be the distinguishing cult
sign of the Minoan Palace makes it more and more probable that
we must in fact recognize in this vast building, with its maze of
corridors and chambers and its network of subterranean ducts, the
local habitation and name of the traditional Labyrinth.'[*]
[Footnote *: A. J. Evans, _Annual of the British School at Athens_,
vol. viii., p. 103.]
The season of 1903 was marked by two important discoveries within
the palace area. Of these we may first consider the so-called Theatral
Area. (Plates XXI. and XXII.). Such an area had been found at Phæstos
by the Italian explorers, and it was natural to expect that something
corresponding to it would not be lacking at Knossos. When found,
it proved to be of later date and of more developed form than the
structure at Phæstos; but the general idea was the same. At the
extreme north-west angle of the palace, abutting on the West Court,
there was discovered a paved area about 40 by 30 feet, divided up
the centre by a causeway. On its eastern and southern sides it
was overlooked by two tiers of steps, the eastern tier having at
one time consisted of eighteen rows, while the greatest number on
the south side was six, diminishing to three as the ground sloped
upwards. At the southeastern angle, where the two tiers met, a
bastion of solid masonry projected between them.
[Illustration XIII: RELIEF OF BULL'S HEAD (_p_. 77)
From 'The Palace of Minos,' by Arthur J. Evans, in _The Monthly
Review_.]
This area, for whatever purpose it may have been designed, was
evidently an integral portion of the Later Palace structure, for no
fewer than five causeways converge upon it from different directions;
but it was in no sense a thoroughfare, and the rows of steps around
it do not lead, and can never have led, anywhere. What can have been
the purpose of its existence? Dr. Evans's view, which is generally
accepted, is that it was some sort of a primitive theatre, where
the inhabitants of the palace gathered to witness sports and shows
of some kind, the tiers of steps affording sitting accommodation
for them, while the bastion at the south-east angle may have been
a kind of Royal Box, from which Minoan majesty and its Court circle
surveyed the games. There would be accommodation on the steps for
some four or five hundred spectators.
It must be confessed that the place leaves much to be desired as
a theatre. The shallow steps must have made somewhat uncomfortable
sitting-places, though one must remember that the Minoan ladies
often, apparently, adopted a sitting posture which was more like
squatting than sitting, and that a seat found in 1901, evidently
designed for a woman's use, was only a trifle over 5 inches in
height. But male dignity required more lofty sitting accommodation;
the seat of the throne of Minos is nearly 23 inches high, and the
spectators of the Knossian theatre cannot have been all women.
Neither does the shape of the area appear to be particularly well
adapted to the purpose suggested; and, on the whole, if it were really
designed for a theatre, we must admit that the Minoan architects
were less happily inspired in its erection than in most of their
other works. At the same time, however, the obstinate fact remains
that we can suggest no other conceivable purpose which the place can
have served; and so, until some more likely use can be suggested,
we are scarcely entitled to demur to Dr. Evans's theory.
Admitting, then, for want of any better explanation, that it may
have been a Theatral Area, what were the games or shows which were
here presented to the Minoan Court and its dependents? Certainly
not the bull-fight. For that there is manifestly no space, as the
flat area is not larger than a good-sized room; while the undefended
position of the spectators would as certainly have resulted in
tragedies to them as to the toreadors. But from the great rhyton
found at Hagia Triada, from a steatite relief found at Knossos
in Igor, and from various seal-impressions, we know that boxing
was one of the favourite sports of the Minoans, as it was of the
Homeric and the classical Greeks; and the Theatral Area may have
served well enough for such exhibitions as those in which Epeus
knocked out Euryalus, and Odysseus smashed the jaw of Irus. Or
perhaps it may have been the scene of less brutal entertainments
in the shape of dances, such as those which delighted the eyes of
Odysseus at the Palace of Alcinous. To this day the Cretans are
fond of dancing, and in ancient times the dance had often a religious
significance, and was part of the ceremonial of worship. So that it
is not impossible that we have here a spot whose associations with
the House of Minos are both religious and literary--'the Choros
(or dancing-ground) which Dædalus wrought in broad Knossos for
fair-haired Ariadne' (Iliad XVIII., 590).
If the Theatral Area be really the scene of the palace sports,
it has for us a romantic as well as an historical interest; for
Plutarch tells us that it was at the games that Ariadne first met
Theseus, and fell in love with him on witnessing his grace and
prowess in the wrestling ring. It may be permissible to indulge
the imagination with the thought that we can still behold the very
place where, while the grim King and his gaily-bedecked courtiers
looked on at the sports which were meant only as a prelude to a
dreadful tragedy, the actors in one of the great romances of the
world found love waiting for them before the gates of death. In
any case, the spot may well have been a most fitting one for the
birth of an immortal tale of love. For it is not improbable that,
in its religious aspect, it had a connection with a greater, a
Divine namesake of the human Ariadne. The great goddess of Knossos,
in one aspect of her nature, was the same whom the Greeks knew
later as Aphrodite, the foam-born Goddess of Love. To this goddess
there was attached in Crete the native dialect epithet of 'The
Exceeding Holy One,' 'Ariadne,' and the Theatral Area may well
have been the place where ceremonial dances were performed in her
honour.
Within the palace walls abundant remains of fine polychrome ware of
the Middle Minoan period were found as the season's work went on.
The dungeons of the preceding year's excavations were supplemented
by the discovery of four more, making six in all, and it was shown
that these pits must have belonged to a very early period in the
history of the buildings, for they have no structural connection
with the walls of the Later Palace, which, indeed, cross them in
some places. But the great discovery within the area was that of
the Temple Repositories. As the eastern side of the palace gave
evidence of having been the domestic quarter, so the west-central
part showed traces of having had a special religious significance
in the palace life. Religion, indeed, seems to have bulked very
largely in the economy of the House of Minos, which is what might
have been expected when one remembers the closeness of the relations
between Zeus and Minos as depicted in the legends, and realizes
that very probably the Kings of Knossos were Priest-Kings, and
perhaps even incarnations of the Bull-god.
Near the west-central part of the palace the Double Axe sign occurred
very frequently, and other evidences seemed to suggest that somewhere
in this vicinity there must have been a sanctuary of some sort.
This season's explorations confirmed the suggestion, for, near
the Pillar Room at the west side of the Central Court, there were
discovered two large cists, which had been used for the storage of
objects connected with the palace cult. The cist which was first
opened was closely packed, to a depth of 1.10 metres, with vases; and
below these there was a deposit of fragments and complete examples of
faïence, including the figures of a Snake Goddess and her votaresses,
votive robes and girdles, cups and vases with painted designs, and
reliefs of cows and calves, wild goats and kids. In fact, this
Repository was a perfect treasure-house of objects in faïence; but
in the second cist such objects were wanting, with the exception
that a missing portion of the Snake Goddess was found, the place
of the faïence being taken by gold-foil and crystal plaques.
Some of the small faïence reliefs are of particularly exquisite
design and execution, particularly one of a Cretan wild-goat and
her young, the subject being executed in pale green, with dark
sepia markings, and characterized by great directness and naturalism
of treatment. Most interesting, however, were the figures of the
Snake Goddess and her votaresses. The goddess is 13-1/2 inches in
height. She wears a high tiara of purplish-brown, with a white
border, and her dress consists of a richly embroidered jacket,
with laced bodice, and a skirt with a short double _panier_ or
apron. Her hair is dressed in a fringe above her forehead, and
falls behind on her neck and shoulders; the eyes and eyebrows are
black, and the ears are of extraordinary size; the bust is almost
entirely bare. But the curious feature of the little figure is
that around her are coiled three snakes. One, which is grasped in
the right hand, passes up the arm, descends behind the shoulders
and down the left arm to the hand, which holds the tail. Two other
snakes are interlaced around her hips, and a fourth coils itself
around the high tiara. The figure of the votaress is somewhat similar;
but her skirt is flounced all the way down in the regular Minoan
style, and she holds a snake in her right hand. The characteristic
feature of both figures is the modernness of their lines, which
are as different as possible from those of the statues of classic
Greece. The waist is exceedingly slender, and altogether 'the lines
adopted are those considered ideal by the modern corset-maker rather
than those of the sculptor.'
There can be little doubt that these tiny figures point to the
worship of an earth goddess, whose emblem is the snake--the other
aspect of the heavenly divinity whose symbols are the doves. It may
be noted that at Gournia Miss Boyd (Mrs. Hawes) found a primitive
figure of a goddess, twined with snakes and accompanied by doves,
together with a low, three-legged altar, and the familiar horns
of consecration. Strangely enough, along with the Snake Goddess
of Knossos there was found in the Temple Repositories a cross of
veined marble, with limbs of equal length, which Dr. Evans believes
to have actually been the central object of worship in the cult,
and which he has placed in this position in his reconstruction
of the little shrine. This discovery, 'pointing to the fact that
a cross of orthodox Greek shape was not only a religious symbol
of the Minoan cult, but an actual object of worship, cannot but
have a profound interest in its relation to the later cult of the
same emblem which still holds the Christian world.' The fact of
the equal-limbed cross having at so early a date been the object
of worship also suggests the reason why the Eastern Church has
always preferred the Greek form of cross to the unequal-limbed form
of the Western Church.
Outside the area of the palace proper discoveries of almost equal
importance were made. About 130 yards to the east of the Northern
Entrance there came to light the walls of a building which Dr. Evans
has designated the Royal Villa. It proved to be by far the finest
example yet discovered of Minoan domestic architecture on a moderate
scale, and contained a finely preserved double staircase; while among
the relics found within its walls were some very beautiful examples
of the ceramic art, including a fine 'stirrup' or 'false-necked'
vase of the Later Palace style, decorated in lustrous orange-brown
on a paler lustred ground. Still more beautiful was a tall painted
jar, nearly 4 feet in height, bearing an exquisite papyrus design
in relief (Plate XXIII.).
[Illustration XIV: CLAY TABLET WITH LINEAR SCRIPT, KNOSSOS (_pp_.
80 & 241)
From 'The Palace of Minos,' by Arthur J. Evans, in _The Monthly
Review_]
The main feature of the Villa was a long pillared hall, measuring
about 37 by 15 feet. At the one end of it was a raised daïs, separated
by a balustrade from the rest of the hall, and approached by an
opening in the balustrade with three steps. Immediately in face
of the opening a square niche breaks the wall behind the daïs,
and here stand the broken fragments of a gypsum throne. A fine
stone lamp of lilac gypsum stands on the second step of the daïs
(Plate XXIV.). The two rows of pillars which run down the hall
divide it into a nave and side aisles, and the hall presents all the
elements of a primitive basilica, with its throne for the presiding
Bishop or Priest-King. It is possible that we have here the first
suggestion of that style of architecture which, passing through the
stage where the King-Archon of Athens sat in the 'Stoa Basilike'
to try cases of impiety, found its full development at last in
the Roman Basilica, the earliest type of Christian church. 'Is
the Priest-King of Knossos, who here gave his decisions,' says
Professor Burrows, 'a direct ancestor of Prætor and Bishop, seated
in the Apse within the Chancel, speaking to the people that stood
below in Nave and Aisles?'[*]
[Footnote *: 'The Discoveries in Crete,' pp. 10, 11.]
So far in the explorations at Knossos metal-work had been conspicuous
by its absence. That the Minoans were skilled metal-workers was
obvious, for many of their ceramic triumphs presented manifest
indications of having been adaptations of metal forms; and the gold
cups of Vaphio, which, there can be little doubt, came originally
from Crete, bore witness to a skill which would not have disgraced
the best Renaissance goldsmiths. But the men, whoever they may
have been, who plundered the palace at the time of its great
catastrophe, had done their work thoroughly, and left behind them
little trace either of the precious metals or of bronze. It turned
out, however, that in a block of building which stands between the
West Court and the paved area to the north-west of the palace,
a strange chance had preserved enough to testify to the art of
the bronze-workers of Knossos. One of the floors of this building
had sunk in the conflagration before the plunderers had had time
to explore the room beneath, and under its débris were found five
magnificent bronze vessels--four large basins and a single-handled
ewer. The largest basin, 39 centimetres in diameter, is exquisitely
wrought with a foliated margin and handle, while another has a
lovely design of conventionalized lilies on its border.
Mention has already been made of the paved causeway which bisects
the Theatral Area of the palace. This was found, in 1904, to have
a continuation in the shape of a well-made road leading in a
north-westerly direction towards the hillside (Plate XII. 1). It
was overlaid by a Roman roadway, and an interesting comparison
was thus made possible between the Minoan work and that of the
great road-makers of later days. The Roman road came out rather
badly from the comparison, the earlier construction being superior
in every respect. The central part of the Minoan road consisted
of a well-paved causeway, rather more than 4-1/2 feet wide, while
on either side of this there extended to a breadth of more than
3-1/2 feet a strip of pebbles, clay, and pounded potsherds rammed
hard, making the whole breadth of the road almost 12 feet. Close
by this first European example of scientific road-making ran the
remains of water conduits, which may have led from a spring on Mount
Juktas, and near the road also were found magazines of clay tablets,
giving details of numbers of chariots, bows, and arrows, while in
the immediate neighbourhood of these were two actual deposits of
bronze-headed shafts.
As the Minoan road was followed up in 1905, it led the explorers
towards an important building in the face of the hill to the north-west.
Its exploration was rendered extremely difficult by the fact that
its masonry ran right back into the side of the hill, which was
covered by an olive wood, beneath whose roots lay a stratum made
up of the remains of Græco-Roman houses. But the building, when
explored, proved to be well worth the labour, for the Little Palace,
as it is called, was an important structure with a frontage of
over 114 feet, and its pillared hall was worthy of comparison even
with the fine rooms of its great neighbour. In Late Minoan times
part of this fine hall had been used as a shrine, and in it were
found, along with the usual 'horns of consecration,' three fetish
idols, grotesque natural concretions of quasi-human type. Of these,
the largest had some resemblance to a woman of ample contours, while
a smaller nodule suggested the figure of an infant, and near it
was a rude representation of a Cretan wild-goat. The third nodule
was of apelike aspect. In view of all the religious associations
of Crete, it can scarcely be doubted that these grotesque images,
'not made with hands,' represent Mother Rhea, the infant Zeus, and
the goat Amaltheia. The cult of stones, meteorites and concretions
such as these of the Little Palace, has been widespread in all
ages; one has only to remember the black stone which forms the
most sacred treasure of Mecca, the black stone which stood in the
Temple of the Great Mother at Rome, and the image of the great
goddess Diana at Ephesus, 'which fell down from Jupiter.' Hesiod's
story of how Kronos or Saturn devoured a stone under the belief
that he was swallowing the infant Zeus evidently belongs to the
recollections of a worship in which such natural idols as these
were adored.
Hitherto Knossos had yielded only one small and inadequate
representation of that seafaring enterprise upon which the Minoan
power rested, though even this had, in its own way, a certain
suggestiveness of the romance and terror of the sea. It was a
seal-impression, found in 1903, in the Temple Repositories, on
which a great sea-monster, with dog's head and open jaws, is seen
rising from the waves and attacking a fisherman, who stands up in
his light skiff endeavouring to defend himself. The Little Palace
yielded a somewhat more adequate representation of the Minoan marine
in the shape of another seal-impression, which showed part of a
vessel carrying one square sail, and propelled also by a single
bank of oars, whose rowers sit under an awning. Imposed upon the
figure of the vessel is that of a gigantic horse, and the impression
has been construed as a record of the first importation of the
thoroughbred horse into Crete, probably from Libya, an interpretation
which seems to demand a certain amount of faith and imagination, for
Mosso's criticism, that 'the perspective is faulty,' is extremely
mild. But at least the representation of the vessel itself gives
us some idea of the galleys which maintained the Minoan peace in
the Ægean.
[Illustration XV: (1) PALACE WALL, WEST SIDE. MOUNT JUKTAS IN BACKGROUND
(_p_. 84)
(2) BATHROOM, KNOSSOS]
Among other treasures yielded by the Little Palace was a vessel of
black steatite in the shape of a bull's head. The idea was already
familiar from other examples, but the execution of this specimen
was beyond comparison fine. 'The modelling of the head and curly
hair,' says Dr. Evans, 'is beautifully executed, and some of the
technical details are unique. The nostrils are inlaid with a kind
of shell like that out of which cameos are made, and the one eye
which was perfectly preserved presented a still more remarkable
feature. The eye within the socket was cut out of a piece of
rock-crystal, the pupil and iris being indicated by means of colours
applied to the lower face of the crystal which had been hollowed
out, and had a certain magnifying power.'[*] Students of Early
Egyptian art will be reminded of the details of the eyes in the
statues of Rahotep and Nefert, and in the bronze statue of Pepy.
'Even after the Cnossian ivories, faience figurines, and faience
and plaster reliefs,' writes Mr. Hogarth, 'after the Cnossian and
Haghia Triadha frescoes, after the finest "Kamares" pottery, and
the finest intaglios, the Vaphio goblets and the Mycencæ dagger
blades, one was still not prepared for the bull's head _rhyton_
... with its painted transparencies for eyes, and its admirable
modelling, and the striking contrast between the black polished
steatite of the mass and the creamy cameo shell of the inlay work.[**]
[Footnote *: The _Times_, August 27, 1908.]
[Footnote **: _Fortnightly Review_, October, 1908, pp. 600, 601.]
Within the palace proper, the work of 1907 witnessed the discovery
of a huge beehive chamber excavated in the rock underlying the
Southern Portico. It had been filled in with later débris and sherds
of the Middle Minoan period, and evidently belonged to a period
antedating that of the construction of even the earliest palace.
Its floor was only reached in 1908 by a small shaft at the depth
of 52 feet from the summit of its cupola; and as yet the floor
remains largely unexplored, and may be expected to furnish valuable
information as to the Early Minoan culture. Professor Murray has
suggested that this huge underground vault may be the actual Labyrinth
of the legend, the underground Temple of the Bull-God, and the scene
of the dark tragedies which belong to the story of the Minotaur;
but for the confirmation or negation of this suggestion we must
wait until the great vault itself has been thoroughly explored.
Such, then, have been the outstanding results of the excavation
of the ancient palace of the Cretan Sea-Kings, so far as it has
yet proceeded. Of the wealth of material which has been brought to
light much, of course, still waits, and, perhaps, may long wait,
for interpretation. The facts are there, but the significance of
them is not always easily discerned. But, at least, the importance
of the supreme fact cannot be questioned; the emergence of this
magnificent relic of a civilization, so great and so advanced as to
fill the mind with wonder, so curiously corroborating the ancient
legends as to the greatness and power of the House of Minos, and
yet so absolutely lost as to have left no trace of itself, save
in romantic story, until the patience and skill of present-day
explorers restored its relics to the light of day to tell, though
as yet only imperfectly, their own tale of splendour and disaster.
The interpretation and co-ordination of the immense body of material
gathered by Dr. Evans must for long be the work of scholars. Perhaps
it is not too much to hope that when the Minoan script has at length
yielded up its secrets we shall be able to comprehend clearly those
historical outlines of the rise and magnificence and fall of a
great monarchy and culture, which at present have to be cautiously
and sometimes precariously inferred from the indications afforded
by scraps of potsherd and fragments of stone or metal. And then
the actual story of the House of Minos will appeal to all. To-day,
perhaps, the main impression left on the ordinary student by this
resurrection is one of sadness. Here was a kingdom so great and
so imposing, a civilization so highly advanced and so full of the
joy of living. And it has all passed away and been forgotten, with
its vivid life, and its hopes and fears; and we can only wonder
how life looked to the men and women who peopled the courts of
the vast palace, and what part was played by them in the fragments
of old legend that have come down to us.
The pathos of this aspect of his discoveries has not been missed by
the explorer. Writing of the restoration of the Queen's apartment
of the palace, a restoration rendered necessary by the decomposing
action of wind and rain on the long-buried materials, Dr. Evans
says: 'From the open court to the east, and the narrower area that
flanks the inner section of the hall, the light pours in between
the piers and columns just as it did of old. In cooler tones it
steals into the little bathroom behind. It dimly illumines the
painted spiral frieze above its white gypsum dado, and falls below
on the small terra-cotta bath-tub, standing much as it was left
some three and a half millenniums back. The little bath bears a
painted design of a character that marks the close of the great
"Palace Style." By whom was it last used? By a Queen, perhaps,
and mother, for some "Hope of Minos"--a hope that failed.'[*]
[Footnote *: The _Times_, August 27, 1908.]
The little bath-tub in the Queen's Megaron at Knossos takes its
place with the children's toys of the Twelfth Dynasty town at Kahun
in bringing home to us the actual humanity of the people who used
to be paragraphs in Lemprière's 'Classical Dictionary' or Rollin's
'Ancient History.'
CHAPTER VI
PHÆSTOS, HAGIA TRIADA, AND EASTERN CRETE
We have followed the fortunes of the excavations at Knossos in
considerable detail, not only as being the most important, but as
illustrating also in the fullest manner the legendary and religious
history of Crete. But they are very far from being the only important
investigations which have been carried on in the island, and it
may even be said that, had Knossos never been excavated, it would
still have been possible, from the results of the excavations made
at other sites, to deduce the conclusion which has been arrived at
as to the supreme position of Crete in the early Ægean civilization.
Both in the Iliad and the Odyssey Phæstos is mentioned along with
Knossos as one of the chief towns of Crete; and it is at and near
Phæstos that the most extensive and important remains of Minoan
culture have been discovered, apart from the work at Knossos. The
splendid valley of the Messara, on the southern side of the island,
is dominated towards its seaward end by three hills, rising in steps
one above the other, and on the lowest of the three, overlooking
the plain, stood the Palace of Phæstos, the second great seat of
the Minoan lords of Crete. As in the case of Knossos, a few blocks
of hewn stone, standing among the furrows of the cornfield which
occupied the site, were the only indications of the great structure
which had once crowned the hill, and it was the existence of these
which induced the Italian Archæological Mission to attempt the
excavation. In April, 1900, the first reconnaissance of the ground
was made, with no very encouraging results. By September of the
same year the great palace had been discovered, though, of course,
the full revelation of its features was a matter of much longer
time. The work has been carried on by Professor Halbherr, Signor
Pernier, and others, concurrently with the excavations of Dr. Evans;
and the result has been the revelation of a palace, similar in many
respects to the House of Minos at Knossos, though on a somewhat
smaller scale, and characterized, like the Labyrinth, by distinct
periods of building. At Phæstos, indeed, the remains of the earlier
palace, consisting of the Theatral Area and West Court, with the
one-columned portico at its south end, are of earlier date than the
existing important architectural features at Knossos, belonging to
the period known as Middle Minoan II., the time when the beautiful
polychrome Kamares ware was in its glory, while the main scheme
of the palace at Knossos, as at present existing, must be placed
somewhere in the following period, Middle Minoan III.
This first palace of Phæstos had been destroyed, like the early
palace at Knossos, but not at the same time, for it apparently lasted
till the beginning of the Late Minoan period, while at Knossos the
catastrophe of the first palace took place at the end of Middle
Minoan II. From this fact it has been suggested that the first
destruction of Knossos was the result of civil war, in which the
lords of Phæstos overthrew their northern brethren of the greater
palace, but the evidence seems somewhat scanty to bear such an
inference.
After the catastrophe at Phæstos, a thick layer of lime mixed with
clay and pebbles was thrown over the remains of the ruined structure
as a preparation for the rebuilding of the palace, and thus the
relics of the earlier building, which are now unveiled in close
connection with the later work, though on a rather lower level,
were completely covered up before the second palace rose upon the
site. The Theatral Area at Phæstos to some extent resembles that
of Knossos, but is simpler, lacking the tier of steps at right
angles to the main tier, and lacking also the Bastion, or Royal
Box, which at Knossos occupies the angle of the junction of the
two tiers. It consists of a paved court, ending, on the west side,
in a flight of ten steps, more than 60 feet in length, behind which
stands a wall of large limestone blocks. As at Knossos, a flagged
pathway ran across the area, obliquely, however, in this case.
Beneath the structure of the second palace were discovered some
of the chambers of the earlier building, with a number of very
fine Kamares vases (Plate XXVI.).
But the chief glory of the palace at Phæstos is the great flight
of steps, 45 feet in width, which formed its state entrance, the
broadest and most splendid staircase that ever a royal palace had
(Plate XXVI.). 'No architect,' says Mosso, 'has ever made such a
flight of steps out of Crete.' At the head of the entrance staircase
stood a columned portico, behind which was the great reception-hall
of the palace. The halls and courts of Phæstos are comparable for
spaciousness even with the finest of those at Knossos, and, indeed,
the Megaron, so called (wrongly), of Phæstos is a more spacious
apartment than the Hall of the Double Axes at the sister palace,
the area of the Phæstos chamber being over 3,000 square feet, as
against the 2,000 odd square feet of the Hall of the Double Axes.
The Central Court, 150 feet long by 70 broad, is a fine paved
quadrangle, but has not the impressiveness of the Central Court
at Knossos, with its area of about 20,000 square feet.
On the whole, the two palaces wonderfully resemble each other in
the general ideas that determine their structure, though, of course,
there are many variations in detail. But, as contrasted with the
sister palace, the stately building at Phæstos has exhibited a
most extraordinary dearth of the objects of art which formed so
great a part of the treasures of Knossos. Apart from the Kamares
vases and one graceful flower fresco, little of importance has
been found. The comparative absence of metal-work at Knossos can
be explained by the greed of the plunderers who sacked the palace;
but Phæstos is almost barren, not of metal-work alone. All the
more interesting, therefore, was the discovery, made in 1908, of
the largest inscribed clay tablet which has yet been found on any
Minoan site. This was a disc of terra-cotta, 6.67 inches in diameter,
and covered on both sides with an inscription which coils round
from the centre outwards. 'It is by far the largest hieroglyphic
inscription yet discovered in Crete. It contains some 241 signs
and 61 sign groups, and it exhibits the remarkable peculiarity
that every sign has been separately impressed on the clay while
in a soft state by a stamp or punch. It is, in fact, a printed
inscription.'[*] One of the hieroglyphs, frequently repeated, is
the representation of the head of a warrior wearing a feathered
headdress which remarkably resembles the crested helmets of the
Pulosathu, or Philistines, on the reliefs of Ramses III. at Medinet
Habu. From his analysis of the various signs Dr. Evans has concluded
that the inscription is not Cretan, but may represent a script,
perhaps Lycian, in use in the coast-lands of Asia Minor. No
interpretation of the writing can yet be given, but Dr. Evans has
pointed out evidences of a metrical arrangement among the signs,
and has suggested that the inscription may conceivably be a hymn
in honour of the Anatolian Great Mother, a goddess who corresponded
to the Nature Goddess worshipped in Minoan Crete, whose traditions
have survived under the titles of Rhea, Britomartis, Aphrodite
Ariadne, and Artemis Dictynna. The pottery in connection with which
it was found dates it to at least 1600, perhaps to 1800, B.C.[**]
[Footnote *: A. J. Evans, 'Scripta Minoa,' p. 24.]
[Footnote **: See Appendix, p. 264.]
The hill of Hagia Triada, about two miles to the north-west of
Phæstos, proved sufficiently fruitful to compensate the Italian
explorers for the incomprehensible barrenness of Phæstos. Here
stand the ruins of the Venetian church of St. George, itself built
of stone which was hewn originally by Minoan masons. The retaining
wall of the raised ground in front of the church had given way,
exposing a section of archæological relics, Minoan potsherds, and
fragments of alabaster, to a depth of more than six feet; and this
accidental exposure led to the discovery of the Royal Villa, which
the lords of Phæstos had erected as a dependency of the great palace,
or as a country seat. Hagia Triada proved to be as rich in objects of
artistic interest as Phæstos had been poor. Some of the fresco work
discovered, in particular a scene with a cat hunting a red pheasant,
reminiscent of the hunting-cat scene on the Mycenæ dagger-blade,
is of extraordinary merit. The cat scene is judged by Professor
Burrows to be superior in vivacity to the famous Egyptian Eighteenth
Dynasty tomb-picture of the marsh-fowler with the trained cat,
though to those familiar with the wonderful dash of the Egyptian
work in question this will seem a hard saying.
There can be nothing but admiration, however, for the three astonishing
vases of black soapstone which were discovered at the villa. They
remain a most convincing evidence of the maturity of Minoan art,
and the mastery to which it had attained over the expression of
the human form in low relief. It has been already noticed that
the fine Minoan pottery is largely an imitation of earlier work
in metal, and this is true also of these stone vases. What the
Minoan craftsman was capable of when he was allowed to deal with the
precious metals we can see from the few specimens which have survived
to the present time. The Vaphio gold cups, with their bull-trapping
scenes, are generally admitted now to be of Cretan workmanship,
though found in the Peloponnese, and Benvenuto Cellini himself
need not have been ashamed to turn out such work, admirable alike
in design and execution. Little of such gold-work has survived, for
obvious reasons. The metal was too precious to escape the plunderer
in the evil days which fell upon the Minoan Empire; and the artistic
value of the vases and bowls would seem trifling to the conquerors
in comparison with the worth of the metal.
But the artists of the time worked not only in the precious metals,
but also in stone, trying to reproduce there the forms with which
they had decorated the vessels wrought in the costlier medium.
Probably, when the steatite was worked to its finished shape, it was
covered with a thin coating of gold-leaf, at least this suggestion,
originally made by Evans, has been confirmed in one instance, where
part of the gold-leaf was found still adhering to a vase discovered
at Palaikastro by Mr. Currelly. In the case of the Hagia Triada
vases the gold-coated steatite had no charms for the plunderer,
who merely stripped off the gold-leaf and left its foundation to
testify to us of the skill of these ancient craftsmen. The largest
of the three stands 18 inches in height. It is divided by horizontal
bands into four zones. Three of these show boxers in all attitudes
of the prize-ring--striking, guarding, falling; while the second
zone from the top exhibits one of the bull-grappling scenes so
common in Minoan art, with two charging bulls, one of them tossing
on his horns a gymnast who appears to have missed his leap and
paid the penalty. The figures are admirably modelled and true to
nature, save for the convention of the exaggeratedly slender Minoan
waist, which seems to create an impression of unusual height and
length of limb. The second vase (Plate XXVII.) is much smaller, and
represents a procession which has been variously interpreted as a
band of soldiers or marines returning in triumph from a victory, or
as a body of harvesters marching in some sort of harvest thanksgiving
festival. This interpretation seems, on the whole, the more probable
of the two. In the middle of the procession is a figure, interesting
from the fact that he is so different from his companions. He has
not the usual pinched-in waist of the Cretans, but is quite normally
developed, and he bears in his hand the _sistrum_, or metal rattle,
which was one of the regular sacred musical instruments of the
Egyptians. In all probability he is meant to represent an Egyptian
priest, though what he is doing in a Cretan festival it is hard to
tell. The three figures, possibly of women, who are following him,
have their mouths wide open, and are evidently singing lustily.
One of the figures, that of an elderly man, who appears to be the
chief of the party, is clad in a curious, copelike garment, which
may be either a ceremonial robe or a wadded cuirass. Apart from all
questions of what kind of incident the artist meant to represent,
the artistic value of his work is unquestionable. It has been said
of this little vase that 'not until the fifth century B. C. should
we find a sculptor capable of representing, with such absolute
truth, a party of men in motion.'
The smallest of the three vases, only 4 inches in height, bears the
representation of a body of soldiers with heads and feet showing
above and below their great shields, which are locked together
into a wall. The shields are evidently covered with hide, as the
bulls' tails still show upon them. But the interest centres in
two figures which stand apart from the others. One seems to be a
chieftain or general; he has long, flowing hair, a golden collar
round his neck, and bracelets on his arms, while in his outstretched
right hand he holds a long staff, which may be the shaft of a lance,
or, more probably, an emblem of authority, like the staves carried
by Egyptian nobles and officials. His legs are covered halfway
up to the knee by a genuine pair of puttees, five turns of the
bandage being clearly marked. He appears to be giving orders to
the other figure, perhaps that of a captain or under-officer, who
stands before him in an attitude of respectful attention. The captain
is slightly lower in stature than his chief, though this may be
due to the fact that room has had to be found for the tall curving
plume of the low helmet which he wears. His neck is adorned with a
single torque, and he carries a long heavy sword sloped over his
right shoulder. Instead of wearing puttees, like his commander, he
wears half-boots, like those on the figurine discovered by Dawkins
at Petsofa. Neither the chieftain nor his officer appears to wear
any defensive armour; their only clothing is a scalloped loin-cloth,
slightly more heavily bordered in the case of the chief than in
that of the soldier; and the modelling of the bodies, with the
indications of muscular development, particularly in the legs of
the chieftain, is exceedingly fine, and of an accuracy marvellous
when the diminutive scale of the figures is considered. The little
vase is a valuable document for the appearance and equipment of
the warriors of those far-off times, but it is also a treasure
of art. 'The ideal grace and dignity of these two figures,' says
Professor Burrows, 'the pose with which they throw head and body
back, is beyond any representation of the human figure hitherto
known before the best period of Archaic Hellenic art.'
The interest of another of the Hagia Triada finds arises from the
fact that it appears to represent a religious ceremony in honour of
the dead. The object in question is a limestone sarcophagus covered
with plaster, on which various funerary ceremonies are painted. The
artistic merit of the work is small, for the figures are badly
drawn and carelessly painted, and in all likelihood represent the
decaying art of the Third Late Minoan period; but the subjects and
their arrangement are of importance (Plate XXVIII.). On one side
of the sarcophagus a figure stands against the door of a tomb. He
is closely swathed, the arms being within his wrappings, and his
attitude is so immobile as to suggest that he is dead. Towards him
advance three figures, one bearing something which, by a stretch
of charity, may be described as the model of a boat, the others
bearing calves, which, curiously enough, are represented, like
the great bulls of the frescoes, as in full gallop. At the other
end of the panel a priestess pours a libation into an urn standing
between two Double Axes, with birds perched upon them. Behind the
priestess is a woman carrying over her shoulders a yoke, from which
hang two vessels, while behind her, again, comes a man dressed in a
long robe, and playing upon a seven-stringed lyre. On the opposite
side of the sarcophagus, the painting, much defaced, shows another
priestess before an altar, with a Double Axe standing beside it, a
man playing on a flute, and five women moving in procession. On
the ends of the sarcophagus are pictures, in one case of a chariot
drawn by two horses, and driven by two women; in the other, of a
chariot drawn by griffins and driven by a woman, who has beside
her a swathed figure, perhaps again representing a dead person. The
figures of the lyre and flute players are interesting as affording
very early information concerning the forms of European musical
instruments. The double flute employed shows eight perforations,
and probably the full number, allowing for those covered by the
player's hands, was fourteen. The lyre approximates to the familiar
classic form, and the number of its strings shows that Terpander can
no longer claim credit as being the inventor of the seven-stringed
lyre, which was in use in Crete at least eight centuries before the
date at which his instrument was mutilated by the unsympathetic
judges at Sparta to put him on a level with his four-stringed
competitors.
[Illustration XVI: A FLIGHT OF THE QUADRUPLE STAIRCASE (_p_. 85)
WALL WITH DRAIN (_p_. 98)]
More important, however, is the suggestion of Egyptian influence
in the grouping of the figures. No one familiar with the details of
the ceremony of 'opening the mouth' of the deceased, so continually
represented in Egyptian funerary scenes, can fail to recognize the
original inspiration of the scene on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus.
The tomb in the background, the stiff swathed figure propped like
a log in front of it, the leafy branch before the dead man, taking
the place of the bunches of lotus-blooms, the offerings of meat,
and the sacrifice of the bull--this is an Egyptian funeral with
the mourners dressed in Cretan clothes. We have already seen a
priest from the banks of the Nile brandishing his sistrum in the
Harvest Procession; and the sarcophagus suggests that Egyptian
religious influence was telling, if not on the actual views of
the Cretans as to the state of man after death, at all events upon
the ceremonial by means of which these views were expressed. Phæstos
and Hagia Triada, we must remember, owing to their position, would
be more exposed to Egyptian influence than even Knossos, where
traces of it are not lacking.
The villa at Hagia Triada showed the same attentive care for sanitary
arrangements which has been already noticed at Knossos. Mosso has
noted an illustration of the honesty with which the work had been
executed. 'One day, after a heavy downpour of rain, I was interested
to find that all the drains acted perfectly, and I saw the water
flow from sewers through which a man could walk upright. I doubt
if there is any other instance of a drainage system acting after
4,000 years.'
The excavations at Knossos, Phæstos, and Hagia Triada have yielded,
in the main, evidence of the splendour of the Minoan Kings; but
other sites in the island, while presenting perhaps nothing so
striking, have added largely to our knowledge of the common life
of the Minoan race. At Gournia an American lady, Miss Harriet Boyd
(now Mrs. Hawes), made the remarkable discovery of a whole town,
mainly dating from the close of the Middle Minoan period, though
the site had been occupied from the beginning of the Bronze Age.
Gournia had had its modest palace, occupying an area of about half
an acre, with its adaptation, on a diminutive scale, of the Knossian
Theatral Area, its magazines, and its West Court, where palace and
town met, as at Knossos, for business purposes. But the main interest
of the little town centred in its shrine and in the houses of the
burghers, with their evidences of a wonderfully even standard of
comfortable and peaceful life, by no means untinged with artistic
elegance.
The shrine, discovered in 1901, stood in the very heart of the
town, and was reached by a much-worn paved way. The sacred enclosure
was only some 12 feet square, and Mrs. Hawes is inclined to believe
that its rough walls never stood more than 18 inches high, forming
merely a little _temenos_, in which stood a sacred tree, and the
small group of cult objects which were still huddled together in
a corner of the shrine. 'It is true that they are very crude, made
in coarse terra-cotta, with no artistic skill; nevertheless, they
are eloquent, for they tell us that the Great Goddess was worshipped
in the town-shrine of Gournia, as in the Palace of Knossos. Here
were her images twined with snakes, her doves, the "horns of
consecration," the low, three-legged altar-table, and cultus vases.
To complete the list, a potsherd was found with the Double Axe
moulded upon it, an indication, perhaps, that some who claimed kin
with the masters of Crete paid their devotions at this unpretentious
shrine.'[*] The smallness of the shrine at Gournia may be compared
with the smallness of the sacred rooms at Knossos, and seems to
have been characteristic of the Minoan worship.
[Footnote *: 'Crete the Forerunner of Greece,' p. 98.]
The 5-feet-broad roadways of the town, neatly paved, are conclusive
evidence of the infrequent use of wheeled vehicles. Flush with their
borders stand the fronts of the houses. Two-storey houses were
common, some of them with a basement storey beneath the ground-floor
when the slope of the hill admitted of such an arrangement. In all
likelihood the general appearance of the homes was much like that
of the comfortable-looking houses depicted on the faïence plaques
of Knossos, already referred to. Even ordinary craftsmen's houses
have six to eight rooms, while those of the wealthier burghers
have perhaps twice as many. Here and there evidences of the former
occupations of the inhabitants came to light--a complete set of
carpenter's tools in one house, a set of loom weights in another,
the block-mould in which a smith had cast his tools in a third.
That the citizens of the little town were not entirely ignorant
of letters was evidenced by the presence of a tablet bearing an
inscription in the linear script of Knossos, Class A, and the beauty
of their painted pottery shows that they were by no means lacking
in refinement and artistic feeling. The town was sacked and burned
about 1500 B.C., as its discoverer thinks, perhaps a century before
the fall of the great palace at Knossos. Partially reoccupied,
like other Cretan sites, during the Third Late Minoan period, it
has since then lain tenantless, waiting the day when its ruined
houses should be revealed again to testify to the quiet and peaceful
prosperity that reigned under the ægis of the great sea-power of
the House of Minos.
At Palaikastro another town of closely-packed houses, covering a
space of more than 400 by 350 feet, has been revealed. Its existing
remains are of somewhat later date than those of Gournia, and the
houses are, on the whole, rather larger, but their general style
is much the same. Near the town, at Petsofa, Professor J. L. Myres
has unearthed, among a wealth of other votive offerings, a number
of curious clay figurines, interesting as being among the earliest
examples of polychrome decoration (they belong to Middle Minoan I.,
and are painted in a scheme of black and white, red and orange),
but still more interesting--'with their open corsage, wide-standing
collars, high shoe-horn hats, elaborate crinolines, and their general
impression of an inaccurate attempt at representing Queen Elizabeth'--as
evidence of how utterly unlike was the costume of prehistoric woman
in the Ægean area to the stately and simple lines of the classic
Greek dress.
The Cretan discoveries have tended as much as any work of recent
years to reduce the extravagant claims which used to be put forward
on behalf of the Phnicians as originators of many of the elements
of ancient civilization, and evidence is now forthcoming to show that
originality in even their most famous and characteristic industry,
the dyeing of robes with the renowned 'Tyrian purple,' must be denied
to them and claimed for the Minoans. In 1903, Messrs. Bosanquet
and Currelly found on the island of Kouphonisi (Leuke), off the
south-east coast of Crete, a bank of the pounded shell of the murex
from which the purple dye was obtained, associated with pottery of
the Middle Minoan period; and in 1904 they discovered at Palaikastro
two similar purple shell deposits, in either case associated with
pottery of the same date.
[Illustration XVII: (1) HALL OF THE DOUBLE AXES (_p_. 86)
(2) GREAT STAIRCASE, KNOSSOS (_p_. 86)]
At Zakro, on the eastern coast of the island, Mr. Hogarth has excavated
the remains of what must have been an important trading-station.
In one single house of one of its merchants he came upon 500 clay
seal-impressions, with specimens of almost every type of Cretan
seal design, which had evidently been used for sealing bales of
goods. Some of the Zakro pottery also was of extreme beauty, one
specimen in particular, conspicuous from the fact that its delicate
decoration had been laid on subsequent to the firing of the vessel,
and could be removed by the slightest touch of the finger, showing
evident traces of Egyptian influence in its adaptation of the familiar
lotus design of Nilotic decorative art (Plate XXIX. 2).
On the tiny island of Mokhlos, only some 200 yards off the northern
coast of Crete, to which it was probably united in ancient days, Mr.
Seager has excavated, in 1907 and 1908, an Early Minoan necropolis,
from which have come some remarkable specimens of the skill with
which the ancient Cretan workmen could handle both stone and the
precious metals. Scores of beautiful vases of alabaster, breccia,
marble, and soapstone, wrought in some cases to the thinness of
a modern china cup, suggest at once the protodynastic Egyptian
bowls of diorite and syenite, and show that if the Cretan took
the idea from Egyptian models, he was not behind his master in
the skill with which he carried it out. Not less surprising is the
work in gold, which includes 'fine chains--as beautifully wrought as
the best Alexandrian fabrics of the beginning of our era--artificial
leaves and flowers, and (the distant anticipation, surely, of the gold
masks of the Mycenæ graves) gold bands with engraved and _repoussé_
eyes for the protective blinding of the dead.'[*][**]
[Footnote *: A. J. Evans, the _Times_, August 27, 1908.]
[Footnote **: For Mr. Seager's work on the Island of Pseira, see
'Excavations on the Island of Pseira, Crete,' by R. B. Seager.
Philadelphia, 1910.]
Excavating outside the area of the palace at Knossos, Dr. Evans
opened, on a hill known as Zafer Papoura, about half a mile north
of the palace, a large number of Minoan tombs dating from the Third
Middle Minoan period onwards. They revealed a civilization still high,
though giving evidence of gradual decline in its later stages. The
earlier tombs provided, what had been singularly lacking at Knossos,
a number of fine specimens of the 'stirrup-' or 'false-necked' vase.
There was also a number of bronze vessels and weapons, including
swords, some of which were nearly a metre in length. In one tomb,
which had evidently belonged to a chieftain, there was found a
short sword of elaborate workmanship, with a pommel of translucent
agate, and a gold-plated hilt, on which was engraved a scene of
a lion chasing and capturing one of the Cretan wild-goats. The
occurrence in some of the tombs of a long rapier and a shorter
sword or dagger is unexpected, as there are no representations of
the two weapons being worn together in Minoan warfare. Mr. Andrew
Lang has made the picturesque suggestion that we may have here an
anticipation of the duelling custom of the Elizabethan age, in
which the dagger was held in the left hand, and used for parrying
thrusts, or for work at close quarters, as in the savage encounter
between Sir Hatton Cheek and Sir Thomas Dutton at Calais in 1610.
On the hill of Isopata, between Knossos and the sea, Dr. Evans
also discovered a stately sepulchre, whose occupant had evidently
been some Minoan King of the Third Middle period. The tomb consisted
of a rectangular chamber measuring about 8 by 6 metres, and built of
courses of limestone blocks, which projected one beyond the other
until they met in a high gable, forming a false arch similar to
those of the beehive tombs at Mycenæ. The back wall of the chamber
had a central cell opposite to its blocked entrance, and the portal,
also false-arched, led into a lofty entrance-hall, in the side
walls of which, facing one another, were two cells, which had been
used for interments. The whole was approached by an imposing avenue
cut in the solid rock. The tomb had been rifled in ancient days,
but there still remained a golden hair-pin, parts of two silver
vessels, and a large bronze mirror; while among the stone vessels
found a diorite bowl again recalled the hard stone vessels of the
Early Egyptian dynasties.
The Dictæan Cave has already been mentioned as being peculiarly
associated with the legends about the birth of Zeus and his relationship
with Minos. Hesiod states that Rhea carried the new-born Zeus to
Lyttos, and thence to a cavern in Mount Aigaios, the north-west
peak of Dicte. Lucretius, Virgil, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus
all knew of a story in which the whole childhood of Zeus had been
passed in a cave on Dicte, and Dionysius assigns to the Dictæan
Cave that finding of the law by Minos which presents so curious a
parallel to the giving of the tables of the law to Moses on Mount
Sinai. Minos, he says, went down into the Sacred Cave, and reappeared
with the law, saying that it was from Zeus himself. And the last
legend, related by Lucian, places in the same cave that union of
Zeus with Europa from which Minos sprang. The Dictæan Cave, then,
is of special interest in connection with the origins of the Minoan
civilization, or, rather, with the fancies which later minds wove
around some of the sacred conceptions of the Minoan civilization.
It is a large double cavern, south-west of Psychro, and some 500
feet above the latter place. Its exploration by Mr. Hogarth revealed
ample evidence of its early connection with the cult of that divinity
upon whom the Greeks foisted their own ideas of Zeus.
A scarped terrace overlooking the slope of the hill gives access
to the shallow upper grotto, in which were found the remains of an
altar, and close by a table of offerings, while the ground beneath
the floor of the cave yielded, in regular stratification, Kamares
ware, immediately above the virgin soil; then glazed ware, with
cloudy brown stripes on a creamy slip; then regular Mycenæan ware,
with the familiar marine and plant designs; and, uppermost, bronze.
The lower grotto has at first a sheer fall from the upper one, then
slopes away for some 200 feet to an icy pool surrounded with a forest
of stalagmites; and in this gloomy cavern the evidence was manifest
of an ancient cult of a divinity to whom the Double Axe was sacred.
There was a great mass of votive offerings of all sorts--engraved
gems, bronze statuettes (including a Twenty-second-Dynasty figure
of the Egyptian god Amen-Ra), and an abundance of common rings,
pins, brooches, and knives; but the chief feature of the find was
the Double Axe, of which numerous specimens were found embedded in
the stalagmites around the dark pool at the foot of the cavern,
some of them still retaining their original shafts. It is evident
that the cave on Dicte was the seat of a very ancient worship,
connected with that worship whose emblems were the Double Axe Pillars
in the Palace of Knossos, and that this worship, as revealed by the
character of the remains in the grotto, goes back to the early
days of the Minoan civilization.
Throughout all these explorations, covering a considerable portion
of the island, one common feature presents itself--a feature already
noted and commented on in connection with Knossos. Nowhere have we
met with anything in the remotest degree resembling the colossal
citadel walls which are the most striking feature of Mycenæ and
Tiryns. Phæstos and Hagia Triada are as devoid of fortification as
Knossos. Gournia and Palaikastro are open towns. Everything points
to the existence of a strong and peaceful rule, allowing the natural
bent of the island race to develop quietly and steadily during long
periods in those lines of work, alike useful and artistic, whose
remains excite our admiration to-day, and resting for generation
after generation on the sea-power which kept all enemies far from
the shores of the fortunate island and guarded the trade-routes
of the Ægean.
CHAPTER VII
CRETE AND EGYPT
The question of the relationship between the Minoan civilization
and the other great civilizations of the ancient world, particularly
those of Babylonia and Egypt, is not only of great intrinsic interest,
but also of very considerable importance to the attempt at a
reconstruction of the outlines of Minoan history and chronology.
For it is only by means of synchronisms with the more or less
satisfactorily, established chronology of one or other of these
kingdoms that even the most approximate system of dating can be
arrived at for the various epochs of the great civilization which the
Cretan discoveries have revealed. Had it been possible to establish
synchronisms with both Babylonian and Egyptian chronology, the result
would not only have been satisfactory as regards our knowledge
of the Minoan periods, but might have proved to have a secondary
outcome of the very greatest importance in the settlement of the
acute controversy which at present rages round the chronology of
ancient Egypt from the earliest period down to the rise of the
New Empire. As it is, this has so far proved to be impossible by
reason of the absence from the chain of the Babylonian link.
It may be held as reasonably certain that for many centuries there
was no lack of intercourse and interchange of commodities and ideas
between Crete and Asia; indeed, it is beginning to be more and
more manifest that in that ancient world there was infinitely more
intercommunication between the different peoples than had been
suspected. Far from the prehistoric age being a time of stagnation,
it was rather a time of ceaseless movement. Perhaps the most striking
example of the distance across which communication could take place
in almost incredibly early times is afforded by the discovery on
the site of ancient Troy--the Second City, roughly contemporary
with Early Minoan III.--of a piece of white jade, a stone peculiar
to China. By what long and devious routes it had reached the coast
of Asia Minor who can say? Yet the fact of its occurrence there
proves the fact of communication.
[Illustration XVIII: THE KING'S GAMING-BOARD (_p_. 87)
_G. Maraghiannis_]
Up to the present time it cannot be said that any object unquestionably
Mesopotamian has been found on any Ægean site, nor any object
unquestionably Ægean on a Mesopotamian one. But it has been suggested
that certain carved ivories found by Layard at Nimrûd in the Palace
of Sennacherib show manifest traces of Ægean influence; and in
Southern Syria, at all events--at Gezer, Tell-es-Safi, and
elsewhere--indisputably Ægean pottery and weapons have been discovered
in sufficient quantity to show that there was certainly communication
between the Minoan civilization and the shores of Asia. Intercourse
is suggested also by the obvious communities of religious conception
existing between Crete and Asia. In both places the divine spirit
is believed to associate itself with sacred pillars, such as the
Double Axe pillars at Knossos; in both it is personified as a Woman
Goddess, the mother of all life, to whom is added a son, who is also
a consort; while the emblems of the ancient cults--the guardian
lions of the goddess on the hill, the Double Axe, and the triple
pillars with perching doves--are property common to both Crete
and Asia. This may not point, however, to a continued intercourse,
but only to community at some early point of the history of both
races.
Of actual traces of Mesopotamian influence singularly few are to
be found in Crete. Dr. Evans has shown the correspondence of a
purple gypsum weight found during the second season's excavations
at Knossos, with the light Babylonian talent, while the ingots of
bronze from Hagia Triada represent the same standard of weight.
It may be that the drainage system so highly developed at Knossos
and Hagia Triada found its first suggestion in the terra-cotta
drain-pipes discovered at Niffur by Hilprecht, though it is by no
means obvious that copying should be necessary in such a matter.
The clay tablets engraved with hieroglyphic and linear script suggest
at once the corresponding and universal use of the clay tablet for
the cuneiform script of Babylonia; and that is practically all
that can be said of any connection between the cultures of Crete
and Mesopotamia.
The case is quite different, however, when we come to the relations
between Crete and the great civilization of the Nile Valley. In
this case there is, if not abundance, at all events a sufficiency
of evidence as to an intercourse which extended through practically
the whole duration of the Minoan Empire. For the Early Dynastic
period of Egyptian history the evidence is somewhat slight, and
the interpretation of it not always certain. When we come to the
Middle Kingdom of Egypt--a period contemporaneous with Middle Minoan
II. and III.--it becomes both more abundant and more unquestionable
in meaning; while with the New Empire (Eighteenth Dynasty) and Late
Minoan II. we reach absolutely firm ground, the correspondence of
art motives, and the actual proofs of intercourse, especially on
the Egyptian side, being indisputable. Our object, then, in this
chapter is to exhibit the evidence of the relationship between
Crete and Egypt, and to inquire to what conclusion it leads us
concerning the dates of the various periods of Minoan history.
For the earliest period we are left with somewhat scanty evidence.
Professor Petrie has found in some of the First Dynasty graves at
Abydos vases of black hand-burnished ware, which are very closely
allied, both inform and colour, to the primitive 'bucchero' discovered
immediately above the Neolithic deposit in the West Court at Knossos;
and he has suggested that, as the pottery is not Egyptian in style,
it may have been imported from Crete. On various sites in the palace
at Knossos there have been found stone vessels of diorite, syenite,
and liparite, exquisitely wrought. Now, such work is eminently
characteristic of the Early Egyptian Dynastic period, the artists
of that time taking a pride in turning out bowls of these intensely
hard stones, wrought sometimes to such a degree of fineness as to
be translucent. The chances are against these bowls having been
imported in later days, as the taste for them gradually died out
in Egypt, and 'no ancient nation had antiquarian tastes till the
time of the Saïtes in Egypt and of the Romans still later.' The
stone vessels discovered by Mr. Seager at Mokhlos, though wrought
out of beautiful native materials, betray, according to Dr. Evans,
the strong influence of protodynastic Egyptian models. Coming down a
little farther, to Early Minoan III., there is evidence of Egyptian
influence in the fact that the ivory seals of this period seem
to derive their motives from the so-called 'button-seals' of the
Sixth Egyptian Dynasty. Mr. H. R. Hall believes that the derivation
was the other way about. 'It would seem very probable that this
decidedly foreign decoration motive was adopted by the Egyptians
from the Ægeans about the end of the Old Kingdom (=Early Minoan
III.), so that the Egyptian seal designs are copied from those of
the Cretan seal-stones, rather than the reverse. Egyptian designs
were very ancient, and had the spiral been Egyptian, we should
have found it in the art of the Old Kingdom. It was a foreign
importation, and its place of origin is evident.'[*] Whether in
this case the Minoan borrowed from the Egyptian or the Egyptian
from the Minoan is, however, immaterial; either way the fact of
intercourse is established.
[Footnote *: Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology,
vol. xxxi., part v., p. 222.]
We may assume, then, that, in all probability, there was intercourse
of some kind between Crete and Egypt as early as the time of the First
Egyptian Dynasty, and that by the time of the Sixth Dynasty, which
marks the close of the great period of the Old Kingdom in Egypt--the
period of the Pyramid Builders (Third to Sixth Dynasty)--intercourse
was common. In fact, it may be said that, from the origin of both
peoples, the likelihood is that they were in contact. It is possible
enough that both the Nilotic and the Minoan civilization sprang from
a common stock, and that the Neolithic Cretans and the Neolithic
Egyptians were alike members of the same widespread Mediterranean
race.
[Illustration XIX: IVORY FIGURES AND HEADS FROM KNOSSOS (_p_. 76)
From 'Annual of the British School of Athens,' by permission]
How was the connection between Crete and Egypt maintained at this
extremely early period? Professor Petrie believes that it was by
the natural and direct sea-route across the Mediterranean. The
representations of vessels painted on pre-dynastic Egyptian ware
show that the Neolithic Egyptians were familiar, to some extent,
with the building and the use of ships, and Professor Petrie supposes
that galleys such as those represented were the ships by means
of which the Egyptians and Cretans maintained their intercourse.
Mr. Hall, on the other hand, maintains that this is impossible,
and that the boats of the pre-dynastic ware are merely small
river-craft, totally unfitted for seafaring work.[*] In his 'Oldest
Civilization of Greece' he roundly asserts 'that these boats were
the ships which plied between Crete and Egypt some 4,000 years
B.C. Nothing can ever prove'; and he therefore believes that the
communication was kept up by way of Cyprus and the Palestinian
coast. But the evidence either way is of so extremely slight a
character, and the delineations in question are so rude, that it
might as well be said that nothing can ever prove that these boats
were _not_ the ships which plied between Crete and Egypt. It does
not seem obvious why the voyage between Crete and Egypt should be
impossible to navigators who could accomplish that between Crete
and Cyprus; and if communication were maintained by way of Cyprus,
it seems strange that that island should show practically no trace of
having been influenced by Minoan civilization until a comparatively
late date. 'It was not till the Cretan culture had passed its zenith
and was already decadent that it reached Cyprus.'[**] That the Homeric
Greeks were by no means daring navigators does not necessarily
imply that an island race, whose whole tradition throughout its
history was of sea-power, should have been equally timid. When
it is remembered in what type of vessel the Northmen risked the
Atlantic passage, one would be slow to believe that even in immediately
post-Neolithic times the Cretans could not have evolved a type of
boat as adequate to the run between Crete and the Nile mouths as
the 'long serpents' were to face the Atlantic rollers.
[Footnote *: 'Egypt and Western Asia,' p. 129.]
[Footnote **: H. R. Hall, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical
Archæology, vol. xxxi., part v., p. 227.]
But however the case may stand with regard to the pre-dynastic
period, there can be no question that by the end of the Third Dynasty
even Egypt had developed a marine not inadequate to the requirements
of the Cretan passage. We know that Sneferu, the last King of the
Third Dynasty, sent a fleet of forty ships to the Syrian coast
for cedar-wood, and that in his reign a vessel was built of the
very respectable length of 170 feet. Coming farther down, we know
also that Sahura of the Fifth Dynasty sent a fleet down the Red
Sea as far as Punt or Somaliland. And if the Egyptians, by no means
a great seafaring race, were able to do such things at this period
of their history, surely an island race, whose sole pathway to the
outer world lay across the sea, would not be behind them. There can
scarcely be any question that, by the time of the Pyramid builders
at latest, Cretan galleys were making the voyage to the Nile mouths,
and unloading at the quays of Memphis, under the shadow of the new
Pyramids, their primitive wares, among them the rude, hand-burnished
black pottery, in return for which they carried back some of the
wonderful fabric of the Egyptian stone-workers.
But supposing that the connection between the primitive Minoan
civilization and the earliest Dynasties of Egypt is a thing established,
what does this enable us to assert as to the date to which we are to
ascribe the dawn of the earliest culture that can be called European?
Here, unfortunately, we are at once involved in a controversy in
which centuries are unconsidered trifles, and a millennium is no
more than a respectable, but by no means formidable, quantity.
Egyptian chronology may be regarded as practically settled from the
beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty downwards. There is a general
consent of authority that Aahmes, the founder of that Dynasty, began
to reign about 1580 B.C., and the dates assigned by the various
schools of chronology to the subsequent Dynasties differ only by
quantities so small as to be practically negligible. But when we
attempt to trace the chronology upwards from 1580 B.C., the consent
of authorities immediately vanishes, and is replaced by a gulf of
divergence which there is no possibility of bridging. The great
divergence occurs in the well-known dark period of Egyptian history
between the Twelfth and the Eighteenth Dynasties, where monumental
evidence is extremely scanty, almost non-existent, and where historians
have to grope for facts with no better light to guide them than
is afforded by the History of Manetho, and the torn fragments of
the Turin Papyrus. The traditional dating used to place the end
of the Twelfth Dynasty somewhere around 2500 B.C., allowing thus
some 900 odd years for the intervening dynasties before the rise
of the Eighteenth. The modern German school, however, represented
by Erman, Mahler, Meyer, and the American, Professor Breasted,
arguing from the astronomical evidence of the Kahun Papyrus, cuts
this allowance short by over 700 years, allowing only 208 years
for the great gap, and proposing to pack the five Dynasties and
the Hyksos domination into that time. Professor Petrie, finally,
accepting, like the German school, the astronomical evidence of
the Kahun Papyrus, interprets it differently, and pushes back the
dates by a complete cycle of 1,460 years, allowing 1,666 years
for the gap between the Twelfth Dynasty and the Eighteenth. Thus,
even between the traditional and the German dating there is a gulf
of 700 years for all dates of the Twelfth Dynasty, while as between
the German dating and that of Professor Petrie the gulf widens to
over 1,400 years.
Into the question of which system of dating should be adopted it
is impossible to enter, though it may be said that if 1,666 years
seems a huge allowance for the five Dynasties, 208 years seems
almost incredibly small. The result is what concerns us here, and
we are faced with the fact that, while the traditional dating places
the First Egyptian Dynasty at about 4000 B.C., the German school
would bring it down to 3400 B.C., and Professor Petrie thrusts
it back to 5510 B.C. Dr. Evans, in provisionally assigning dates
to the periods of Minoan history, formerly drew nearer to the
traditional than to either the German dating or that of Professor
Petrie; but he has gradually modified this position, and now dates
his Middle Minoan II., which synchronizes with the Twelfth Egyptian
Dynasty, at 2000 B.C., thus practically accepting the chronology
of the German school. This would place Early Minoan I., which must
be equated with the First Dynasty, about 3400 B.C. Practically,
all that can be said with a moderate amount of certainty is that
the earliest civilization of Crete, like that of Egypt, was in
existence at a period not much later than 3500 B.C., while it is
not impossible that it may be 1,500 years older. Even accepting
the lower figure, the antiquity of man's first settlements on the
hill of Kephala becomes absolutely staggering to the mind. If the
growth of deposit on the hill was at the rate of something like 3
feet in a millennium--a reasonable supposition--it follows that
we must place the earliest habitations of Neolithic man at Knossos
not later than 10000, perhaps as early as 12000 B.C.
It is not till many centuries after the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty had
passed away that we come upon fresh evidence of the connection between
the two countries. The earlier palaces at Knossos and Phæstos had been
built, and the first period of Middle Minoan, with its beginnings
of polychrome decoration and its Queen Elizabeth figurines from
Petsofa, had come and gone in Crete, while in Egypt the corresponding
period had been marked by the troublous times between the Seventh
and the Eleventh Dynasties. But the rise of the Twelfth Dynasty in
Egypt marked the beginning of a more stable state of affairs in
the Nile Valley, and in this period, which corresponds with Dr.
Evans's Middle Minoan II., there are again evidences of touch between
the two kingdoms. With regard to absolute dating, we are of course
as much in the dark as ever, and may choose between 2000, 2500,
and 3459 B.C. In any case, at this point, put it provisionally
at 2000 B.C., the Egypt of the Senuserts and Amenemhats and the
Crete of Middle Minoan II. are manifestly contemporaneous, and in
well-established connection. In Crete this was the period when
the beautiful polychrome Kamares ware was at the height of its
popularity, and at Kahun, close to the pyramid of Senusert II.,
Professor Petrie some years ago discovered some unquestionable
specimens of this fine ware, which had certainly been imported from
Crete, as the fabric is one quite unknown to native Egyptian ceramic
art. Even more conclusive was Professor Garstang's discovery, in an
untouched tomb at Abydos, of a polychrome vessel in the latest
style of the period, in company with glazed steatite cylinders,
which bear the names of Senusert III. and Amenemhat III., the last
great Kings of the Twelfth Dynasty.
But the most interesting link between the two countries is found
in the fact that in this period there was erected in Egypt the
building which came to be looked on as the parallel to the Cretan
Labyrinth, and which, with a curious inversion of the actual facts,
was long supposed to be the original from which the Cretan Labyrinth
was derived. The pyramid of Amenemhat III., the greatest King of
the great Twelfth Dynasty, and indeed one of the greatest men who
ever held the Egyptian sceptre, stood at Hawara, near the mouth
of the Fayum. Not far from it Amenemhat erected a huge temple,
such as had never been built before, and never was built again,
even in that land of gigantic structures. The great building was
erected, in a taste eminently characteristic of the Middle Kingdom,
of great blocks of fine limestone and crystalline quartzite. It has
long since disappeared, having been used as a quarry for thousands
of years; but the size of the site, which can still be traced,
shows that in actual area the temple covered a space of ground
within which Karnak, Luqsor, and the Ramesseum, huge as they all
are, could quite well have stood together.
Even in the time of Herodotus enough was still remaining of this
vast building to excite his profound wonder and admiration, and it
seemed to him a more remarkable structure than even the Pyramids. 'It
has,' he says, 'twelve courts enclosed with walls, with doors opposite
each other, six facing the north, and six the south, contiguous to
one another, and the same exterior wall encloses them. It contains
two kinds of rooms, some under ground, and some above ground over
them, to the number of 3,000, 1,500 of each.' He was not allowed
to inspect the underground chambers. 'But the upper ones, which
surpass all human works, I myself saw; for the passages through
the corridors, and the windings through the courts, from their
great variety, presented a thousand occasions of wonder as I passed
from a court to the rooms, and from the rooms to halls, and to
other corridors from the halls, and to other courts from the rooms.
The roofs of all these are of stone, as also are the walls; but
the walls are full of sculptured figures. Each court is surrounded
with a colonnade of white stone, closely fitted.'[*] Herodotus
believed that the building belonged to the time of Psamtek I.,
in which, of course, he was ludicrously far astray, but otherwise
there seems no reason to question that his description actually
represents what he saw, though no doubt his lively mind somewhat
multiplied the number of the rooms.
[Footnote *: Herodotus II. 148.]
Pliny the elder, judging from his description, evidently saw much
the same thing at Hawara as Herodotus had seen, though time must
have somewhat diminished the splendour of the building. Now, to
this temple there was already applied in the time of Herodotus the
name Labyrinth. It used to be believed that the Hawara Labyrinth
gave its name to the Cretan one, and an Egyptian etymology was
arranged for the word 'labyrinth,' according to which it would
have meant 'the temple at the mouth of the canal.' The Egyptian
form of the title, however, is 'a mere figment of the philological
imagination.' Probably originality lies in the other direction.
The first palace at Knossos dates from a period certainly as early
as, probably somewhat earlier than, the Hawara temple; and since
the derivation of the word 'labyrinth' from the Labrys or Double
Axe, making the palace the House or Place of the Double Axe, seems
quite satisfactory, the Egyptian Labyrinth in all likelihood derived
its name from the House of Minos at Knossos. Apart, however, from
any mere question of names, there appears the interesting parallel
that the two most famous Labyrinths, the first palace at Knossos,
and the great Hawara temple, actually belong to the same period--a
period when, as we know from the other evidence, there was certainly
active intercourse between the two nations.
Mr. Hall has pointed out[*] the resemblance between the actual
building at Knossos and the descriptions left to us of its Egyptian
contemporary. The literary tradition of the Labyrinth of Minos
is that it was a place of mazy passages and windings, difficult
to traverse without a guide or clue, and the actual remains at
Knossos show that the palace must have answered very well to such
a description, while the feature of the Hawara temple which struck
both Herodotus and Pliny was precisely the same. 'The passages
through the corridors and the windings through the courts, from
their great variety, presented a thousand occasions of wonder.'
The resemblance extended to the material of which the buildings
were erected. The fine white limestone of Hawara must have closely
resembled the shining white gypsum of Knossos, and though the Egyptian
Labyrinth has passed away too completely for us to be able to judge
of its masonry, yet the splendid building work of the Eleventh
Dynasty temple of Mentuhotep Neb-hapet-Ra at Deir-el-Bahri, with
its great blocks of limestone beautifully fitted and laid, affords
a good Middle Kingdom parallel to the great gypsum blocks of the
Knossian palace. Of course we cannot attribute to Cretan influence
the style of the Egyptian building in this respect. For hundreds
of years the Egyptians had been past masters in the art of great
construction with huge blocks of stone, so that, if there is to
be any derivation on this point, it may rather have been Crete
which followed the example of Egypt. But it may not be altogether
a mere coincidence that, in a period of Egyptian history which
we know to have been linked with an important epoch of Cretan
development, there should have been erected in Egypt a building
absolutely unparalleled, so far as we know, among the architectural
triumphs of that nation, but bearing no distant resemblance, if
the descriptions are to be trusted, to the great palace which the
Minoan Sovereigns had newly reared, or were, perhaps, still rearing,
for themselves at Knossos. Is it permissible to fancy that the
envoys of Amenemhat III. may have brought back to Egypt reports and
descriptions of the great Cretan palace which may have fired that
King with the desire to leave behind him a memorial, unique among
Egyptian buildings, but inspired by the actual achievements of his
brother monarchs in Crete? Whether the idea of this relation between
the two buildings be merely fanciful or not, their resemblances add
another illustration to the proofs of the close connection between
the Minoan and the Egyptian cultures in the third millennium B.C.
[Footnote *: _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, 1905, part ii.]
With the succeeding Cretan epoch, Middle Minoan III., we come into
touch with the dark age of Egyptian history, the great gap covering
Dynasties XIII.-XVII., towards the close of which is to be placed
the Hyksos domination. As the age was so troubled in Egypt, it
is scarcely probable that we shall find much evidence there of
any connection between the two lands; but the evidence found on
Cretan soil, though slight, is conclusive as to the fact that
communication was maintained. For the earlier part of the period
we have the statuette, already mentioned as having been found at
Knossos, bearing the name of 'Ab-nub's child, Sebek-user, deceased,
born of the lady Sat-Hathor.' 'Who Sebek-user was,' as Mr. Hall
remarks, 'and how his statuette got to Crete, we have no means
of knowing.' But the 'deceased' in the inscription shows that the
statuette was a funerary or memorial one, and it is hardly likely
that such an object was imported merely for its own sake or for
its artistic value, which is slight enough. May it not be that
either Ab-nub, the father, or Sebek-user, the son, or both, may
have been Egyptians resident at the Court of Knossos, either as
representatives of Egyptian interests or as skilled artificers,
and that the statuette is the memorial of one who died far from
his native land, but not without friends to see that he did not
lack the funerary attentions which would have been his at home? No
doubt there was interchange of persons as well as of commodities
between the two lands; some of the artists and craftsmen of both
countries would naturally go to where there was a demand arising
for their work, or where instructors were being sought to teach
the new arts; and Ab-nub and his son Sebek-user may have drifted
to Knossos in this manner, and found at last their graves there.
Were they conceivably responsible for the 'imported alabaster vases
dating from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt,' which were found in the
royal tomb at Isopata?
Towards the close of this epoch the ceramic art of Knossos shows
features which are directly attributable to Egyptian influence.
The art of glazing pottery was not a native Cretan, but an Egyptian
art; it is in full use in Egypt from the very beginnings of the
First Dynasty. But now we find it appearing in a high state of
development in Crete in the beautiful faïence reliefs of the wild-goat
and kids, the vases with the wild-rose in relief on the lip, and
the figurines of the Snake Goddess and her votaresses. The Cretan
artists, however, though they borrowed the process, adapted it
to their own tastes. In Egypt the native faïence of the time is
of strictly conventional type, with black design on blue; but the
Cretan emancipated himself from these limits, and made his faïence
reliefs in the polychrome style, which still persisted, though
now no longer so prevalent as it had once been.
The disastrous period of the Hyksos domination in Egypt has left
but one trace at Knossos, but that is of peculiar interest, for
it is the lid of an alabastron bearing the name of the Hyksos King
Khyan. It cannot be said that we know any of the Hyksos Kings,
but Khyan is the one whose relics are the most widely distributed
and have the most interest. The finding of the lid at Knossos, his
farthest west, is balanced by the lion, bearing his cartouche,
found many years ago at Baghdad, his farthest east, while in his
inscriptions he calls himself 'Embracer of territories.' So it
has been suggested that the Knossos lid and the Baghdad lion are
the scanty relics of a great Hyksos empire which once extended
from the Euphrates to the First Cataract of the Nile, and possibly
also held Crete in subjection. In all likelihood, however, the
idea is merely a dream; certainly so far as regards Crete it is
most improbable. In the palmiest days of the Egyptian navy the
Pharaohs never held any dominion over Crete, and even Cyprus was
never really under their rule. It is much less likely still that a
King of the Hyksos race, whose whole tradition is of the land and
the desert, should have succeeded in establishing any suzerainty
over a race whose whole tradition is of the sea, and which was
then in the full pride of its strength.
Another era of history has passed away before we again find Crete
and Egypt in close touch with one another. In Crete the last period
of Middle Minoan had been succeeded by the first of Late Minoan,
in which the great palace of the Middle period was being gradually
transformed into a still larger and more magnificent structure,
which was not to be completed until the succeeding period. In Egypt
the Seventeenth Dynasty had at last, after long hesitation, picked
up the gauntlet thrown down by the Hyksos conquerors, and the War
of Independence had resulted in the expulsion of the Desert Princes
and their race. The conquering Dynasty had been succeeded by the
Eighteenth, the Dynasty of Queen Hatshepsut, Tahutmes III., and
Amenhotep III., and Egypt was in the full tide of a great revival,
alike in world-influence, in trade, and in art. Queen Hatshepsut,
who states in one of her inscriptions that 'her spirits inclined
towards foreign peoples,' had sent out her squadron to Somaliland,
and Tahutmes III. had organized a war-fleet on the Mediterranean
coast-line. The ancient Empire of the Nile was opening its arms
in every direction to outside influences, and was drawing into
the ports of the great river the commercial and artistic products
of every known people.
Among the races who are most prominent in the Egyptian records
of the period are the Keftiu, who are frequently represented in
the paintings of the time, and always with the same characteristic
features, the same dress and bearing, the same products of commerce
and art. Who, then, were the Keftiu? The word means the people
or the country 'at the back of'--in other words, at the back of
'the Very Green,' as the Egyptians called the Mediterranean. So
that the Keftians with whom the merchants and courtiers of Egypt
grew familiar in the times of Hatshepsut and Tahutmes III. Were to
them the men 'from the back of beyond'--the farthest distant people
with whom they had any dealings. But what race could correspond to
these 'back of beyond' men? In Ptolemaic times the word 'Keftiu'
was unquestionably applied to the Phnicians, who had for long
been the great seafarers and carriers of the Mediterranean; and
till recent years it was generally believed that the Keftiu of the
Eighteenth Dynasty were Phnicians also, though their faces, as
depicted on the Egyptian wall-paintings, did not bear the slightest
trace of Semitic cast. But the discoveries of the last few years
have demolished that idea for ever, along with many other beliefs
as to the influence of the overrated Phnicians upon the culture of
the Mediterranean area, and the pictures of the Minoans of Knossos
have made it certain that the Keftiu of the Eighteenth Dynasty
were none others than the ambassadors, sailors, and merchants of
the Sea-Kings of Crete. Fortunately, the tomb-painting which has
preserved so many interesting details of Egyptian life, was never
more assiduously practised or more happily inspired than at this
period. In all the chief tombs there are pictured processions of
Northerners, Westerners, Easterners, and Southerners, the North
being represented by Semites, the East by the men of Punt, the
South by negroes, and the West by the Keftiu; and we can compare
the men of the Knossos frescoes with their fellow-countrymen as
depicted on the tomb-walls of the Theban grandees, and be certain
that, allowing for the differences in the style of art, they are
essentially the same people. The tombs which preserve best the
figures of the Keftiu are those of Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra. That
of Sen-mut is the earlier, though only by a generation, or perhaps
rather less. He was the architect of Queen Hatshepsut, the man who
planned and executed the great colonnaded temple at Deir-el-Bahri,
and who set up Hatshepsut's gigantic obelisks. His tomb at Thebes
overlooks the temple which he built at his Queen's command to be
'a paradise for Amen,' and on its walls we can see 'the men from
the back of beyond' walking in procession, each with his offering
to present to the Pharaoh. There can be no question as to who they
are. The half-boots and puttees, the decorated girdle compressing
the waist, not quite so tightly as in the Minoan representations,
the gaily adorned loin-cloth, which is the only article of attire,
all are practically identical with the type of such a fresco as that
of the Cupbearer at Knossos. The conscientious Egyptian artists
have carefully represented also the elaborate coiffure which was
characteristic of the Minoans, who allowed their hair to fall in
long tails down their shoulders, doing part of it up in a knot or
curl on the top of the head. The tribute-bearers carry in their
hands or upon their shoulders great vessels of gold and silver,
some of them exactly resembling in shape the Vaphio cups, though
much larger than these, some of them of the type of the bronze
ewer found in the north-west house at Knossos.
[Illustration XX: (1) MAIN DRAIN, KNOSSOS (_p_. 98)
(2) TERRA-COTTA DRAIN PIPES (_p_. 98)]
Rekh-ma-ra, in whose tomb are the other notable pictures of the
Keftiu, was also a great figure in Egyptian history in the next
reign. He was Vizier to Tahutmes III., the conquering Pharaoh of
the Eighteenth Dynasty. The pictures on the walls of his tomb are,
at least in some cases, evidently more than mere racial studies;
they are careful portraits. 'The first man, "The Great Chief of
the Kefti, and the Isles of the Green Sea," is young, and has a
remarkably small mouth with an amiable expression. His complexion is
fair rather than dark, but his hair is dark brown. His lieutenant,
the next in order, is of a different type--elderly, with a most
forbidding visage, Roman nose, and nut-cracker jaws. Most of the
others are very much alike--young, dark in complexion, and with
long black hair hanging below their waists and twisted up into
fantastic knots and curls on the tops of their heads.'[*]
[Footnote *: H. R. Hall, 'Egypt and Western Asia,' p. 362.]
These Keftiu, then, were the Minoans of the Great Palace period of
Crete, the pre-Hellenic Greeks, the Pelasgi of old Greek tradition,
in whose time the great civilization of the Minoan Empire reached its
culminating point, and was within a little of its final disaster.
It is a fortunate circumstance that Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra should
have caused them to be portrayed when they did, for in two or three
generations more the glory of Knossos had passed away, never to be
revived. Greece gave to Egyptian scholars the key to the translation
of the hieroglyphics in the Greek version of the Egyptian text on
the Rosetta Stone; the paintings of the Theban tombs have paid
back an instalment of that debt in showing us the likenesses of
those 'Greeks before the Greeks' who dwelt in Crete. Perhaps some
day the debt will be fully repaid by the discovery of a bilingual
text in Egyptian and Minoan, giving us in hieroglyphics a version
of some passage of that Minoan script which now exists only to
tantalize us with records of an ancient history which we cannot read.
Such a discovery is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility.
It is not so long since Boghaz-Keui supplied us with a cuneiform
version of the famous treaty between the Egyptians and the Hittites
in the time of Ramses II.; perhaps some site in Crete or Egypt
may yet provide us with a bilingual treaty between Tahutmes III.
and the Minoan Sovereign of his time.
After the time of Tahutmes, the evidences of connection between
the two lands grow scanty once more. The fact that the faïence of
the time of Amenhotep III. has discarded the old Egyptian tradition
of black upon blue, and now rejoices in splendid chocolates, purples,
violets, reds, and apple-greens, shows that Cretan influence was
still strong. Fragments of Late Minoan pottery found in abundance
on the site of Akhenaten's new capital at Tell-el-Amarna show that
even in the reign of this King, the heretic son and successor of
Amenhotep III., Crete was still trading with Egypt. But before
Akhenaten came to the throne, about 1380 B.C.--possibly twenty
years before that event--the great catastrophe which brought the
Minoan Empire of Knossos to a close had already happened. The Cretan
wares which filtered into Egypt after 1400 B.C. were the products
of the Minoan decadence, when the survivors of the Empire of the
Sea-Kings--a broken and dwindling race--were still trying to maintain
a slowly failing tradition of art under the new masters, perhaps
the Mycenæans of the mainland, who, driven forth themselves by
the pressure of Northern invaders, had crushed in their turn the
gentler sister civilization of Crete.
The Mycenæan 'stirrup-vases' pictured in the tomb of Ramses III.
(1202-1170 B.C.), and the representations in the tomb of Imadua of
gold cups of the Vaphio type, carry the connection down to the last
dregs of the dying' race; but by the time of Ramses III. the Minoan
kingdom had probably been dead and buried for about two centuries.
In fact, with the rise of the Nineteenth Dynasty in Egypt (1350
B.C.), the name of the Keftiu disappears from the Egyptian records,
and in the place of the men from the back of beyond there appears
a confused jumble of warring sea-tribes, some of them possibly the
men who had overthrown the Minoan Empire, some of them probably
representing the broken fragments of that Empire itself, who unite
in attacks upon Egypt, but are foiled and overthrown. In the record
of the earlier of these invasions, that which took place in the
reign of Merenptah (1234-1214 B.C.), the successor of Ramses II.,
it is difficult to trace any names that have Cretan connections.
The Aqayuasha may conceivably have been Achæans; but that is another
story.
But when we come to deal with the great invasion in the reign of
Ramses III., about 1200 B.C., we get into touch with tribes which
bear almost beyond question the marks of Cretan origin, and one of
which is particularly interesting to us on other grounds. In the
eighth year of Ramses III. The eastern coasts of the Mediterranean
were swept by a great invasion of the 'Peoples of the Sea.' 'The
isles were restless, disturbed among themselves,' says Ramses in
his inscription at Medinet Habu. Very probably the incursion was the
result of the southward movement of the invading northern tribes,
whose pressure was forcing the ancient Ægean peoples to migrate
and seek new homes for themselves. Landing in Northern Syria, the
sea-peoples quickly made themselves masters of the fragments of
the once formidable Hittite confederacy, and, absorbing in their
alliance the Hittites, who may indeed have been of their own kin,
they moved southwards along the sea-coast, their fleet of war-galleys
keeping pace with the advance of the land army. They established
a central camp and place of arms in the land of Amor, or of the
Amorites, and their southward movement speedily became a menace
to the Egyptian Empire. Ramses III., the last great soldier of
the true Egyptian stock, made effective preparations to meet them.
Gathering at the Nile mouths a numerous fleet, which carried large
numbers of the dreaded Egyptian archers, he advanced with the land
army to meet the invaders, his fleet also accompanying the march
of the army. The locality of the encounter between the two forces
is doubtful, some placing it in Phnicia, and others much nearer
to the Egyptian frontier. In any case, a great battle was fought,
both by land and sea, and the Egyptian army and fleet were entirely
successful in the double encounter. The reliefs of Ramses at Medinet
Habu show the details of the battle, the Egyptian fleet penetrating
and overthrowing that of the sea-peoples, while the Pharaoh from
the shore assists by archery in the discomfiture of his enemies.
The result of the double victory was to put an effective check
on any aspirations which the invaders may have cherished in the
direction of a permanent occupation of Egypt, though quite probably
they continued to hold the territory they had already gained.
[Illustration XXI: THEATRAL AREA, KNOSSOS: BEFORE RESTORATION (_p_.
100)]
The tribes which are mentioned in the inscriptions of Ramses as
having been leagued together in this attempt are the Danauna, the
Uashasha, the Zakkaru, the Shakalsha, and the Pulosathu, in alliance
with the North Syrian tribes. The Danauna are evidently the Danaoi,
or Argives, the same race which, under Achæan overlords, composed the
mass of the Greek army at the siege of Troy. As Danaos, the name-hero
of the race, was King of Rhodes and Argos, these sea-Danaoi may have
been Rhodian Argives. The Shakalsha are a more doubtful quantity,
having been variously identified with the Sikels of ancient Sicily
and with the Sagalassians of Pisidia. But the remaining tribes are
in all probability Cretans, fragments of the old Minoan Empire
which had collapsed two centuries before, and was now gradually
becoming disintegrated under the continued pressure from the north. The
Zakkaru have been connected by Professor Petrie with the coast-town
of Zakro, in Eastern Crete, and the identification, though not
absolutely certain, is at all events very probable. The Uashasha
have been associated by Mr. H. R. Hall with the town of Axos, in
Crete. There remain the Pulosathu, who are, almost beyond question,
the Philistines, so well known to us from their connection with
the rise of the Hebrew monarchy. The Hebrew tradition brought the
Philistines from Kaphtor, and Kaphtor is plainly nothing else than
the Egyptian Kefti, or Keftiu. In the Philistines, then, we have
the last organized remnant of the old Minoan sea-power. Thrown
back from the frontier of Egypt by the victory of Ramses III.,
they established themselves on the maritime plain of Palestine,
where perhaps the Minoans had already occupied trading-settlements,
and there formed a community consisting of five cities, governed by
five confederate tyrants. No doubt they brought under and held in
subjection the ancient Canaanite population of the district, whom
they would rule as the Normans ruled the inhabitants of Sicily.
In the district which they governed, and especially at Tell-es-Safi
(Gath), Messrs. Bliss and Macalister have discovered many specimens
of pottery which is obviously Cretan of the Third Late Minoan period,
together with ware which is local in the sense of having been
manufactured on the spot, but is quite certainly Late Minoan also
in its design and decoration.
So, then, the nation with which we have all been familiar from the
earliest days of childhood as the hated rival of the young Hebrew
state, whose wars with the Hebrews are the subject of so many of
the heroic stories of Israel's Iron Age, was the last survival of
the great race of Minos. Samson made sport for his Cretan captors
in a Minoan Theatral Area by the portico of some degenerate House
of Minos, half palace, half shrine, with Cretan ladies in their
strangely modern garb of frills and flounces looking down from
the balconies to see his feats of strength, as their ancestresses
had looked down at Knossos on the boxing and bull-grappling of the
palmy days when Knossos ruled the Ægean. The great champion whom
David met and slew in the vale of Elah was a Cretan, a Pelasgian,
one of the Greeks before the Greeks, wearing the bronze panoply with
the feather-crested helmet which his people had adopted in their
later days in place of the old leathern cap and huge figure-eight
shield. Ittai of Gath, David's faithful captain of the bodyguard,
and David's body-guards themselves, the Cherethites and Pelethites
(Cretans and Philistines), were all of the same race.
Though these last supporters of the great Minoan tradition had
fallen upon evil times, it is evident that they were not altogether
degenerate. The references to their cities in Scripture show that
they still retained the national taste for splendid buildings;
and no doubt their culture, though belonging to the last and most
debased period of Minoan art, was far in advance of that of the
rude Hebrew tribes. The golden mice and tumours which they sent to
the Hebrews along with the ark of Jehovah recall on the one hand
the skill of the Minoan goldsmiths, and on the other the votive
images of animals and diseased human organs placed in the old shrine
at Petsofa. The respect which was excited by their warlike prowess
can easily be read between the lines of the Hebrew story. A race
that to its opponents appears to breed giants is a race that has
proved itself thoroughly respectable on the field of war; and the
fact that a small league of five towns maintained itself so long as
it did, and was able to make itself so dreaded, points to bravery
and skill in arms altogether out of proportion to its actual strength
in mere numbers. Evidently the last Minoans succeeded in creating
an atmosphere for themselves in Palestine, and in impressing the
surrounding peoples with a wholesome terror of them. We may imagine
the men from Crete, lithe and agile, as we see them on the Boxer
Vase of Hagia Triada, swaggering in their bronze armour among the
weaker Orientals, much as the later Greek hoplite of the times of
Psamtek I. or Haa-ab-ra domineered over the native Egyptians.
But all the same the Philistine was an anachronism, a survival from
an older world. The day of the Minoan, like that of his early friend
the Egyptian, had passed away. The stars of new races were rising
above the horizon, and new claimants were dividing the heritage of
the ancient world. To the new Greek the realm of knowledge and
art which his Cretan forerunner had not unworthily cultivated; to
the Mesopotamian the realm of armed dominance, to which also the
Cretan had once laid claim; to the Hebrew the realm of spiritual
thought, in which, by reason of our ignorance, we can say next to
nothing of the Cretan's achievement, save only that he too sought
for God, if haply he might feel after Him and find Him.
CHAPTER VIII
THE DESTROYERS
The Empire of the Sea-Kings had not been immune from disaster and
defeat any more than any other great Empire of the ancient world.
The times of conquest and triumph, when Knossos exacted its human
tribute from the vanquished states, Megara or Athens, or from its
own far-spread dependencies, had occasionally been broken by periods
when victory left its banners, and when the indignities it had
inflicted on other states were retaliated on itself. Once at least
in the long history of the palace at Knossos, if not twice, there
had come a disastrous day when the Minoan fleet had either been
defeated or eluded, when some invading force had landed and swept
up the valley, had overcome what resistance could be made by the
guard of the unfortified palace, and had ebbed back again to its
ships, leaving death and fire-blackened walls behind it. The Second
Middle Minoan period closes with the evidence of such a general
catastrophe, in which the palace was sacked and fired, and there
are also traces which suggest that the end of the preceding period
was marked by a similar disaster.
But these catastrophes, whether the agents of them were mere sea-rovers,
making a daring raid upon the eyrie of the great sea-power, or
the warriors of rival mainland states, eager to avenge upon their
enemy what they themselves had suffered at her hands, or, as Dr.
Evans and other explorers incline rather to believe, Cretans from
Phæstos, whose purpose was merely to overthrow the ruling dynasty,
scarcely interrupted the current of Minoan development. If the
enemy came from without, he came only to destroy and plunder, not
to occupy, and, having done his work, departed; if from within
the Empire, his triumph made no breach in the continuity of the
Minoan tradition. The palace rose again from its ashes, greater
and more glorious than before, and men of the same stock carried
on the work that had been checked for a while by the rough hand of
war. The men of the Third Middle Minoan period reared the beginnings
of the second palace on the site where the first had stood, and in
the relics of their arts and crafts the same spirit which informed
the earlier period still prevails, with no greater modifications
than such as come naturally to the art of any nation by the mere
lapse of time.
From the beginning of Middle Minoan III. to the end of Late Minoan
II.--a period, that is to say, of either some 500 or almost 2,000
years, according to the scheme of Egyptian chronology which we
may adopt--the civilization of Crete apparently followed a course
of even and peaceful development. At Knossos, Phæstos, and Hagia
Triada the great palaces slowly grew to their final glory. The
art that had produced the beautiful polychrome Kamares ware passed
away, and was succeeded by the naturalism which has left us the Blue
Boy who gathers the white crocuses, and the faïence reliefs of the
Temple Repositories, a naturalism which, with various modifications
in style and material, persists to the end of Late Minoan I. In the
midst of this period (Late Minoan I.) come what are perhaps the
highest developments of Minoan art in the shape of the steatite vases
of Hagia Triada, Boxer, Harvester, and Chieftain. On the mainland
the kindred culture of Mycenæ was rising to its culmination, and
the art represented in the Circle-Graves was almost in the fulness
of its bloom. Naturalism declines in its turn, and is succeeded by
the Later Palace style, more grandiose, more mannered, and less
free than that which had preceded it. It was in the Later Palace
period (Late Minoan II.) that the miniature frescoes were painted,
to preserve for us the strangely modern style of the Minoan Court,
with its flounced and furbelowed dames. Naturalism, though failing,
was still capable of great things, and its last efforts in the palace
at Knossos gave us the magnificent reliefs of painted stucco, such
as the bull's head and the King with the peacock plumes. Over the
seas, the Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty were setting down on
their tomb walls those likenesses of the Keftiu which have helped
us to the date of this last development of Minoan greatness.
[Illustration XXII: THEATRAL AREA, KNOSSOS: RESTORED (_p_. 100)
_G. Maraghiannis_]
Probably the power and grandeur of the Empire was never more imposing
than during the hundred years before 1400 B.C. The House of Minos
at Knossos had reached its full development, and stood in all its
splendour, an imposing mass of building, crowning the hill of Kephala
with its five storeys around the great Central. Court, its Theatral
Area, and its outlying dependencies. Within its spacious porticoes and
corridors the walls glowed with the brilliant colours of innumerable
frescoes and reliefs in coloured plaster. The Cup-Bearer, the Queen's
Procession, the Miniature Frescoes of the Palace Sports, stood
out in all their freshness. Magnificent urns in painted pottery,
with reliefs like those of the great papyrus vase (Plate XXIII.),
decorated the halls and courts, and were rivalled by huge stone
amphoræ, exquisitely carved. The King and his courtiers were served
in costly vessels of gold, silver, and bronze _repoussé_ work.
The Empire of the Sea-Kings was at its apogee, and on every hand
there were the evidences of security and luxury.
But, as in the contemporary Egypt of Amenhotep III. a similar
development in all the comforts and luxuries of civilized life
was swiftly followed by the downfall under Akhenaten, so in Crete
the luxury of Late Minoan II. was only the prelude to its great
and final disaster. Exactly when the catastrophe came we cannot
tell. The Cretan Empire was certainly still existent in all its
glory in 1449 B.C., when Amenhotep II., the son of the great Tahutmes
III., came to the throne, for Rekh-ma-ra, the Vizier of Tahutmes,
in whose tomb the visit of the Keftian ambassadors is pictured,
survived, as we know, into the reign of Amenhotep. The twenty-six
years of Amenhotep II.'s reign, and the almost nine of Tahutmes
IV., bring us to the accession of Amenhotep III. in 1414, and the
thirty-six years of the latter take us to 1379 B.C. or thereby,
when the heretic Akhenaten, whose reign was to witness the downfall
of the Egyptian Empire in Syria, ascended the throne. Somewhere
within these seventy years the Empire of the Minoans passed away
in fire and bloodshed, and we shall probably not go far wrong if
we suppose that the great catastrophe came about the year 1400
B.C. The conclusion of Dr. Evans is that 'it seems reasonable to
suppose that the overthrow at Knossos had taken place not later
than the first half of the fourteenth century.'[*] Mrs. H. B. Hawes
places the fall of Knossos at 1450; but Rekh-ma-ra must have still
been living at that date, and, as Professor Burrows remarks, 'it
would at least be a strange coincidence if Egyptian artists were
painting the glories of the Palace at the very moment when they
were passing away.'
[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' pp. 52, 53.]
That there was a huge disaster, which broke for ever the power of
the Sea-Kings, is unmistakable. The Minoan kingdom did not fall
from over-ripeness and decay, as was the case with so many other
empires. The latest relics of its art before the catastrophe show
no signs of decadence; the latest specimens of its linear writing
show a marked advance on those of preceding periods. A civilization
in full strength and growth was suddenly and fatally arrested.
Everywhere throughout the palace at Knossos there are traces of
a vast conflagration. The charred ends of beams and pillars, the
very preservation of the clay tablets with their enigmatic records,
a preservation due, probably, to the tremendous heat to which they
were exposed by the furious blazing of the oil in the store jars
of the magazines, the traces of the blackening of fire upon the
walls--everything tells of an overwhelming tragedy. Nor was the
catastrophe the result of an accident. There is no mistaking the
significance of the fact that in the palace scarcely a trace of
precious metal, and next to no trace of bronze has been discovered.
Fire at Knossos was accompanied by plunder, and the plundering
was thorough. A few scraps of gold-leaf, and the little deposit
of bronze vessels that had been preserved from the plunderers by
the fact that the floor of the room in which they were found had
sunk in the ruin of the conflagration, are evidences, better than
absolute barrenness would have been, to the fact that the place
was pillaged with minute thoroughness, and the unfinished stone jar
in the sculptor's workshop tells its own tale of a sudden summons
from peaceful and happy toil to the stern realities of warfare.
The evidence from Phæstos and Hagia Triada tallies with that from
Knossos. Everywhere there are the traces of fire on the walls,
and a sudden interruption of quiet and luxurious life. The very
stone lamps still stand in the rooms at Hagia Triada, and on the
stairs of the Basilica at Knossos, as they stood to lighten the
last night of the doomed Minoans. Of course there are no records,
and if there were we could not read them; but it is easy to imagine
the disastrous sea-fight off the mouth of the Kairatos River, or
elsewhere along the coast, the wrecks of the once invincible Minoan
fleet driven ashore in hopeless ruin in the shallow bay, like the
Athenian fleet at Syracuse, the swift march of the mainland conquerors
up the valley, the brief, desperate resistance of the palace guards,
and then the horrors of the sack, and the long column of flushed
victors winding down to their ships, laden with booty, and driving
with them crowds of captive women. Similar scenes must have been
enacted at Phæstos and Hagia Triada, either by other forces of
invaders, or by the same host sweeping round the island.
From this overwhelming disaster the Minoan Empire never recovered.
The palace at Knossos was never reoccupied as a palace, at least on
anything like the scale of its former magnificence. The invaders
possibly departed as swiftly as they had come, or if, as seems
more probable, they eventually established themselves as a ruling
caste among the subject Minoans, they chose for their dwellings
other sites than those of the old palaces. The broken fragments of
the Minoan race crept back after the sack to the blackened ruins
of their holy and beautiful house, not to rebuild it, but to divide
its stately rooms and those of its dependencies by rude walls into
poor dwelling-houses, where they lived on--a very different life
from that of the golden days before the sack.
[Illustration XXIII: GREAT JAR WITH PAPYRUS RELIEFS (_p_. 206)]
In their own way they strove to continue, possibly under the modifying
influence of the art tradition of their conquerors, the great story
of the art of Knossos. There is no abrupt break in the style of the
pottery and other articles belonging to the latest Minoan period, as
compared with that of the days before the catastrophe. Technical skill
is almost as great as ever; it is degeneration in the inspiration of
the art that has begun. The spirit of the nation has been broken,
and its art is no longer living. Though the old models are followed,
it is with less complete understanding, with a perpetually increasing
interval, and with less and less fidelity. 'With the inability to
create new ideas of art and life,' says Dr. Mackenzie, 'is coupled
the slavish adherence to inherited tradition and custom in both.
Nothing new is produced, and nothing old is changed.'[*] 'For Crete
the sack is Ægospotami, Late Minoan III., the long months that
culminate in the surrender of Athens; the sack is Leipzig, Late
Minoan III., the slow closing in on Paris that leads up to the
abdication of Napoleon.'[**] Finally, even the technique fails, and
the great art which gave to the world the figures of the Cup-Bearer
and the King with the Peacock Plumes dies out in monstrosities.
[Footnote *: _Annual of the British School at Athens_, vol. xiii.,
p. 426.]
[Footnote **: R. M. Burrows, 'The Discoveries in Crete,' p. 100.]
The long decay was to some extent arrested by the coming of other
waves of invaders, probably Achæans, to whose influence may be
attributed the change in customs which begins to show itself in the
post-Minoan period. Burning begins to take the place of inhumation
as a means of disposing of the dead; Continental types of weapons
make their appearance in the tombs; iron swords and daggers are
even found. In life the men who use these weapons are clad, not
with the Minoan loin-cloth, but with the garments which we associate
with the Greeks of the Classical period, garments which require
the use of the fibula or safety-pin to fasten them. The potter's
art begins to find new motives, and to develop the use of the human
form as a type of adornment in a manner almost entirely foreign to
the Minoan tradition. At last, perhaps four centuries after the
fall of Knossos, comes the great tidal wave of Dorian invasion,
engulfing the work alike of conquerors and conquered, and blowing
out all the landmarks of the ancient cultures.
And through all these changes, and ever since, the ruined House of
Minos remained absolutely deserted, until, more than 3,000 years
after the sack, its echoes were wakened by the spades and picks
of Dr. Evans's workmen. Around the ruins grim and cruel legends
swiftly grew up. The old traditions, dimly surviving in the minds
of the native Cretans, of the bull-fight and the prize-ring, and
the tribute of toreadors from the conquered nations, seemed to be
corroborated by the very decorations of the palace walls, still
visible amidst the ruins, and around them were woven the stories
which have come down to us as legends of early Greece. 'Let us
place ourselves for a moment,' says Dr. Evans, 'in the position of
the first Dorian colonists of Knossos after the great overthrow,
when features now laboriously uncovered by the spade were still
perceptible amid the mass of ruins. The name [Labyrinth] was still
preserved, though the exact meaning, as supplied by the native
Cretan dialect, had been probably lost. Hard by the western gate,
in her royal robes, to-day but partially visible, stood Queen Ariadne
herself--and might not the comely youth in front of her be the
hero Theseus, about to receive the coil of thread for his errand
of liberation down the mazy galleries beyond? Within, fresh and
beautiful on the walls of the inmost chambers, were the captive
boys and maidens locked up here by the tyrant of old. At more than
one turn rose a mighty bull, in some cases, no doubt, according
to the favourite Mycenæan motive, grappled with by a half-naked
man. The type of the Minotaur itself as a man-bull was not wanting
on the soil of prehistoric Knossos, and more than one gem found
on this site represents a monster with the lower body of a man
and the forepart of a bull.
'One may feel assured that the effect of these artistic creations
on the rude Greek settler of those days was not less than that of
the disinterred fresco on the Cretan workman of to-day. Everything
around--the dark passages, the lifelike figures surviving from an
older world, would conspire to produce a sense of the supernatural.
It was haunted ground, and then, as now, "phantasms" were about. The
later stories of the grisly King and his man-eating bull sprang,
as it were, from the soil, and the whole site called forth a
superstitious awe. It was left severely alone by the new-comers.
Another Knossos grew up on the lower slopes of the hill to the
north, and the old Palace site became "a desolation and hissing."
Gradually earth's mantle covered the ruined heaps, and by the time
of the Romans the Labyrinth had become nothing more than a tradition
and a name.'[*]
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, pp. 131, 132.]
Who, then, were the invaders who, whether they remained as a ruling
caste in the land which they had conquered, or merely destroyed
and departed, inflicted upon the Minoan civilization a blow from
which it never recovered? The Cretans of Præsos, whose story of the
Sicilian expedition of Minos has already been mentioned, stated to
Herodotus that, after that great disaster, 'to Crete, thus destitute
of inhabitants ... other men, and especially the Grecians, went, and
settled there.' As Mr. Hogarth has pointed out, 'the men of Præsos
were no doubt, in the true saga spirit, foreshortening history by
crystallizing a process into a single event.' It is very improbable,
in view of the evidence afforded by the long survival and gradual
decay of the Minoan tradition, that there was any immediate general
occupation of the island on the part of the conquering race. The
process which finally resulted in the island of Crete becoming
'the mixed land,' with a heterogeneous population of Pelasgians,
Dorians, Achæans, and other tribes, must have been a gradual one,
extending, in all probability, over several centuries. Any large
influx of foreign elements was impossible so long as Crete was
dominated by a great and warlike central power; but once that power
was broken by the catastrophe in which the Palaces of Knossos and
Phæstos were overthrown, there was nothing to hinder the gradual
drifting in of the wandering tribes of the Ægean and of the North.
How that catastrophe came about we can see, not with any certainty
of detail, but with some amount of probability as to its general
outlines, from that echo of a period of wandering and strife in
the Mediterranean area which comes to us from the records of Ramses
III. at Medinet Habu. 'The isles were restless, disturbed among
themselves,' and it was one of the later waves of that storm which
broke itself against the armed strength of Egypt about 1200 B.C.
Probably the process of migration had been going on for several
generations. The rude but vigorous tribes of the North had been
pressing down upon the races which had created that remarkable
Bronze Age civilization of the Danubian area, whose relics have
been coming to light of late years; and these in their turn, under
the pressure from the North, had been moving down towards the
Mediterranean, driving before them the peoples, probably of kindred
stock to themselves, who had occupied the lands of the Mycenæan
civilization.
We know that long before the Homeric poems took shape the Achæans
had established themselves as the ruling caste in the Argolid,
in Laconia, and elsewhere; and that the pressure had begun even
while Mycenæ was at the height of its power is suggested by the
figures on one of the steles of the Circle-Graves, where a Mycenæan
chieftain in his chariot is pursuing an enemy whose leaf-shaped
sword shows that he was one of the Danubian race. The Mycenæan
was the victor in the first shock; but the steady pressure of the
tribes from the North was not to be permanently resisted, and the
end was the establishment of an alien race in power at Mycenæ. The
Mycenæan stele, where the chief of the ancient stock pursues his
Northern assailant, has its _motif_ reversed in the archaic Greek
stele discovered by Dr. Pernier at Gortyna, where a big Northerner
with round shield and greaves threatens a tiny Minoan or Mycenæan,
crouching behind his figure-of-eight shield. The two rude pictures
may be taken as typical of the beginning and the end of the process
which resulted in the establishment of the race of Agamemnon at
'Golden Mycenæ.' Pressed upon thus by the warlike Achæans, perhaps
already forced from their homes on the mainland, the Mycenæans
of Tiryns and Mycenæ were obliged to fare forth in search of new
dwelling-places. Not unnaturally the emigrants may have turned to
the land from which their civilization had originally sprung, in
the expectation that the Cretans would not refuse a welcome and a
home to men of their own stock. Seemingly they were disappointed in
their expectation. The Minoans, or, at least, the Minoan rulers, were
not prepared to admit peacefully the incursion of this new element
into their kingdom; and the wanderers, under the spur of desperate
need, took by force what was denied to them as suppliants. So, in
all probability, the glory of the Minoan Empire was destroyed by
the hands of its own children, the descendants of men whom Knossos
herself had sent forth to hold her mainland colonies.[*]
[Footnote *: _Cf_. Dr. Mackenzie, _Annual of the British School
at Athens_, vol. xiii., pp. 424, 425.]
In such circumstances there would be no sudden eclipse of the ancient
culture. Modified slightly, if at all, by the influx of what, after
all, was a kindred element, it would persist, as the evidence shows
it persisted, until it perished of natural decay. Even when the
Achæans, and, later still, the Dorians, followed in the wake of the
Mycenæan immigrants, though their advent brought, as we have seen,
important changes in customs and in art motives, the ancient native
culture remained the fundamental element of the newer civilization.
It has been pointed out by Mr. Hogarth that the Geometric vases
of the early Iron Age in Crete exhibit in their decoration merely
stylized Minoan motives, while 'the shields and other bronzes of the
Idæan Cave, the latest of which come down probably to the ninth
or even the eighth century, are artistic descendants of Minoan
masterpieces modified by some element of uncouthness which was
probably of Northern origin.'[*]
[Footnote *: _Fortnightly Review_, October, 1908, p. 602.]
Thus in slow decay, after the great catastrophe, passed away the
great civilization of the Minoan Empire. Not all of the tribes
which had owned the dominion of the House of Minos were content,
however, to remain as subjects to the mainland conquerors. The
destruction of the central power at Knossos must have involved, as
Dr. Evans has suggested,[*] the collapse of much of the commerce
on which the island of the Hundred Cities depended for the support
of its great population. Already in the reign of Amenhotep III.
of Egypt, that powerful monarch had been obliged to establish a
special coastguard service at the mouths of the Nile to protect his
trade-routes against the Lycian pirates. When the Minoan fleet was
no longer in being to police the Ægean, these and other piratical
races must have quickly driven the Cretan merchant marine from the
seas. The purple fisheries and the oil trade would dwindle and
die, and the population which had been supported by them would be
driven from a land which could no longer maintain it. The colonizing
movement which has left traces of Minoan culture in Anatolia, in
Palestine, in Sicily, and even in Spain, began, no doubt, at an
earlier period, when the Empire of the Sea-Kings was in its full
strength; but it probably received a considerable impulse at this
time of forced emigration. The sudden introduction of the same
culture into Cyprus at some period after 1400 B.C. has been referred
to conquest by men of the Ægean race, who may very well have been the
men of Knossos driven forth by the pressure of altered conditions
to find a new home for themselves.
[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' p. 59.]
The Mycenæan pottery found at Tell-el-Amarna shows that there was
still an opening in Egypt for the products of Ægean art at least as
late as the reign of Akhenaten; and it is more than probable that
in Egypt many of the _émigrés_ of the Minoan _débâcle_ found a home.
The art of the reign of Akhenaten is characterized by the somewhat
sudden outburst of a naturalistic style almost entirely foreign to
the Egyptian tradition; and, as Mr. Hall foresaw eleven years ago,
it has been suggested[*] that the naturalism of Tell-el-Amarna
owes some of its inspiration to the influence of the fugitives
who brought with them from Crete the traditions of the great art
of Knossos. Such a suggestion is no longer so improbable as it
seemed to be in 1901, when it was still a tenable theory that the
new development of Egyptian art was due to Mesopotamian influence,
and came from Mitanni with Queen Tyi, the wife of Amenhotep III.
Now that it is certain that Tyi was no Mitannian, but a native
Egyptian, that door is closed, and we must suppose either that
Egyptian art suddenly and spontaneously awakened to a new style of
vision and execution, from which, again, it as suddenly departed,
or else that some foreign influence was working strongly upon the
rigid Egyptian convention, modifying and vivifying it. If a foreign
influence, why not the influence of the Minoan _émigrés_, whose
art we at least know to have been capable of such an effect? Of
course, it is, after all, matter of surmise, and perhaps the chances
are rather in favour of the new art of Akhenaten's time having
been a genuinely native growth, influenced and inspired by the
new ideas with which the heretic King was seeking to leaven the
national life; but it is certainly far from unlikely that the break-up
of the Minoan Empire did influence the art of Egypt, and perhaps
that or other nations, in a manner something similar to, though on
a smaller scale than, that in which the capture of Constantinople
influenced the culture of Europe in the fifteenth century.
[Footnote *: R. M. Burrows, 'The Discoveries in Crete,' p. 96.]
We have already seen the evidence for the migration of Minoan tribes
of a later age in the assault of the Zakkaru and Pulosathu upon
Egypt 200 years after the fall of Knossos, and the establishment
of the latter tribe as an independent power upon the coast of
Palestine--events which may have been due to the advance of another
wave of Northern colonists upon the shores of Crete. One more glimpse
of the dying sea-power of the Cretan race, now itself disorganized
and predatory, is given us by the Golenischeff papyrus, which tells,
among other adventures of the unfortunate Wen-Amon, envoy of Her-hor,
the priest-King of Upper Egypt (_circa_ 1100 B.C.), how the Egyptian
ambassador was threatened with capture by eleven ships of Zakru
pirates, who put into Byblos when he was about to sail thence.
Whether these were genuine Minoans or not, it is impossible to
tell; their immediate connection was apparently with Dor, on the
coast of Palestine; but their name suggests the town of Zakro, in
Eastern Crete, and it is not unlikely that they belonged to the
same race as the Zakkaru of the time of Ramses III.
Thereafter the Egyptian records are silent as to the scattered
tribes of Crete, just as they had been silent since the rise of
the Nineteenth Dynasty as to the organized Empire of the Keftians.
The eleven shiploads of Zakru sea-robbers are the last degenerate
representatives of the great marine which, under the Kings of the
House of Minos, had once held the undisputed Empire of the Ægean.
The ring of Minos was destined to lie for long ages beneath the
waves before the descendants of Theseus brought it up again.
CHAPTER IX
THE PERIODS OF MINOAN CULTURE
We must now endeavour to form some idea of the various periods
into which the long enduring culture of the Minoan Empire more
or less naturally falls, and to note some of the characteristic
features of each period. The chief aid in the formation of such
an idea is given by the remains of the pottery which have survived
from each period, and it is largely from the classification of
the pottery at Knossos and other sites that the scheme adopted
by Dr. Evans and other workers has been derived. The deposit left
by Neolithic man on the hill of Kephala averages about 6 metres
in thickness below the later deposit which marks the occupation
of the site by the post-Neolithic culture. We are thus led to an
almost fabulous antiquity for the first occupation of the site.
In the earliest beginnings of human development, progress, with
its consequent accumulation, is slow, and if we allow a rate of
3 feet of deposit for each thousand years, we shall probably not
be very far wrong. Such an allowance brings us to about 10,000
B.C. as the time when Neolithic man began his first settlement on
the hill of Knossos.
_Neolithic Age_.--The remains found in the deposit of this period
are naturally of a very simple and primitive character. They consist
of pottery, handmade without any use of the wheel, and hand-burnished,
black in colour, and, in the latest specimens, adorned with incised
ornament, which is sometimes filled in with a white chalky substance.
While this description is characteristic of the deposit generally, a
gradual progress in the potter's art is traceable from the virgin soil
upwards. In the earliest stratum, immediately above the depositless
virgin soil, the pottery, for the depth of the first metre, was entirely
plain, unfired, polished within and without, with no appearance of
narrowed necks or moulded bases. The next metre shows the beginning
of incised ornament, but in almost inappreciable quantity, and
the third and fourth metres show the gradual, but extremely slow,
growth of this species of decoration, the proportion of incised
vases in the fourth metre only reaching 3 per cent. The fifth metre
deposit, however, discloses one important innovation. The proportion
of incised vases is scarcely greater than in the preceding stratum,
but almost all of them have the incisions filled in with the white
chalky substance already alluded to, forming a geometric design of
white upon black. Along with this new development of the incised
ware goes a development of the unincised, whose surface is now not
only polished to the highest degree of lustre, but is thereafter
rippled in vertical lines by the pressure of some blunt instrument,
so as to produce an undulating effect, like that of the ripple
marks on sand. The rippling of the unincised pottery continues
along with the chalk filling of the incised through the remainder
of the Neolithic series, and, in fact, appears to have enjoyed
an even superior popularity. In the sixth metre from the virgin
soil indications begin to present themselves of the fact that the
Neolithic period is about to draw to a close, for some of the pottery
is beginning to assume the shapes which are characteristic of the
painted ware of the earliest Minoan period, and in the following
metre paint begins to make its appearance as a means of decoration
in rivalry with the incision and rippling of the earlier strata.
From this point, then, we begin to get into touch with the genuine
Minoan periods, of which, according to Dr. Evans's classification,
there are three--Early, Middle, and Late Minoan--each in its turn
subdivided into three sub-periods.
_Early Minoan I_.--The pottery of this period takes over in great
part the style of the primitive hand-burnished black ware inherited
from the preceding age. But though this supplies the greater proportion
of the material, it is not the characteristic feature. This is
supplied by the fact that the potter now begins to use paint as a
means for producing the lustrous black surface which his Neolithic
predecessor produced by hand-burnishing. A lustrous black glaze
medium is spread as a slip over the surface of the clay, so as to
produce an effect generally similar to that of the hand-polished
ware, and on this lustrous slip the decoration is painted, generally
in white, more rarely in vermilion. Thus we have painted vases,
with light design upon a dark ground.
Having made this step, the artist varied his procedure by applying
the black slip itself as the decoration in bands upon the natural
buff colour of the clay, thus giving a decorative scheme of dark
design upon a light ground. The ware now for the first time gives
evidence of having been fired. The primitive 'bucchero,' still
surviving alongside of the painted pottery, is very closely related
to the imported vases found by Petrie in First Dynasty tombs at
Abydos; and a further link with Egypt is afforded by the fact that
vases of Proto-Dynastic Egyptian form in diorite and syenite were
discovered in the south and east quarters of the palace at Knossos.
Early Minoan I. is thus to be equated with the earliest beginnings
of Dynastic rule in Egypt--that is to say, it dates from about
5500 B.C. if Petrie's date for the First Dynasty be adopted, or
from about 3400 B.C. if the Berlin dating be preferred. From this
period there survive no remains of building at Knossos.
_Early Minoan II_.--The distinguishing characteristic of the second
period of Early Minoan is the greater freedom and originality shown
in the designs of the vases. The style of painted decoration remains
much the same as in the preceding period; but the vases now develop
long spouts or beaks, and are the 'beak-jugs' (Schnabelkanne) of
the German archæologists. While a tendency may be observed to vary
the straight line decoration of Early Minoan I. by the introduction
of simple curves, there is also a revival of the fashion for the
old incised geometric-patterned ware. A curious development of
this period is found in the mottled ware from Vasiliki, where the
decoration was accomplished neither by incising nor by painting a
design, but by a method of firing in which the vases, first painted
red, were so placed that the hot coals actually came into contact
with the vases at certain points, and produced black patches upon
the red paint. The resultant mottled surface was then hand-polished,
and sometimes, but more rarely, used as the medium for a design
in white. To this period belong the oldest parts of the deposit
at Hagios Onouphrios, and the greater part of the contents of the
bee-hive chamber tomb at Hagia Triada, where, along with incised
and early painted vases, were found copper daggers with very short
triangular blades, a number of rude stone seals, and very primitive
idols, rudely imitating the human form. There are still no traces
of any surviving building on the hill of Knossos, nor is there any
definite link with Egypt to afford an opportunity for determining
the date of the period.
[Illustration XXIV: THE BASILICA. STONE LAMP. THE ROYAL VILLA, KNOSSOS
(_p_. 108)]
_Early Minoan III_.--In this period the proportion of painted vases
steadily increases, though for a time there is also a revival of
the incised ornament, attributed by Dr. Evans to influence from
the Cyclades, which at this time also gave to Crete the idea of
the flat, banjo-shaped human figurines which are characteristic
of the early deposits of Melos and Amorgos.
The use of the potter's wheel probably now begins, and the clay is
carefully sifted and fired, the favourite colour scheme being white
on lustrous brown or black slip, though sometimes the alternative
scheme of dark upon light is adopted; and vases are sometimes fashioned
out of very thin clay, in anticipation of the fine egg-shell Kamares
ware of Middle Minoan II. The chief decorative motive is a horizontal
band, or more than one, around the upper part of the vase. On these
bands the chief ornament is the zig-zag, and curves directly derived
therefrom, and the spiral begins to appear as a form of decoration.
It is uncertain whether the credit for the origination of this
favourite form of decorative motive is to be attributed to Egypt
or to Crete. Miss Hall[*] regards the Early Minoan III. spirals
as late-comers in the field, attributing the first development of
the spiral to the painters of Egyptian pre-Dynastic vases; but Mr.
H. R. Hall[**] denies the right of the volutes on the pre-Dynastic
vases to be regarded as spirals at all, considers that the true
spiral appears suddenly in Egypt as 'a new and unprecedented thing'
about the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, and infers that in its
use the Cretans were original, and the Egyptians merely borrowers;
while Dr. Evans[***] denies originality to both, and holds that
the use of the spiral was first developed on the European side
of the Ægean.
[Footnote *: 'The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age,' p.
9.]
[Footnote **: Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology,
vol. xxxi., part 5, pp. 221, 222.]
[Footnote ***: 'Scripta Minoa,' p. 126.]
The fact that the seals of this period show motives derived from
the Egyptian Sixth Dynasty 'button-seals' suggests that Early Minoan
III. is to be equated with the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt.
This, however, is but a slight help as to the positive date of
the Minoan period, owing to the huge gap between the different
systems of Egyptian chronology. All that can be said is that on
Petrie's system of dating the Minoan period which is contemporary
with the end of the Sixth Dynasty would date about 4000 B.C., and
on the Berlin system about 2475 B.C. Though the two cultures are
contemporaneous, it is, of course, by no means to be inferred that
the art of Early Minoan III. has left us any relics which are worthy
of being placed on a level with the wonderful work of the Egyptian
Old Kingdom artists. The primitive pictographs on the bead-seals
of this period mark the beginnings of this form of Minoan script,
which persisted until Late Minoan I., when it was at last superseded
by the linear form of writing which had made its appearance in
Middle Minoan III.
_Middle Minoan I_.--With this period we have distinct advance in
more directions than one. The Minoan artist is beginning to feel
his way towards that polychrome style of decoration which reached
such a remarkable development in the Kamares vases of the succeeding
stage. In the decoration of his ware, which does not exhibit any
marked advance in form upon that of Early Minoan III., he has begun
to supplement the familiar white on the dark slip by adding yellow,
orange, red, and crimson. The Petsofa figurines, already alluded
to, which belong to this period, have a colour scheme of black
and white, red and orange. Along with this development of the use
of colour goes a corresponding advance in design. The motives of
the former period are continued, but are much more developed, and
more freely handled. Instead of being stiffly disposed in bands
round the vessel, they are now frequently grouped with the idea
of covering the ground of the vases in a graceful manner without
any attempt at formal definition of the limits of each article of
the design, the artist's idea being simply to fill, in a manner
satisfying to the eye, the space upon which he had to work. The
zonal system still persists side by side with the freer style,
and is often very skilfully handled as a means of decoration. One
of the characteristic features of Middle Minoan ceramic art--the
use of relief to enhance the effect of the polychrome decoration
through the addition of contrasts of light and shade--is seen coming
into use in the earliest part of the period.
Decoration is still geometric, and was to continue so for long.
Not until Middle Minoan III. do we get a really naturalistic style
of decorative art. But in Middle Minoan I. there are indications
which, though slight, seem to point to a striving after realism
on the part of some of the artists of the period. This tendency
is apparent even in some of the geometric designs, which are so
disposed as to form an approach to naturalistic patterns. But the
most remarkable example of the tendency is seen in a fragment of
a vase from Knossos, figured by Dr. Mackenzie,[*] on which the
figures of three of the Cretan wild goats are followed by that
of a gigantic beetle with a tail. 'The subject of the design,'
says Dr. Mackenzie, 'in its naturalistic character is so advanced
that, were it not for the company in which the fragments occur,
we should be tempted to assign it to a much later age.' It is
unfortunate that only a part of the design has survived, and that
no parallel to it has ever been found. Was it merely a sport, the
freak of some ancient potter who was weary of the conventional
designs of his time, and tried his hand at something new, combining
the wild life that he could see from the window of his workshop
with that which crawled upon its floor, without ever dreaming of
the problem he was setting for the students of 4,000 years later to
exercise themselves upon? The style of the goat and beetle fragment
is dark upon light. The goats are surrounded by an incised outline,
and filled in with lustrous black glaze; the beetle is drawn freely
in the black glaze, without incision, almost as though it had been
a humorous afterthought of the potter.
[Footnote *: _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol. xxvi., part I,
plate ix. 3.]
Middle Minoan I. has no surviving link with Egyptian art, a fact
which may be explained by the consideration that from the end of the
Sixth Dynasty to the establishment of the Eleventh, Egypt appears
to have been passing through a time of great confusion. The period
is practically a Dark Age so far as Egyptian history is concerned.
[Illustration XXV: (1) KNOSSOS VALLEY
(2) EXCAVATING AT KNOSSOS]
_Middle Minoan II_.--We now come to the period when the first undoubted
traces of the Cretan palaces begin to reveal themselves. The chief
architectural remains of the period are, however, not at Knossos,
but at Phæstos. There the Theatral Area, at least, was in existence
early in this period, possibly in the later part of the preceding
one. But at Knossos the chief evidence for the high state of
civilization attained in this period is the pottery, which reaches a
very advanced development. This is the age of the splendid polychrome
vessels of the type called 'Kamares,' from the cave on Mount Ida
where they were first discovered by Mr. J. L. Myres. The vases
and cups of this fabric, from the delicacy of their forms, the
grace of their designs, and the richness of their colour, are among
the most notable survivals of Minoan ceramic art. The clay is fine
and carefully sifted, and the walls of the vessels are of extreme
thinness and delicacy, approaching to that of the finest egg-shell
china. The designs upon the vases are often moulded in low relief
as well as painted, and the thinness of their walls, the form of
their handles, and the knobs upon them, which are evidently meant to
suggest rivets, show that the potters of the time were endeavouring
to emulate the achievements of their brother artists, the metal
workers. The designs upon the vases themselves are conventional,
the idea being to produce a rich and harmonious effect of form
and colour rather than to secure any imitation of Nature. Indeed,
the patterns are very largely geometric; the zig-zag, the cross,
and concentric circles occur frequently; and when plant life is
imitated it is skilfully conventionalized, as in the case of the
water-lily cup, perhaps the most beautiful specimen of the ware
of the period, on which the white petals start from a centre at
the foot of the cup and enfold its body. The ground of this cup
is lustrous black, and the white of the petals is accentuated by
thin lines of red, while a geometric pattern moulded in low relief
runs round the rim of the cup above the waterlilies (Plate XXIX.
4). The colours of the vases are varied, consisting chiefly of
white, orange, crimson, red, and yellow, and each colour is used
in several shades. 'Black shades into purple, white into cream;
brown has sometimes a red, and sometimes an olive tint; yellows
are either pale or orange; and red is not only a crude vermilion,
but is weakened to pink, or strengthened with shades of orange
and cherry and terra-cotta.' In the decoration of the vases both
styles flourish side by side, dark design upon light ground, and
light upon dark. In some vessels of the period there is a combination
of conventionalized naturalistic ornament and geometric design.
A distinct link between Egypt and Middle Minoan II. is afforded by
the fact that at Kahun, close to the pyramid of Senusert II., near
the Fayum, Professor Petrie discovered vases which are unquestionably
of Kamares type, while the synchronism with the Twelfth Dynasty was
fully established by Professor Garstang's discovery at Abydos of
fragments of a polychrome vessel of late Middle Minoan II. type in
an untouched tomb, which also contained glazed steatite cylinders
with the names of Senusert III. and Amenemhat III. Middle Minoan
II., then, equates with the times of the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty,
a period which was in many respects the most brilliant of Egyptian
history.
When we come to inquire, however, as to positive date, we are still
met, though almost for the last time, by the great discrepancy
between the systems of Egyptian dating. The Twelfth Dynasty is
placed by Professor Petrie at about 3400 B.C., by the traditional
dating about 2500 B.C., while the modern German school brings down
the date as low as 2000 B.C. No more can be said than that Middle
Minoan II. certainly does not begin earlier than 3400 B.C., and
can scarcely begin later than 2000 B.C. The period closes with the
evidence of a great catastrophe at Knossos, in which the palace was
burned; and, as already mentioned, the fact that Phæstos shows no
evidence of such a disaster at this point has roused the suspicion
that the Lords of Phæstos may have been responsible for the destruction
of the greater palace.
_Middle Minoan III_.--To this period belong the beginnings of the
second palace at Knossos. The western portion of the palace probably
dates largely from this time, though it was altered and extended
later; and we must place here the Temple Repositories, and certain
other chambers on the northeast side of the Central Court, though
they were covered up and built over in Late Minoan I. At all events,
a very great and splendid building must have existed upon the site
at this time. Egypt was passing through the dark period between the
Thirteenth and Seventeenth Dynasties, which includes the domination
of the Hyksos; but the civilization of Crete, on the contrary, was
continually and steadily advancing. To this age belong many of
the most interesting and precious relics of the Minoan culture.
The art of the period gradually undergoes a great change from that
of Middle Minoan II. Polychrome decoration steadily declines, and
is superseded by monochrome. The beautiful lustrous black glaze
ground of the vases is replaced by a dull purple slip on which
the decoration is often laid in a powdery white paint. The best
designs are found in this white upon a lilac or mauve ground. In
the designs themselves conventionalism and geometric ornament pass
away, and are followed by a development of naturalism. Dr. Mackenzie
has pointed out that it is to this growth of naturalism that we
must trace the gradual disappearance of polychrome decoration.
'Once we have the portrayal of natural objects, such as flowers,
which becomes so rife before the close of the Middle Minoan Age,
it soon becomes apparent that a scale of colours, which in their
relation to each other were capable of producing polychrome effects
of great beauty, was quite inadequate towards the reproduction of
the natural colours of objects. Thus green, for example, which is
the first necessity towards the rendering of leaves and stems, did
not exist in the colour repertory of the vase painter. The ceramic
artist must thus have felt that with his limited scale of colours
he could not produce the same natural effects as the wall-painter
with his. On the other hand, he must have been equally conscious
that natural objects such as flowers did not look natural in a
polychrome guise which was not that of Nature. The only solution
of the colour difficulty in the circumstances was a compromise in
the shape of a convention. Thus the tendency came into being to
make all natural objects either simply light on a dark ground,
or dark on a light ground.'[*]
[Footnote *: _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol. Xxvi., part I,
pp. 257, 258.]
The two flowers most generally used for the purpose of ornamentation
are the lily and the crocus. For the first time the importance of
pottery as an evidence of the condition of the art of the period
is second to that of other artistic products. It is to Middle Minoan
III. that there belongs the wonderful fabric of faïence, of which so
many specimens were discovered in the Temple Repositories. In them
the same tendency towards naturalism reveals itself. The wild-goat
suckling its kid, the flying-fish, the porcelain vases, one of them
with cockle-shell relief, and another with ferns and rose-leaves
on a ground of pale green, are all instances of the naturalistic
growth. Evidence is also afforded of a great delight in scenes
connected with the sea, and we have the flying-fish and the seal
with the seaman in his skiff defending himself against the attacks
of the sea-monster, to witness to the Minoan appreciation alike
of the curiosities and the dangers of the deep.
Fresco-painting also begins to leave survivals, and we have particularly
the fresco of the Blue Boy gathering white crocuses. At the beginning
of the period the old form of pictographic writing is still in
general use, but by the close of Middle Minoan III. the earlier
type of the linear script, Class A, has made its appearance and
is extensively used. The Middle Minoans of the Third period were
the fabricators of the huge knobbed and corded _pithoi_, or jars,
some of them with the curious 'trickle,' ornament, which is surely
decoration reduced to its last straits. The artist merely dabbed
quantities of brown glaze paint around the rims of his jars, and
allowed it to trickle down the sides at its own will. The result
is curious, but can scarcely be called beautiful (Plate IX. 2).
'Ab-nub's child, Sebek-user, deceased,' whose statuette was found
at Knossos, gives us a point of connection between the earlier
part of Middle Minoan III. and the Thirteenth Egyptian Dynasty,
while the alabastron of Khyan links the later portion of the period
with the Hyksos domination in Egypt. The King who built the great
tomb at Isopata, already described, must have reigned at Knossos
during this period.
_Late Minoan I_.--In this period we come into touch with a great
deal of the fine work of the Royal Villa at Hagia Triada, which
has been already described. A considerable portion of the area
of the palace at Knossos, dating from the preceding age, is now
covered up by new construction, and the second palace begins to
assume the form which was completed in the subsequent period. In
pottery the naturalistic style still persists, but the technique
begins to modify, and the white design on a dark ground occurs
less frequently than design in dark glaze paint on the natural
light ground of the clay. Ornament begins to partake increasingly
of a marine character; the octopus, the Triton shell, the nautilus,
and seaweed, appear as designs, and are executed in lifelike fashion,
which contrasts strongly with the later conventionalized method
of representing them. Indeed, Middle Minoan III. And Late Minoan
I. and II. show a distinct appreciation of and delight in all the
beauty and wonder of the sea, which suggest the important part
which it played in the lives of the Cretan populace. 'At ports
where sailors and fishermen and divers for sponge and purple went
and came, it was natural for an imaginative race to acquire that
sense of the magic and mystery of the sea, that curiosity about
the life in its depths, which found expression in these ceramic
pictures.'[*]
[Footnote *: R. C. Bosanquet, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol.
xxiv., part 2, p. 322.]
[Illustration XXVI: GREAT STAIRCASE, PHÆSTOS (_p_. 120)
_G. Maraghiannis_]
Along with the marine designs went naturalistic representations
of flowers and grasses--the lily and the crocus, already familiar
from earlier work, the Egyptian lotus in a form adapted to the taste
of the Minoan artist, and ivy leaves and tendrils. A peculiarly
graceful design on a vase from Zakro shows an adaptation of the
Egyptian lotus, presenting that favourite Nilotic motive in a style
more flexible and easy than that of the native representations of
it. The design in this case is painted in white on a reddish-brown
ground, and its peculiarity is that the white was laid on after the
vase had been fired, and can be removed with the finger (Plate XXIX.
2). The three vases from Hagia Triada, the Boxer, the Harvester, and
the Chieftain, belong to this period, as do also the frescoes of
the Hunting Cat and the Climbing Plants, and probably the Royal
Gaming Board from the palace at Knossos. At this time, too, we
come upon the long bronze swords which had succeeded the daggers
of the preceding ages. Hieroglyphic writing is now superseded by
the linear script of Class A, which now comes into regular use,
although at Knossos the documents in this script, according to
Dr. Evans, are only to be found in the stratum belonging to the
last period of Middle Minoan, their place being supplied by Class
B, which occurs only at Knossos.
At Hagia Triada and Gournia the older forms of vase are mingled
with early specimens of the type variously known as 'Bügelkanne,'
'Vases à Étrier,' or 'Stirrup-vases.' These vases, named from the
stirrup-like appearance of their curving handles, may more correctly
be called 'false-necked vases,' from the fact that the neck to
which the handles unite is closed, and another neck is formed,
farther away from the handles, for convenience in pouring. The
false-necked vase is the characteristic pottery type of Late Minoan
III., and occurs very frequently on the Mycenæan sites of that
period. The seals with fantastic forms of monsters, such as those
found in such numbers at Zakro, date from the beginning of Late
Minoan I., and to this period also belong the earlier of the Shaft-
or Circle-Graves at Mycenæ, so that now for the first time Minoan
can be equated with Mycenæan. We are still without any system of
dating that is absolutely certain, but this is the last period
of which such a remark is true. The next period brings us into
touch with Egyptian synchronisms whose date is certain to within
a few years.
_Late Minoan II_.--To Late Minoan II. belong the great glories
of the second palace at Knossos, which arrived at its greatest
splendour just before the time at which it was to be destroyed.
Now were built the Throne Room and its antechamber, and the Royal
Villa with its daïs and throne and columned hall, while the walls
of the completed palace were covered with the splendid frescoes
of whose beauties the Cup-Bearer and the spectators watching the
games give us evidence. The reliefs in hard plaster, such as the
bull's head and the King with the peacock plumes, show the style
of decoration which gave variety on the walls to the paintings on
the flat. In pottery the change of style and decoration is gradual,
but quite pronounced. The chief characteristic of the time is the
fabrication of large decorated vases and _pithoi_, such as the
beautiful papyrus relief vase of the Royal Villa, nearly 4 feet
in height (Plate XXIII.; see also Plate XXX.). Naturalism still
survives in occasional designs, but the bulk of the design is
conventional, and the composition of the various elements is often
extremely skilful. A typical form of vessel of this period is the
long narrow strainer, which is borne by the Cup-Bearer in the palace
fresco, and of which various specimens have been found. In many
cases these strainers were made of variegated marble, though pottery
was also used for them.
The bronze vessels from the north-west house at Knossos, and the
swords from the earlier Zafer Papoura graves, testify to the skill
with which metal was wrought. One of these swords from the chieftain's
grave, the short weapon which the noble of Late Minoan II. carried
along with his long rapier, perhaps for parrying thrusts, as the
gallants of Queen Elizabeth's time used their daggers, has a pommel
of translucent agate, and a gold-plated hilt engraved with a design
of a lion chasing and capturing a wild-goat. Great bronze vessels
were wrought with splendid conventional designs, and some of the
stone vases of the period are amazing in the skill with which they
were worked and decorated. 'How the hard material was worked with
precision in the _inside_ of vessels which have only the narrowest
of neck orifices, and that in an age of soft bronze tools, is as
great a mystery as the mode of working diorite and granite in
prehistoric Egypt.'[*] Perhaps the most splendid specimen is the
great amphora, 2 feet high by 6 feet in circumference, with its
two magnificent spiral bands, which was found in the so-called
Sculptor's Workshop at Knossos, beside the smaller vessel which
had only been roughed out when the catastrophe of the palace came.
[Footnote *: D. G. Hogarth, _Cornhill Magazine_, March, 1903, p.
329.]
The linear script, Class B, now supersedes the earlier type, Class
A.
In this period we come for the first time into a sphere where there
is practically an absolute certainty in dating; for now we have the
Keftiu appearing in the tomb frescoes of the Eighteenth Dynasty
at Thebes, with their vessels of characteristic Minoan type, and
their purely Minoan style of dress and general appearance. Sen-mut's
tomb gives us a date about 1480 B.C., and Rekh-ma-ra's may bring
us down to 1450 B.C., or thereby. It is somewhat striking that
the periods of greatest splendour alike for the Egyptian Empire
and for the Minoan should virtually coincide. In either case, the
duration of the culmination of splendour was short. The magnificence
of the Egypt of Hatshepsut, Tahutmes III., and Amenhotep III., was
speedily to be clouded and dimmed by the disasters of the reign
of Akhenaten; but even before the glory of the Eighteenth Dynasty
had passed away, the sun of the Minoan Empire had set. Late Minoan
II., with all its triumphs of architecture and art, was brought to
an abrupt close by the sack of the palaces, probably about 1400
B.C., and the great frescoes of the palace at Knossos were the last
evidences of a magnificence which was never to be revived again
on Cretan soil.
During this period intercourse between Crete and Egypt must have
been frequent and close. It is not only indicated by the evidence
of the Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra tombs, but by the parallelism in
the styles of art in the two countries. The art of each remains
truly national, but the frescoes of Knossos and Hagia Triada and
those of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt are inspired by the same
spirit, though in either case the result is modified by national
characteristics.
[Illustration XXVII: THE HARVESTER VASE, HAGIA TRIADA (_p_. 124)
_G. Maraghiannis_]
_Late Minoan III_.--This, the last period of the Minoan civilization,
commences with the destruction of the palace of Knossost somewhere
before 1400 B.C., and presents no definite line of termination.
The great style of art represented by the preceding period does
not at once degenerate into barbarism. If, as seems probable, the
men who destroyed the Cretan palaces were Mycenæans of the mainland,
more or less of the same stock as the Cretan representatives of the
Minoan tradition, we can see how the catastrophe of the palaces
need not have been followed by any immediate catastrophe of the art
of Crete. At the same time the true spirit of the Minoan race had
been destroyed, and degeneration of the standard of art naturally
followed. The level of artistic work in the earlier part of the
period is still high--in fact, it is that of what is considered
the best Mycenæan art--the technical skill which produced the
masterpieces of the Palace period still survives, but the inspiration
which gave it life is gone. Originality in design vanishes first,
and is gradually followed by skill in execution; the old types are
reproduced in more and more slovenly fashion, and at last even
the material employed follows the example of degeneration. This
period of gradual decadence is, however, the period of greatest
diffusion of the products of Minoan, or, rather, as we may now
call it, of Mycenæan art. At Ialysos in Rhodes, and in the lower
town of Mycenæ, types parallel with the work of Crete are found,
and Tell-el-Amarna furnishes specimens of pottery whose degeneracy
from the type of the Palace period declares them to belong to these
days of decadence. Specimens of Late Minoan III. work are found
at Tarentum, and the island of Torcello, near Venice, and even
as far west as Spain. One of the characteristic features of the
period is the fact that the stirrup-vase, found at Hagia Triada
and Gournia in Late Minoan I., but almost totally wanting in Late
Minoan II., now becomes common.
Towards the close of the period the site of the palace at Knossos
was partially reoccupied by a humbler race of men, who used the
rooms that had once witnessed the pride of the Minoan Sovereigns,
dividing them up by flimsy partition-walls to suit their smaller
needs. An age of transition succeeded, during which the character
of the Cretan population was gradually modified by successive waves
of invasion from the mainland, until Crete assumed the guise of
'the mixed land,' under which Homer knew it; and finally came the
great invasion of the Dorians, which brought in for Crete, as for
the rest of Greece, the dark age which preceded the dawn of the
true Hellenic culture.
CHAPTER X
LIFE UNDER THE SEA-KINGS
What manner of men were the people who developed the Bronze Age
civilization of Crete? Can we form any idea of their physical
characteristics, of their homes and social conditions, of the general
aspect of their daily life, and of the occupations in which they
were engaged? Such questions can only be answered more or less
generally in the absence of written material, or, rather, in our
lack of understanding of the written material that exists; but,
still, a considerable mass of evidence is in existence from which
some broad outlines may be deduced with moderate certainty, and
the object of this chapter is to present these outlines.
First, as to the physical characteristics of the race. Two lines
of evidence are here available. On the one hand, there is that
afforded by the actual remains of the bodies of men and women of
the Minoan race which have been exhumed from ossuaries of the Bronze
Age, and studied by anthropologists. Generally speaking, the result
of their investigations has been to show that the Minoans belonged
to the southernmost of the three great racial belts into which
the ancient peoples of Europe may be divided--the so-called
Mediterranean race. That is to say, they were a people of the
long-headed type, dark in colouring and small in stature. The average
height, estimated from the bones which have been measured, is somewhat
under 5 feet 4 inches, which is about 2 inches less than the average
of the modern Cretans, and corresponds more to the stature of the
Sardinians and Sicilians of the present time. A few skulls of the
broad-headed type appear among the general long-headedness, and
probably point to some intermixture of race; but, as a whole, the
people were long-headed. The shortness of stature indicated by the
bones is a feature which one would scarcely have inferred from
the other line of evidence available--the actual representations
of men and women of their own race which the Minoans have left in
their fresco-paintings; but allowance must, of course, be made
for the artistic convention which tended to accentuate slenderness
of figure, and therefore to increase apparent height.
Judging from the surviving pictures, the Minoan men were bronzed,
with dark hair and beardless faces; their figures were slender,
and their slenderness was made all the more conspicuous by the
fashion which prevailed of drawing in the waist by a tightly fastened
belt, which seems, in some cases at least, to have had metal edges;
but muscularly they were well developed, and the pictures suggest
litheness and agility in a high degree. 'One would say a small-boned
race, relying more on quickness of limb and brain than on weight
and size.' The hair of the men was worn in a somewhat elaborate
fashion, being done up in three coils on the top of the head, while
the ends of it fell in three long curls upon the shoulders. On the
other hand, their dress was extremely simple, consisting normally
of nothing but a loin-cloth, girt by the broad belt already mentioned,
the material of which the loincloth was made being frequently gaily
coloured or patterned, as in the case of the Cup-Bearer, whose
garment is adorned with a dainty quatre-foil design. That more
elaborate robes were worn on certain occasions of importance is
shown by the sarcophagus at Hagia Triada (Plate XXVIII.), where
the lyre player wears a long robe coming down to the ankles and
bordered with lines of colour, while the other men in the scene
wear tucked robes reaching a little below the knees (or possibly
baggy Turkish trousers); and also by the Harvester Vase, where
the chief figure in the procession is clad in a stiff garment,
which has been variously interpreted as a wadded cuirass, or as
a cope of some stiff fabric.
On their feet they wore sometimes shoes, with puttees twisted round
the lower part of the leg, and sometimes half-boots, as shown on
the Chieftain Vase and one of the Petsofa figurines. Indeed, the
footgear of the Minoans seems to have been somewhat elaborate. In
the representations of the Keftiu, on the walls of Rekh-ma-ra's
tomb, the shoes are white, and have bindings of red and blue, and
in some cases are delicately embroidered. Such examples as the shoe
on an ivory figure found at Knossos, and the terra-cotta model of
a shoe found at Sitia, show the daintiness with which the Minoans
indulged themselves in the matter of footwear. In personal adornment
the men to some extent made up for their simplicity in the matter
of dress. The Cup-Bearer wears a couple of thick bracelets on his
upper arm, and another, which bears an agate signet, on his wrist;
and such decorations seem to have been in common use. The King
whose figure in low relief has been reconstructed from fragments
found at Knossos, wears peacock plumes upon his head, while round
his neck he has a collar of fleur-de-lys, wrought, no doubt, in
precious metal.
The Minoan women are depicted with a perfectly white skin, which
contrasts strongly with the bronzed hue of the men. The deep coppery
tint of the men, and the dead white skin of the women is, of course,
to be accepted only as a convention, similar to that adopted by
Egyptian artists, meant to express a difference of complexion caused
by greater or less exposure to the weather; and we need not imagine
that there was so great a contrast between the colouring of men
and women in actual life as would appear from the paintings. If
the dress of the male portion of the populace was simple, that of
the female was the reverse. An elaborate and tight-fitting bodice,
cut excessively low at the neck, covered, or affected to cover,
the upper part of the body, which is so wasp-waisted as to suggest
universal tight-lacing. From the broad belt hung down bell-shaped
skirts, sometimes flounced throughout their whole length, sometimes
richly embroidered, as in the case of a votive skirt represented
in faïence among the belongings of the Snake Goddess found in the
Temple Repositories. In some cases--_e.g._, that of the votaress
of the Snake Goddess--the skirt, below a small panier or apron, is
composed of different coloured materials combined in a chequer pattern
distantly resembling tartan. A fresco from Hagia Triada represents
a curious and elaborate form of dress, consisting apparently of
wide trousers of blue material dotted with red crosses on a light
ground, and most wonderfully frilled and vandyked. Diaphanous material
was sometimes used for part of the covering of the upper part of
the body, as in the case of some of the figures from the Knossos
frescoes. Hairdressing, as already noticed, was very elaborate, and
above the wonderful erections of curls and ringlets which crowned
their heads, the Minoan ladies, if one may judge from the Petsofa
figurines, wore hats of quite modern type, and fairly comparable
in size even with those of the present day. A seal from Mycenæ,
representing three ladies adorned with accordion-pleated skirts,
shows that heels of a fair height were sometimes worn on the shoes.
Necklaces, bracelets, and other articles of adornment were in general
use, and the workmanship of some of the surviving specimens is
astonishingly fine (Plate XXXII.). Altogether, so far as can be
estimated from the representations which have come down to us,
the appearance of a Minoan assembly would, to a modern eye, seem
curiously mixed. The men would fit in with our ideas of their period,
but the women would remind us more of a European gathering of the
mid-nineteenth century.
The houses which were occupied by these modern-looking ladies and
their mates were unexpectedly unlike anything in the house-building
of the Classical period. There is little of the uniformity of style
and arrangement which characterizes the ordinary Greek house. The
Minoan burgher built his home as the requirements of his site and
of his household suggested, and was not the slave of any fixed
convention in the matter of plan. The houses at Gournia, Palaikastro,
and Zakro, which may be taken as typical specimens of ordinary
Minoan domestic architecture, must have been much more like modern
houses than anything that we know of in Greek towns of the Classical
period; and the elevations of Minoan villas preserved in the faïence
plaques from the chest at Knossos suggest the frontages of a suburban
avenue. Some of the Knossian plaques show houses of three and four
storeys, with windows filled in with a red material which, as Dr.
Evans suggests, may have been oiled and tinted parchment. In such
houses, as distinguished from the palaces, there was no separation
between the apartments of men and women. The fabric of the houses
was generally of sun-dried brick, reared upon lower walls of stone;
some of the Knossian villas, however, were plastered and timbered,
the round beam-ends showing in the frontage. Oblong windows took
the place of the light-wells which give indirect illumination to
the palace rooms. The accommodation must have been fairly extensive.
The smaller houses have six to eight rooms, the larger ones twice
that number; while one of the houses in Palaikastro has no fewer
than twenty-three rooms.
Within doors the walls were finished with smooth plaster, and probably
decorated with painting, though, of course, on a humbler scale than
in the palaces. The floors were of flagstones and cement, even
in the upper storeys, and in some cases of cobbles or of earth
rammed hard. The furniture of the rooms has perished, except in
the case of such articles as were of stone or plaster; but the
evidence we possess of the comfort and even the luxury of the life
of these times in other respects suggests that the townsfolk of
Gournia and the other Cretan towns were not lacking in any of the
essentials of a comfortable home life. The great chest at Knossos
which was once decorated with the faïence plaques was, of course,
part of the furnishing of a royal home, and we are not to suppose
that such magnificent pieces of furniture were common; but in their
own fashion the ordinary Minoan houses were doubtless quite adequately
appointed, and the great variety of domestic utensils which has
survived shows that life in the Bronze Age homes of Crete was by no
means a thing of primitive and rough-and-ready simplicity, but was
well and carefully organized in its details. It has been remarked
that 'cooking in Homer is monotonous, because no one eats anything
but roast meat'; but this accusation could not be brought against
the Minoans, who had evidently attained to a considerable skill
and variety in the way in which they prepared their viands for
the table. The three-legged copper pot which was the most common
vessel for cooking purposes was supplemented by stewpans with
condensing-lids, and a variety of other forms of saucepan, while
the number of different types of perforated vessels for straining
and other purposes shows the care with which the art of cooking
was attended to. Probably the Minoan kitchen, though we are still
much in the dark as to its form, was almost as well equipped for
its special functions as the kitchen of the present day.
We are, unfortunately, without any evidence as to the appearance
of the great palaces in their finished state. The inner plan can
be traced, but it is difficult to arrive at any idea of what these
huge buildings must have looked like from the outside. It is fairly
evident, however, that there cannot have been any symmetrical balancing
of the different architectural features. The palaces were more
like small towns than simple residences, and the impression made
upon the eye must have been due more to the great mass and extent
of the building than to any symmetry of plan. Probably we must
conceive of them as great complex blocks of solid building, rising
in terrace above terrace, the flat roofs giving an appearance of
squareness and solidity to the whole. On a closer approach the eye
would be impressed by the wide and spacious courts, the stately
porticoes, the noble stairways, and the wealth of colour everywhere
displayed; but, on the whole, so far as can be judged, it was only
from within that the splendour of the Minoan palaces could be fairly
estimated.
A palace such as that of Knossos sheltered an extraordinary variety
and complexity of life. An abundance of humbler rooms served for
the accommodation of the artists and artisans who were needed for
the service and adornment of the palace, and of whom whole companies
must have lived within the walls, 'dwelling with the king for his
work,' like the potters and foresters mentioned in Scripture. Several
shrines and altars provided for the religious needs of the community.
Rooms of state were set apart for public audiences and for council
meetings. In fact, the building was not only a King's dwelling-place,
but the administrative centre of a whole empire, and within its
walls there was room for the offices of the various departments
and for the housing of their records.
The domestic quarter of the palace still reveals in some of its
rooms the environment of luxury and beauty in which the Minoan
royalties lived. The Queen's Megaron may be taken as typical. A
row of pillars rising from a low, continuous base divides the room
into two parts. The upper surface of the base on either side of
the pillars is of stucco moulded so as to form a long couch, which
was doubtless covered with cushions when the room was in use. Light
was furnished in the day-time, according to Cretan Palace practice,
not by windows, but by light-wells, of which there are two, one on
the south and one on the east side. In one of these light-shafts
the brilliant white stucco surface which reflected the light into
the room is decorated with a modelled and painted relief, of which
a fragment has survived, representing a bird of gorgeous plumage,
with long curving wing, and feathers of red, blue, yellow, white,
and black. Near the light-well on the other side of the line of
pillars, outside nature was brought within doors by a beautiful
piece of fresco-painting which shows fishes swimming through the
water, and dashing off foam-bells and ripples in their rapid course.
Along the north wall of the room ran another gay fresco, representing
a company of dancing-girls on a scale of half life-size. One of
the dancers is clad in a jacket with a yellow ground and blue and
red embroidered border, beneath which is a diaphanous chemise. Her
left arm is bent, and her right stretched forward; her features are
piquant, if not beautiful, and a slight dimple shows at the corner
of her lips. Her long black hair, elaborately waved and crimped,
floats out on either side of her head as she turns in the movement of
the dance. The fragments of decoration which have survived help us
to realize a very beautiful room, gay with colour, yet never garish
because of the softness of the indirect illumination, in which we may
imagine the Minoan Court ladies, in their modern gowns, reclining
on the cushions of the long couch, discussing the incidents of the
last bull-grappling entertainment, the skill of the young Athenian
Theseus, and the obvious infatuation of Princess Ariadne, or employing
their time more usefully in some of the wonderful embroidery-work
in which the fashion of the period delighted. By night the scene
in the palace would be even more picturesque. Greatstone lamps,
standing on tall bases, and each bearing several wicks on the margin
of its broad bowl of oil, flared in the rooms and corridors, lighting
up the brightly coloured walls, and sending many-tinted reflections
dancing from the bronze and copper vases and urns which decorated
the passages and the landings of the stairways; while through the
breadths of light and shadow moved in an always changing stream
of colour the gaily dressed figures of the Minoan Court.
Even at this exceedingly early stage of human progress, the various
branches of industry had become fairly separated and specialized,
more so, perhaps, than in the Homeric period, and a considerable
variety of tools was employed in the various crafts. The carpenter
was evidently a highly skilled craftsman, and the tools which have
survived show the variety of work which he undertook. At Knossos a
carefully hewn tomb held, along with the body of the dead artificer,
specimens of the tools of his trade--a bronze saw, adze, and chisel.
'A whole carpenter's kit lay concealed in a cranny of a Gournia
house, left behind in the owner's hurried flight when the town was
attacked and burned. He used saws long and short, heavy chisels
for stone and light for wood, awls, nails, files, and axes much
battered by use; and, what is very important to note, they resemble
in shape the tools of to-day so closely that they furnish one of
the strongest links between the first great civilization of Europe
and our own.'[*] Such tools were, of course, of bronze. Probably
the chief industry of the island was the manufacture and export of
olive oil. The palace at Knossos has its Room of the Olive Press,
and its conduit for conveying the product of the press to the place
where it was to be stored for use; and probably many of the great
jars now in the magazines were used for the storage of this
indispensable article. As we have seen, Dr. Evans conjectures that
it was the decay of the trade in oil during the troubled days after
the sack of the palaces that drove the Minoans abroad from their
island home to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Besides the trade
in oil, it would seem that there must have been a trade in the
purple of the murex, and no doubt the Keftiu mariners found a ready
market for this much-prized product long before the Phnicians
dreamed of Tyrian purple. Minoan pottery was manifestly also an
article of export--a fragile cargo for those days. The fact that
two of the Keftiu envoys in the Rekh-ma-ra frescoes carry ingots
of copper of the same shape as those found by Dr. Halbherr at Hagia
Triada suggests that Crete may have exported copper to Egypt in the
time of Tahutmes III. as Cyprus exported it in large quantities
in that of Amenhotep III.
[Footnote *: C. H. and H. Hawes, 'Crete the Forerunner of Greece,'
p. 37.]
It is unfortunate that so far we have no large-scale representations
of the ships in which these early masters of the ocean conducted
the sea-borne commerce of the Ægean world. The various seal-stones
and impressions, and the gold ring from Mokhlos, are interesting,
but it would have been much more satisfactory had we been able to
see representations of the Minoan galleys as complete as those which
Queen Hatshepsut has left of the ships of her merchant squadron.
The vessels represented are almost universally single-masted, with
one bank of oars, whose number varies from five to eleven a side,
a high stern, and a bow ending either in a barbed point or an open
beak, which suggests resemblances to the galleys of the sea-peoples
who were defeated by Ramses III. In some instances the length of
the voyage undertaken appears to be indicated. A crescent moon on
the forestay, and another on the backstay of a vessel with seven
oars a side, may point to a two months' voyage, while a disc over
the beak of another which has no oars at all may indicate one of
a year's duration, or perhaps, more probably, one of a complete
month. The supreme part which the sea played in the life of the
Cretans is shown unmistakably by the fact that practically every
Minoan site of importance is on the coast, or within easy reach of
it, while the innate national delight in all the wonderful creatures
of the marine world is seen in the constant use of their forms as
motives in decorative work. No designs are so common on Minoan
pottery as those derived from the sea; the octopus, the murex, the
nautilus, the coral, and various forms of algæ, occur continually,
and are utilized with great skill, while such pictures as the Dolphin
Fresco (Plate X. 1) show the fascination which marine life had
upon the Minoan mind, and the care with which it was observed.
That commerce was thoroughly organized and attended to with that
careful precision which seems to have been characteristic of the
race is seen from the Zakro excavations, where Mr. Hogarth found
500 seal impressions in the house of a single merchant. Trade must
have been very far removed indeed from primitive conditions when
merchants were so careful about the security of their bales of
goods.
[Illustration XXVIII: SARCOPHAGUS FROM HAGIA TRIADA (_p_. 127)
_G. Maraghiannis_]
So far as the evidence goes, the Minoan Empire does not appear
to have been a specially warlike one. No doubt there was a good
deal of fighting in its history, as was the case with all ancient
empires. But the insular position of Crete, and the predominance
which the Minoan navy established on the sea, saved the island
Empire from the necessity of becoming a great military power, and
the absence of the spirit of militarism is reflected in the national
art. While an Assyrian palace would have been decorated from end to
end with pictures of barbarous bloodshed and plunder, while even
the milder Egyptians would have adorned their walls with records
of the conquests of their Pharaohs, the Kings of the House of Minos
turned to other and more gentle scenes for the decoration of their
homes. Flower-gatherers and dancing-girls, harvest festivals and
religious processions, appealed to their minds far more than the
endless and monotonous succession of horrors with which the Mesopotamian
monarchs delighted to disfigure their walls; and even the dangers
of the bull-ring, as seen on the Knossian frescoes, are mild and
gentle when compared with the abominations where Teumman has his
head sawed off with a short dagger, and other unfortunates are
flayed alive, or have their tongues torn out.
The archives of the palace at Knossos certainly show that a military
force was kept on foot, and was thoroughly organized and well looked
after. There are records of numbers of chariots, and of the issue
of equipments to the charioteers of the force; and many of the
tablets refer to stores of lances, swords, bows, and arrows, a
store of nearly 9,000 arrows being mentioned in one of the finds;
while an actual magazine, containing hundreds of bronze arrow-heads,
has been discovered. We may remember that in ancient warfare the
Cretan bowmen were as famous as the Balearic slingers or the archers
of England. On the whole, however, the genius of the Minoans, like
our own, was more commercial than military, though, no doubt, they
were not devoid of the fighting spirit when occasion arose. Their
kinsmen of Mycenæ and Tiryns, less happily situated, were forced
to develop the military side of life; but the position and the
maritime power of Crete secured for the fortunate island those
long centuries of tranquil growth which were so fruitful in the
arts of peace. With one possible exception, no records appear to
have been found as yet dealing with the Minoan marine; but it is
impossible to believe that a people so methodical, who kept such
careful record of their military stores, should not have had a
thoroughly organized department to deal with the infinitely more
important matter of their navy, and perhaps the records of the
Minoan Board of Admiralty may yet come to light and be deciphered,
to enable us to understand how the first great sea-power of history
dealt with its fleets.
Comparatively few agricultural tools have survived, probably because
few were used; but some bronze sickles have been found. These are
not curved like the modern ones, but are bent at an angle, and
have a longer handle, so that the peasants would not be obliged
to bend down so much in the work of reaping. The figures on the
Harvester Vase carry a curious implement, which has been variously
described, according as those who deal with it believe the vase
to represent a triumphal march of warriors returning from battle
or a harvest procession. In the first case it is described as a
kind of trident with a hook attached to it, for the purpose of
grappling the rigging of an opponent's vessel; in the second, it
is looked upon as a common hay-fork. The resemblance to a hay-fork
seems satisfactory enough, though the three prongs are much longer
than the two of the implement used nowadays, and the hook attached
remains unexplained; but if the implement must be supposed to be a
military weapon, it seems singularly ill-contrived and inadequate
for such rough service. It might conceivably be a trident for spearing
fish, but, on the whole, the hay-fork idea seems most satisfactory.
Hand-querns were used for the grinding of corn, and numbers of
these and of mortars for pounding grain remain. Indeed, in some
cases the actual grains of barley and the pease which were stored
for future use still remain in the great jars. In a jar at Hissarlik,
Schliemann found no less than 440 pounds of pease, and some of his
workmen lived for a time on this food, which might conceivably
have been stored against a siege of Troy earlier than that recorded
in the Iliad. The olive-tree was of great importance, as yielding
the staple product of the island, and the fig-tree seems also to
have been in general cultivation, and was held to be sacred; but,
strangely enough, though wine must have been in constant use, as
is shown by the vessels for its storage and service, there is only
one representation of the vine, and even in that case the identity
of the object depicted is doubtful. Weaving was an art in which
the Minoans were well skilled, to judge from the fabrics which
are represented in the frescoes. As in Penelope's time, it was a
domestic art, and probably almost every household had its loom,
where the women turned out the materials for ordinary wear. In
many of the houses have been found the loom-weights, mostly of
stone or clay, which took the place of the more modern weaver's
beam in serving to keep the threads taut; and there are also numbers
of the stone discs which were attached, in spinning, to the foot of
the spindle, to keep it straight and in motion. These loom-weights
and spindle-discs are frequently ornamented with spiral incisions.
But the arts in which the islanders were supreme were those of the
potter and the metal-worker, the chief evidences of whose skill
have been already discussed. The reputation of Crete as a centre
of metal-working became legendary in ancient times, and, in all
likelihood, the bronze-worker and his fellows, the gold- and
silver-smiths, attained the height of their skill before their
brethren the potters, since, as we have seen, many of the finest
pottery specimens are obviously designed on bronze, or, at all
events, on metal models, the resemblance even going so far as the
copying of the seams and rivets of the metal originals. Bronze
was smelted in furnaces, the remains of one of which still exist
near Gournia; and was cast in moulds, many of which have survived.
The tools and weapons which were made of the metal show an average
alloy of about ten per cent. of tin. For beaten work, copper in an
almost pure state appears to have been used. Gold was in extensive
use for the best class of ornamental work, and the Vaphio cups,
which are now held to have been imported to Laconia from Crete,
are evidence of the marvellous skill which the Minoan goldsmiths
had attained; while the necklaces and other articles of personal
adornment found at Mokhlos and in the beehive tombs at Phæstos
(Plate XXXII.), are only to be matched, among ancient work, by
the diadems of the Twelfth Dynasty Princesses, found at Dahshur
in Egypt. Silver is comparatively scarce on Minoan, as on other
Ægean sites, though a number of fine silver vessels have been found
at Knossos and elsewhere; and this scarcity is perhaps due, not
only to the greed of the plunderers, but also to the fact that,
during the greater part of the period covered by the Minoan Empire,
the metal itself was actually scarcer and more valuable than gold.
In Egypt, whose supplies of silver apparently came from Cilicia, it
maintained a higher value than gold until the time of the Eighteenth
Dynasty, or about the period of the fall of Knossos; but then and
thereafter its value fell, owing to increasing supplies, below that
of the more precious metal. It does not appear that the gold-silver
alloy--'electrum,' of which the Egyptians were so fond--was used
by the Minoans.
[Illustration XXIX: MINOAN POTTERY (_pp_ 198 & 204)
Reproduced from _The Journal of Hellenic Studies_, by permission
of the Council of the Hellenic Society]
Of the social life of the people in these prehistoric times we
know practically nothing. Only one inference, possibly precarious
enough, may be made from one of the features of the architecture of
Knossos. There is no attempt to seclude the life of the palace from
that of the town and country around it. On the contrary, the building
seems almost to have been arranged with the view of affording the
citizens of the Minoan Empire every facility for intercourse with
the royal household. The great West Court, with its portico and
its seats along the palace wall, suggests considerable freedom of
access for the populace to the immediate neighbourhood of royalty.
It is perhaps rather a large inference to conclude that 'the very
architecture of the Palaces of Knossos and Phæstos may testify to
the power of the democracy';[*] but at least the thoughtfulness
with which the comfort of the people visiting the palace was provided
for, and the general openness and lack of any jealous seclusion,
testified to by the whole style of the buildings, suggest that
the relations between the Kings of the House of Minos and their
subjects were much more human and pleasant than those obtaining
in most ancient kingdoms.
[Footnote *: Mosso, 'The Palaces of Crete,' p. 163.]
From their art one would, on the whole, conclude the people to
have been a somewhat attractive race, frankly enjoying the more
pleasant aspects of life, and capable of a keen delight in all the
beauties of Nature. Minoan art has little that is sombre about it;
it is redolent of the open air and the free ocean, and a people who
so rejoiced in natural beauty and delighted to surround themselves
with their own reproductions and interpretations of it can scarcely
have been bowed beneath a heavy yoke of servitude, or have lived
other than a comparatively free and independent life. How much the
Greeks of the Classic period imbibed of the spirit of this gifted
and artistic race we can only imagine. The artistic standpoint of
the Hellenic Greek is somewhat different from that of his Minoan or
Mycenæan forerunner, and he has lost that keen feeling for Nature
which is so conspicuous in the work of the earlier stock; but the
two races are at least at one in that profound love of beauty which
is the dominant characteristic of the Greek nature, and it may
well be that something of that feeling formed part of the heritage
which the conqueror took over from the conquered, and which, added
to the virility and intellectual power of the northern race, made
the historic Greek the most brilliant type of humanity that the
world has ever seen.
CHAPTER XI
LETTERS AND RELIGION
Of all the discoveries yet made on Cretan soil, that which, in
the end, will doubtless prove to be of the greatest importance is
the discovery of the various systems of writing which the Minoans
successively devised and used. As yet knowledge with regard to these
systems has not advanced beyond the description of the materials
and their comparison with those furnished by other scripts, a task
which has so far been accomplished by Dr. Evans in the first volume
of his 'Scripta Minoa.' An immense amount of material has been
accumulated, and has been separated into various classes, which
have been shown to be characteristic of different periods of Minoan
history. It is possible to arrive at a general understanding of
the matters to which certain items of the material refer, but the
actual reading of the inscribed tablets has as yet proved to be
impossible. To all appearance, moreover, a considerable proportion
of the material appears to be not literary, in any true sense,
but to consist of inventories and accounts, perhaps also of legal
documents and other such records of purely business and practical
interest. Even so it would be a matter of no small importance could
it be found possible to decipher the records, let us say, of the
War Office or Admiralty of Knossos, or to survey the details of
royal house-keeping in those far-off days; and it may still be
hoped that, when the ardently desired bilingual inscription at
last turns up and makes decipherment possible, we may find that
documents of more genuinely literary interest are not altogether
lacking. One thing at least is abundantly clear--that, as Dr. Evans
put it in the summary of his first year's results, 'that great
early civilization was not dumb,' but, on the contrary, had means
of expression amply adequate to its needs.
In 1894 M. Perrot wrote:[*] 'As at present advised, we can continue
to affirm that for the whole of this period, nowhere, neither in
the Peloponnese nor in Greece proper, no more on the buildings
than on the thousand and one objects of luxury or domestic use
that have come out of the tombs, has there anything been discovered
which resembled any kind of writing.' The statement was perfectly
true to the facts as then known; but it was obviously unthinkable
that, while the Egyptians and Babylonians had their fully developed
scripts, and while ruder races, such as the Hittites, had their
systems of writing, the men who built the splendid walls and palaces
of Tiryns and Mycenæ, and wrought the diadems and decorations of the
Shaft-Graves, should have been so far back in one of the chiefest
essentials of human progress as to be unable to communicate with one
another by means of writing. We have already seen how the discoveries
of the first year's work at Knossos settled that question for ever,
and revealed the existence of more than one form of writing. Since
then the material has been rapidly accumulating, and at present the
number of objects--tablets, labels, and other articles-inscribed
with the various Cretan scripts can be counted by thousands.
[Footnote *: Perrot et Chipiez, 'La Grèce primitive: l'Art mycénien,'
p. 985.]
The earliest form of Minoan writing that can be traced consists of
rude pictographic symbols engraved upon bead-seals and gems. This
primitive pictographic writing is characteristic of the Early Minoan
period, and throughout the succeeding period of Middle Minoan it was
gradually developed into a hieroglyphic system which is believed
to present some analogies to the Hittite form of writing. But in
the latest phases of the Third Middle Minoan period there begins
to appear, at Knossos and elsewhere, a series of inscriptions in a
very different style. The characters are no longer hieroglyphic,
but have become definitely linear, and are arranged very much as
in ordinary writing. In general they are incised upon the clay
tablets of which so many hundreds have been found, but there are
several instances in which they have been written with ink, apparently
with a reed pen, as in the case of the two Middle Minoan III. cups
found at Knossos, which bear linear inscriptions executed before the
clay was fired. While in the case of the hieroglyphic inscriptions
the characters run indifferently from left to right, or from right
to left, in this linear script their fixed direction is the usual
one, from left to right. Suffixes were apparently used to indicate
gender, and pictorial signs indicating the contents of the document
are also in use, though more sparingly than they came to be in
the later form of script. Such signs as occur seem to show that
the documents in which they are found mainly related to matters
of business. The saffron-flower, various vessels, tripods, and
balances, probably for the weighing of precious metals, occur most
frequently among these determinatives.
At Knossos this form of linear writing, Dr. Evans's Class A, appears
to have had a comparatively short vogue. Documents belonging to it
are only found in the particular stratum which is connected with
Middle Minoan III., and are to be dated, according to Dr. Evans's
latest revision of the chronology, not later than 1600 B.C., the
period at which Middle Minoan III. closes. In the Late Minoan periods
which follow, the linear script of Class A is superseded at Knossos
by another form, Class B. In other parts of the island, however,
Class A seems to have survived as a general form of writing much
longer than at Knossos. At Hagia Triada the very large deposits of
linear writing--larger, indeed, than the representation of Class A at
Knossos--belong to the First Late Minoan period, and are contemporary
with the wonderful work of the steatite vases and the fresco of the
hunting-cat; while at Phæstos the final catastrophe of the palace
took place at a time when the linear writing of Class A was still in
full use. At Zakro, Palaikastro, Gournia, and elsewhere, examples
of this script have been found, showing that it was prevalent,
at all events, throughout Central and Eastern Crete; and in all
cases it is associated with remains which belong to the close of
Middle Minoan III. and the beginnings of the Late Minoan period.
But it would appear that this form of writing was not confined to
Crete, but was more widely diffused. Traces of it, or of a script
very closely allied with it, have been found at Thera, while at
Phylakopi in Melos evidence has come to light of a whole series of
marks closely corresponding to the Cretan Class A. This would seem
to suggest what in itself is entirely probable, that the language
used in Minoan Crete was predominant, or at all events was understood
and largely used, throughout the Ægean area. The inscription on
the libation table found by Dr. Evans at the Dictæan Cave belongs
to this class, and also that upon the similar object found by Mr.
Currelly at Palaikastro.
[Illustration XXX: LATE MINOAN VASE FROM MYCENÆ (_p_. 206)
Reproduced from _The Journal of Hellenic Studies_, by permission
of the Council of the Hellenic Society]
When, at the beginning of the Late Minoan period, the Palace of
Knossos was remodelled, another great change accompanied the
architectural one. This was the entire supersession of the linear
script, Class A, by another similar but independent form, which
has been named Class B. Somewhat remarkably, although the specimens
of the script discovered at the Palace of Knossos and its immediate
dependencies are far more numerous than those of Class A, the use
of Class B seems, so far as the evidence yet collected goes, to
have been entirely confined to Knossos. The beginning of the use
of this system may have been in the early part of the fifteenth
century B.C., and it was in full service at the great catastrophe of
Knossos, at the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the fourteenth
century B.C. Its use still continued after the fall of the Minoan
power, tablets inscribed with this form of writing being found
in the Late Minoan III. House of the Fetish Shrine at Knossos.
According to Dr. Evans, whose 'Scripta Minoa' sums up all that is
at present known of these enigmatic Cretan writings, Class B is
not a mere outgrowth of Class A. The scripts are certainly allied,
and there are indications that B is the more highly developed of the
two, having a smaller selection of characters and a less complicated
system of compound signs; but at the same time several of the signs
found in B do not occur in A at all, and some of those which belong
to both scripts are found in a more primitive form in B. The language
expressed in both scripts must, however, have been essentially
the same. It is suggested, therefore, that in the supersession
of Class A by Class B we have another indication of the dynastic
revolution which is supposed to have caused that ruin of the palace
which closed the Middle Minoan period.
The records of Class B give evidence of a very considerable advance
in the art of writing. 'The characters themselves have a European
aspect. They are of upright habit, and of a simple and definite
outline, which throws into sharp relief the cumbrous and obscure
cuneiform system of Babylonia. Although not so cursive in form
as the Hieratic or Demotic types of Egyptian writing, there is
here a much more limited selection of types. It would seem that
the characters stood for syllables or even letters, though they
could in most cases also be used as words.... The spaces and lines
between the words, the _espacement_ into distinct paragraphs, and
the variation in the size of the characters on the same tablet,
according to the relative importance of the text, show a striving
after clearness and method such as can by no means be said to be
a characteristic of Classical Greek inscriptions.'[*] A decimal
system of numbers was in use, the highest single amount referred
to being 19,000, and percentages were evidently well understood,
as a whole series of tablets is devoted to them.
[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' pp. 39, 40.]
The tablets themselves were originally of unburnt, but sun-dried,
clay, and their preservation, as we have seen, is probably due to
the excessive heat to which they were exposed during the great
fire which destroyed the palace. 'Fire itself, so fatal to other
libraries, has thus insured the preservation of the archives of
Minoan Knossos.' Great care was plainly bestowed upon the storage
of the tablets. They were stored in chests and coffers of various
materials, and were evidently carefully separated according to
the different departments to which their contents referred. In
one deposit near the northern entrance, which was the 'Sea-Gate'
of the palace, the largest of the seatings which had secured the
cases in which the tablets were stored bore a representation of a
ship, possibly an indication of the fact that these tablets belonged
to the Minoan Board of Admiralty. One set of tablets had been stored
in a room which presents all the appearance of having been an office,
and the frequent occurrence in this deposit of the figures of a
horse's head, a chariot, and a cuirass, suggests that the store
belonged to the Minoan War Office, and refers to the equipment
of the Chariot Brigade of the Knossian army.
Further evidence of the business-like methods of the Minoan officials
was given by the fact that many of the seals belonging to the various
stores were countermarked on the face, and had their backs countersigned
and endorsed, evidently by examining officials, while they appear to
have been regularly filed and docketed for reference. Indeed, the
Minoan methods have already borne the test of having been accepted
as evidence in a modern court of law. 'In 1901,' says Dr. Evans,
'I discovered that certain tablets had been abstracted from the
excavations, and had shortly afterwards been purchased by the museum
at Athens. It further appeared that one of our workmen--a certain
Aristides--had left the excavation about the same time for Greece, and
had been seen in Athens offering "antikas" for sale under suspicious
circumstances. On examining the inscriptions on the stolen tablets
I observed a formula that showed that some or all of the pieces
belonged to a deposit found in Magazine XV. A reference to our
daybooks brought out the fact that the same Aristides had taken
part in the excavation of this particular magazine a little before
the date of his hasty departure. On his return to Crete, some months
later, he was accordingly arrested, and the evidence supplied by the
Minoan formula was accepted by the Candia Tribunal as a crowning
proof of his guilt. Aristides--"the Unjust"--was thus condemned to
three months' imprisonment.' Few criminals attain to the dignity
of being convicted on evidence 3,500 years old.
Certain of the tablets contain lists of persons of both sexes,
apparently denoted by their personal names, the signs which appear
to stand for the name being followed in each case by an ideograph
which is the determinative of 'man,' or 'woman,' as the case may
be. It is, of course, impossible to say as yet to what rank or class
the people thus catalogued may have belonged; but the conjecture
may be hazarded that these lists may be the major-domo's records
of the male and female slaves of the household, or perhaps of the
artisans who appear to have dwelt within the precincts of the palace.
Another type of record is given by tablets such as that represented
in Plate XIV. The tablet contains eight lines of well-written
inscription, and consists apparently of twenty words, divided into
three paragraphs. In this case there are no determinatives and no
numerals; and it is possible that the document may be a contract,
or perhaps an official proclamation.
[Illustration XXXI: KAMARES VASES FROM PHÆSTOS AND HAGIA TRIADA
(_pp_. 120 & 197)
_G. Maraghiannis_]
That such tablets were not the only form in which the Minoans executed
the writing of their various documents is evident from the fact
already noticed, that inscriptions have been found executed with a
reed-pen, and, though those extant are written on clay vessels, it
is obvious that the reed-pen was not a very suitable instrument for
writing on such materials, and that its existence presupposes some
substance more adapted to the cursive writing of a pen--parchment,
possibly, or papyrus, which could be readily obtained from Egypt.
Unfortunately, such materials, on which, in all probability, the
real literary documents of the Minoans, if there were any such
documents, would be written, can scarcely have survived the fire
which destroyed the palace, or, if by any chance they escaped that,
the subsequent action of the climate; so that whatever genuinely
literary fragments may yet come to light must be looked for on the
larger tablets, and at the best can scarcely be more than brief
extracts. We cannot expect from Crete a wealth of papyri such as
Egypt has preserved for the archæologist.
Into quite a different category from any of the ordinary Minoan
tablets comes the disc found at Phæstos in 1908. Its general character
has been already described. The long inscription which covers both
of its faces is written in a form of hieroglyphics which, to some
extent, resembles the Minoan pictographic system, but is not the
same. The crested helmets which occur frequently as signs, the
round shields, the fashion of dress of both men and women, and the
style of architecture depicted in the hieroglyphic rendering of
a house or pagoda, are not Minoan; and, on the whole, the evidence
seems to point to the disc being the product of some allied culture,
perhaps Lycian, in which a language closely akin to that of Minoan
Crete was used. The inscription on the disc is carefully balanced
and arranged, and each side contains exactly the same number of
sign-groups, with one additional group on face A, which is separated
from the preceding part of the inscription by a dash. Certain sets
of sign-groups recur in the same order, as though they constituted
some kind of refrain. From these indications it has been suggested
that the whole inscription is a metrical composition, a short poem
or hymn--perhaps one leaf of an Anatolian Book of Psalms whose other
pages have perished. It is agreed that the language and religion of
the western coast of Asia Minor were closely allied to those of
Crete, and it is possible that when the Minoans developed their
own language on somewhat different lines from the mainlanders,
they maintained in parts of their religious service the old form
of the speech common to themselves and their Anatolian relatives,
as a kind of sacred language.[*]
[Footnote *: See Appendix, p. 264.]
Thus, it is abundantly evident that the civilization of Minoan
Crete, far from being dumb, had varied and perfectly adequate means
of expressing itself. The old Cretan tradition that the Phnicians
did not invent the letters of the alphabet, but only changed those
already existing, is amply justified; for this seems to have been
precisely what they did. The Phnician mind, if not original, was
at all events practical. The great stumbling-block in the way of
the ancient scripts was their complexity--a fault which the Minoan
users of the Linear Script, Class B, had evidently already begun to
recognize and endeavour to amend. What the Phnicians did was to
carry the process of simplification farther still, and to appropriate
for their own use out of the elements already existing around them a
conveniently short and simple system of signs. The position which
they came to occupy, after the Minoan empire of the sea had passed
away, as the great carriers and middlemen of the Mediterranean, gave
their system a spread and a utility possible to no other system
of writing; and so the Phnician alphabet gradually came to take
its place as the basis of all subsequent scripts. Unquestionably
it was a great and important service which was thus rendered by
them; but, all the same, the beginnings of European writing must
be traced not to them, but to their predecessors the Minoans, and
the clay tablets of Knossos, Phæstos, and Hagia Triada are the
lineal ancestors of all the written literature of Europe.
In attempting to deal with the Minoan religion we are met by the
fact that it is as yet quite impossible to present any connected
view of the subject. As in the case of their literature we have
the actual records but cannot read them, so in the case of their
religion a considerable mass of facts is apparent, but we have no
means of co-ordinating them so as to arrive at any definite idea
of a religious system. Some of the ritual we can see, and even
understand something of the Divinity to whom it was addressed,
but the theology is lacking. Accordingly, nothing more can be done
than to present the fragmentary facts which are apparent.
The Minoans, it seems fairly clear, were never, like their successors
the Greeks, the possessors of a well-peopled Pantheon; nor was the
chief object of their adoration a male deity like the Greek Zeus.
There are, indeed, traces of a male divinity, who was adopted by
the Greeks when they obtained predominance in the island, as the
representative of their own supreme deity, and who became the Cretan
Zeus. But in Minoan times this being occupied a very subordinate
place, and undoubtedly the chief object of worship was a goddess--a
Nature Goddess, a Great Mother--[Greek: potnia thaerou], the Lady
of the Wild Creatures--who was the source of all life, higher and
lower, its guardian during the period of its earthly existence,
and its ruler in the underworld.
The functions of this great deity, it has been aptly pointed out,
are substantially those claimed for herself by Artemis in Browning's
poem, 'Artemis Prologizes':
'Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along;
I shed in hell o'er my pale people peace;
On earth, I, caring for the creatures, guard
Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek,
And every feathered mother's callow brood,
And all that love green haunts and loneliness.'
She was a goddess alike of the air, the earth, and the underworld, and
representations of her have survived in which her various attributes
are expressed. As goddess of the air, she is represented by a female
figure crowned with doves; as goddess of the underworld, her emblems
are the snakes, which we see twined round the faïence figure at
Knossos, or the terra-cotta in the Gournia shrine. Her figure is
often seen upon seals and gems, standing on the top of the rock or
mountain, with guardian lions in attendance, one on either side,
and sometimes with a male votary in the background.
The earliest form of her worship, and one which proved very persistent,
was apparently aniconic. The divinity was not embodied in any graven
image, but was inherent in such objects as the rude natural concretions
found in the House of the Fetish Shrine, or was supposed to dwell
in sacred trees, on which sometimes perch the doves which indicate
that the goddess is present as ruler of the air, or which are twined
with serpents, showing her presence as goddess of the earth and
underworld. In the place of sacred trees we have often sacred pillars,
which seem to have been objects of worship down to Late Minoan
II. at least, since in the Royal Villa at Knossos, dating from
this period, there is a pillar-room similar to the much earlier
pillar-rooms of the Great Palace. The little group of three pillars
found at Knossos evidently represents the divinity in her aspect as
a heavenly goddess, for the pillars have doves perching upon their
capitals. Sometimes, as in the case of the Lion Gate at Mycenæ, and
other representations, we have the pillar with the two supporting
lions, an anticipation of the anthropomorphic figure of the goddess
on the rock. It is possible that in some cases the figures of the
Double Axes standing between horns of consecration were also looked
upon as embodiments of the divinity. A similar mode of representing
deity occurs in the earlier stages of many religions, and the sacred
pillar set up by Jacob at Bethel may be instanced as an example
of its presence in the beginnings of the Hebrew worship.
In general the Minoan Great Mother appears to have been looked
upon as a being of beneficence, and as the giver of 'every good
and perfect gift'; but her association with the lion and the snake
shows that there was also a more mysterious and awful side to her
character. When the later Greeks came into the island and found
this deity in possession, she became identified, in the various
aspects of her many-sided nature, with various goddesses of the
Hellenic Pantheon. Foremost and specially she became Rhea, the
mother of the gods, who had fled to Crete to bear her son Zeus.
Otherwise she was Hera, the sister and the spouse of Zeus, and
in this case the story of the marriage of the great goddess and
the supreme god probably represents the fusion of religious ideas
on the part of the two races, the conquerors taking over the deity
of the conquered race, and uniting her with the Sky God whom they
had brought with them from their Northern home. She also survived
as Aphrodite, as Demeter, and, in her capacity as Lady of the Wild
Beasts, as Artemis.
The suggestion of the association of Zeus with the Minoan goddess
may have been given to the Northern conquerors by a feature of the
Cretan religion which they found already in existence. On certain
seal impressions and engraved gems there are indications that the
great Nature Goddess was sometimes associated with a male divinity.
This being, however, seems to have occupied an obscure and inferior
position. In most of the scenes in which he is represented he, is
either in the background, or reverentially stands before the seated
female divinity. It would appear that the Achæans appropriated this
insignificant god as the representative of their own Zeus, attributed
to him birth from the Great Goddess in her own cave-sanctuary of
Dicte, and endowed him with many of the attributes which she had
formerly possessed, including the Double Axe emblem of sovereignty,
so that in Hellenic times the supreme deity of the island was always
the Cretan Zeus, Zeus of the Double Axe, though in reality he was
no Cretan god at all, or at best a secondary divinity, dressed
in borrowed plumes and with greatness thrust upon him.
As to the forms of worship with which the Great Mother of Crete was
served, comparatively little is known. The most striking feature
is the seemingly total absence of what we should call temples.
In this respect Crete presents a curious contrast to Egypt: in
Egypt we have an abundance of vast temples, but practically no
surviving palaces; in Crete the case is exactly reversed, and we
have huge palaces but no temples. The reason of this appears to
be, as Dr. Mackenzie has pointed out,[*] that the Minoan religion
was of an entirely domestic character. 'At Knossos all shrines
are either house-shrines or palace-shrines. The divinities are
household and dynastic divinities having an ancestral character
and an ancestral reputation to maintain.' To put it in a word,
worship in the Minoan religion was essentially Family Worship. No
doubt there were public ceremonials also, in which the King, who
seems to have been Priest as well as King (if, indeed, he was not
viewed as an incarnation of deity), performed the principal part; but
there can have been nothing like the habitual publicity of parts of
the worship of the god which was contemplated in the great peristyle
courts of the Egyptian temples and the processional arrangements
of part of their service. 'At Knossos,' says Dr. Mackenzie, 'we
found, as a matter of fact, that there was a tendency for each
house to have a room set apart for family worship. Of such shrines
the palace was found to have more than one. Those shrines were
found to be in a very private part of the house, and usually to
have no thoroughfare through them.'
[Footnote *: _Annual of the British School at Athens_, vol. xiv.,
p. 366.]
What these shrines were like we may to some extent judge from the
fragmentary fresco found at Knossos, representing one of the
pillar-shrines where the Great Goddess was worshipped in her emblems
of the sacred pillars. The structure consists of a taller central
chamber, with a lower wing on either side of it. The material of
which it is built is apparently wood, faced and decorated in certain
parts with chequer-work in black-and-white plaster. The whole building
rests upon large blocks of stone, immediately above which in the
central chamber comes a solid piece of building, adorned first
with the chequer-work, and then, above this, with two half-rosettes
bordered with _kuanos_. Over this rises the open chamber of the
shrine, which contains nothing but two pillars of the familiar
Minoan-Mycenæan type, tapering downwards from the capitals. These
rise from between the sacred horns, which occur in practically
every religious scene as emblems of consecration (_cf._ the 'horns
of the altar' in the Hebrew temple worship). The lower chambers
on either side contain each a single pillar, again rising from
between the horns of consecration. A Minoan lady, dressed in a gown
of bluish-green, sits with her back to the wall of the right-hand
lower chamber, and the scale of the shrine is given by the fact
that, her seat being on the same level as the floor of the chamber,
her head is in a line with the roof beam which rests on the capital
of the sacred pillar. The remains of an actual shrine discovered
in 1907 close to the Central Court at Knossos show that the fresco
does not exaggerate the smallness of the sacred buildings. The
Gournia shrine, situated in the centre of the town, is about twelve
feet square, and its discoverer believes that the walls of the
sacred enclosure may never have stood more than eighteen inches
high. Here, again, were the horns of consecration, the doves, and
the snakes twined round the image of the goddess.
Of what sort were the acts of worship in connection with the Minoan
Religion? Sacrifice was certainly prominent, and the bull was probably
the chief victim offered to the goddess. In one of the scenes on
the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, a bull is being sacrificed, and his
blood is dripping into a vessel placed beneath his head. Behind is
the figure of a woman, whose hands are stretched out, presumably
to hold the cords with which the victim is bound. Two kids crouch
on the ground below the bull, perhaps to be offered in their turn.
Libation also formed part of the ceremonial, and on the same sarcophagus
there are two scenes in which it occurs. In the one instance (Plate
XXVIII.), the vessel into which the offering is being poured stands
between two sacred Double Axes with birds perched upon them; in
the other the libation-vessel stands upon an altar with a Double
Axe behind it. The three receptacles of the Dictæan Libation Table
suggest a threefold offering like that of mingled milk and honey,
sweet wine, and water, which, in the Homeric period, was made to
the Shades of the Dead and to the Nymphs.
As was perhaps natural in the cult of a goddess, the chief part
in the ritual seems to have been taken by priestesses. Men share
in the ceremonies also, but not so frequently, and apparently in
subordinate rôles. Part of the ritual evidently consisted of dancing,
and music also had its place, as is evident from the figures of
the lyre and flute players on the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada.
The question of whether the Minoans had any worship of ancesters
or sacrifice to the dead is raised by several relics. Above the
Shaft-Graves at Mycenæ stood a circular altar, where offerings
must have been made either to the Shades of the Dead or on behalf
of them, and the scenes on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, resembling
so curiously those of the Egyptian ceremony of 'the Opening of
the Mouth,' suggest a belief in the continued existence of the
spirit, either as an object to be propitiated by sacrifice, or
as a being which needed to be sustained in its disembodied state
by offerings of meat and drink.
The relation of the Minoan King to the religion of his country
is a point of some interest, though the facts known are scarcely
sufficient to afford ground for more than surmise. The very structure
of the palace at Knossos gives evidence of the importance of the
part which he played in spiritual matters, and of the intimate
connection which existed in the Minoan, as in so many other ancient
faiths, between Royalty and Religion. There are not only several
shrines and altars in the palace, but it is probable, as Dr. Mackenzie
has pointed out,[*] that the so-called bathrooms at Knossos and
Phæstos are not bathrooms at all, but small chapels or oratories,
so that altogether religion bulks very largely in the arrangements
of the Royal dwelling. In fact, the Kings and Queens of Knossos
were Priest-Kings and Priest-Queens, the heads of the spiritual
as well as of the material life of their people; and it is not at
all unlikely, from what is known of the religious views of other
ancient peoples, that the Priest-King was looked upon as an incarnation
of divinity. If so, of what divinity? It is here that, in all
likelihood, we get near the heart of the Minotaur legend. 'The
characteristic mythical monster of Crete,' says Miss Jane Harrison,[**]
'was the bull-headed Minotaur. Behind the legend of Pasiphae, made
monstrous by the misunderstanding of immigrant conquerors, it can
scarcely be doubted that there lurks some sacred mystical ceremony
of ritual wedlock ([Greek: ieros gamos]) with a primitive bull-headed
divinity.... The bull-Dionysos of Thrace, when he came to Crete,
found a monstrous god, own cousin to himself.... Of the ritual of
the bull-god in Crete, we know that it consisted in part of the
tearing and eating of a bull, and behind is the dreadful suspicion
of human sacrifice.' The actual evidence found on Minoan sites for
the existence of such a bull-headed divinity is somewhat slight, the
clearest instance being a seal-impression from Knossos, representing
a monster who bears an animal head, possibly a bull's, upon a human
body, and who is evidently regarded as divine, since he is seated
and reverently approached by a human worshipper; but, taken in
connection with the universal currency of the Minotaur legend,
it is probably sufficient. What relation this monstrous divinity
held to the other objects of Minoan worship is not apparent.
[Footnote *: _Annual of the British School at Athens_, xiv., p.
366. The suggestion is also made by Mosso, 'The Palaces of Crete,'
pp. 64-66.]
[Footnote **: 'Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,' pp.
482, 483.]
It may be, then, that this deity was the one of whom the King was
supposed to be the representative and incarnation, and in that
case the bull-grappling, which was so constant a feature of the
palace sports, had a deeper significance, and was in reality part of
the ceremonial associated with the worship of the Cretan bull-god.
In this connection Professor Murray has emphasized[*] certain facts
in connection with the legendary history of Minos, which would
seem to link the Cretan monarchy with a custom not infrequently
observed in connection with other ancient monarchies and faiths.
It will be remembered that the legend of Minos states variously
that he 'ruled for nine years, the gossip of Great Zeus,' and that
every nine years he went into the cave of Zeus or of the bull-god,
to converse with Zeus, to receive new commandments, and to give
account of his stewardship. The nine-year period recurs in the
account of the bloody tribute of seven youths and seven maidens
who were offered to the Minotaur every ninth year. May we not,
therefore, have in these statements a distorted recollection of
the fact that the Royal Incarnation of the Bull-God originally
held his office only for a term of nine years, and that at the
end of that period he went into the Dictæan Cave, the sanctuary
of his divinity, and was there slain in sacrifice, while from the
cave his successor came forth, and was hailed as the rejuvenated
incarnation of divinity, to reign in his turn, and then to perish
as his predecessor had done? In this case the seven youths and
seven maidens who were offered to the Minotaur at the end of the
nine-year period may have been slain with him to be his companions
and servants in the underworld, or, as is perhaps more likely,
they may, in a later stage of the custom, have been accepted as
his substitutes, so that the death of the King was merely a ritual
one.
[Footnote *: 'The Rise of the Greek Epic,' pp. 127, 128.]
Of course, this explanation of the Minos legend and the story of
the human tribute is in the meantime only a supposition, and not
susceptible of absolute proof; but the constant recurrence of the
nine-year period is, at least, very striking, and it is worth
remembering that a custom precisely similar to that suggested has
existed in connection with several ancient monarchies, and, indeed,
survives to the present day. In the ancient Ethiopian kingdom the
King was obliged to slay himself when commanded to do so by the
priests. A similar custom prevailed in Babylonia and among the
ancient Prussians, while several modern African tribes slay their
King when the first sign of age or infirmity begins to show itself
in him. Professor Flinders Petrie has shown[*] that the greatest of
the Egyptian feasts, the 'Sed' Festival, was a ceremonial survival
of a time when the Pharaoh, the Priest-King and representative of
God on earth, was slain at fixed intervals. The object in all such
cases is manifestly to secure that the incarnation of divinity shall
always be in the prime of his vigour, and shall never know decay.
It is impossible, no doubt, to say that such a feature belonged to
the Minoan religious polity; the evidence is not such as to admit
of certainty, yet it is not unlikely that in a custom similar to
this lies the interpretation of the main features of the Minotaur
legend.
[Footnote *: 'Researches in Sinai,' pp. 181-185.]
Such, then, was the Empire of the Minoan Sea-Kings as it has been
revealed to us by the excavations and researches of the last ten
years. Apart from the actual information gained of this great race,
which must henceforward be regarded as one of the originating sources
of Greek civilization and learning, and therefore, to a great extent,
of all European culture, perhaps the most striking and interesting
result that has been attained is the remarkable confirmation given to
the broad outlines of those traditions about Crete which have survived
in the legends and in the narratives of the Greek historians. The
fable of the Minotaur is now seen to be no mere wild and monstrous
imagining, but a reflection, vague and grotesque as seen through
the mist of centuries, of customs which did actually exist in the
palace life of Knossos, and were very probably parts of the religious
practice of the country. The slaying of the Minotaur by the Athenian
Theseus may well be an echo of the conquest of the Minoan Empire by
the mainland tribes. The story which makes Theseus bring up from
the Palace of Amphitrite the ring which Minos had thrown into the
sea, seems almost certainly to be a symbolic expression of the passing
over of the sea-power of the Ægean from the once-omnipotent Minoans
to the Achæans and the other restless tribes who for generations
after the fall of Knossos held the dominion of the ocean, and were
the terror of all peaceful nations, and a menace to the existence
of even so great a power as Egypt. No one now dreams of hesitating
to accept the statements of Herodotus and Thucydides as to the
great sea-empire of Crete. Whoever the Minos to whom they allude
may have been--whether he was actually a single great historical
monarch who brought the glory of the kingdom to its culmination,
or whether the name was the title of a race of Kings, is a matter
of small moment. In either case the sea-power of Minoan Crete was a
reality which endured, not for one reign, but for many reigns; and
it is practically certain that, during a long period of history,
the whole sea-borne trade of Europe, Asia, and Africa, was in the
hands of these, the earliest lords of the ocean.
[Illustration XXXII: GOLDSMITHS' WORK FROM BEEHIVE TOMBS, PHÆSTOS
(_p_. 216)
_G. Maraghiannis_]
The recollections of the fallen power that survived in the Greek
mind were chiefly those connected with the oppressive aspect of
the dominion which the Lord of Knossos exercised over the Ægean
area; but in Egypt there lingered for centuries a tradition which
did more justice to the glories of Minoan Crete. In the Timæus,
Plato tells a story of how Solon went to Egypt, and was told by
a priest at Sais that long ago there had been a great island in
the western sea, where a wonderful central power held sway, not
only over the whole of its own land, but also over other islands
and parts of the continent. In an attempt at universal conquest,
this island State made war upon Greece and Egypt, but was defeated
by the Athenians, and overwhelmed by the sea as a punishment for its
sins, leaving only a range of mud-banks, dangerous to navigation,
to mark the place where it had been. In the Timæus and Critias, Plato
describes with considerable detail the features of the island State,
and the details are such that he might almost have been describing
what the Egyptian priest who originally told the story was no doubt
endeavouring to describe--the actual port and Palace of Knossos,
with the life that went on there. 'The great harbour, for example,
with its shipping and its merchants coming from all parts, the
elaborate bathrooms, the stadium, and the solemn sacrifice of a bull,
are all thoroughly, though not exclusively, Minoan; but when we read
how the bull is hunted "in the temple of Poseidon without weapons
but with staves and nooses," we have an unmistakable description of
the bull-ring at Knossos, the very thing which struck foreigners
most, and which gave rise to the legend of the Minotaur.'[*]
[Footnote *: 'The Lost Continent,' _Times_, February 19, 1909. The
anonymous writer was the first to identify Crete with the 'Lost
Atlantis.']
The boundaries which Plato assigns to the Empire of the lost State
are practically identical with those over which Minoan influence
is now known to have spread, while the description of the island
itself is such as to make it almost certain that Crete was the
original from which it was drawn. 'The island was the way to other
islands, and from these islands you might pass to the whole of
the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean.' So Plato
describes Atlantis; and when you set beside his sentence a modern
description of Crete--'a half-way house between three continents,
flanked by the great Libyan promontory, and linked by smaller island
stepping-stones to the Peloponnese and the mainland of Anatolia'--there
can be little doubt that the two descriptions refer to the same
island.
The only difficulty in the way of accepting the identification is
that it is stated that the lost Atlantis lay beyond the Pillars
of Hercules; but doubtless this statement is due to Solon's
misinterpretation of what was said by his Egyptian informant, or to
the Saite priest's endeavour to accommodate his ancient tradition
to the wider geographical knowledge of his own time. The old Egyptian
conception of the universe held that the heavens were supported
on four pillars, which were actual mountains; and probably the
original story placed the lost island beyond these pillars as a
metaphorical way of stating that it was very far distant, as indeed
it was to voyagers in those early days. But by Solon's time the
limits of navigation were extended far beyond those of the early
seafarers. The Phnician trader had pushed at least as far west
as Spain; Necho's fleet had circumnavigated Africa; and so 'the
island farthest west,' which naturally meant Crete to the Egyptian
of the Eighteenth Dynasty who first recorded the catastrophe of the
Minoan Empire, had to be thrust out beyond the Straits of Gibraltar
to satisfy the wider ideas of the men of Solon's and Necho's time.
Almost certainly then, Plato's story gives the Saite version of the
actual Egyptian records of the greatness and the final disaster of
that great island state with which Egypt so long maintained intercourse.
Doubtless to the men of the latter part of the Eighteenth Dynasty the
sudden blotting out of Minoan trade and influence by the overthrow
of Knossos seemed as strange and mysterious as though Crete had
actually been swallowed up by the sea. The island never regained
its lost supremacy, and gradually sank into the insignificance
which is its characteristic throughout the Classical period. So,
though neither the priest of Sais nor his Greek auditor, and still
less Plato, dreamed of the fact, the wonderful island State of which
the Egyptian tradition preserved the memory, was indeed Minoan
Crete, and the men of the Lost Atlantis whose portraits Produs saw
in Egypt were none other than the Keftiu of the tombs of Sen-mut
and Rekh-ma-ra.
CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY
Prior to 1580 B.C. the dates in the summary must be regarded as
merely provisional, and the margin of possible error is wide. The
tendency on the part of the Cretan explorers has been to accept
in the main the Berlin system of Egyptian dating in preference
to that advocated by Professor Flinders Petrie ('Researches in
Sinai,' pp. 163-185), on the ground that the development of the
Minoan culture can scarcely have required so long a period as that
given by the Sinai dating. It must be remembered, however, that
the question is still unsettled, and that the longer system of
Professor Petrie must be regarded as at least possible.
CRETE.
EGYPT (BERLIN).
EGYPT (PETRIE).
B.C.
10000-3000, Neolithic Age.
_c._ 3000-2600, Early Minoan I.
Dynasties I.-V., 3400-2625 B.C.
Dynasties I.-V., 5510-4206 B.C.
_c._ 2600-2400 " " II.
Dynasty VI., 2625-2475 "
Dynasty VI., 4206-4003 "
_c._ 2400-2200 " " III.
Dynasties VII.-X., 2475-2160 "
Dynasties VII.-X., 4003-3502 "
_c._ 2200-2000, Middle Minoan I.
(earlier palaces at Knossos and Phæstos).
Dynasty XI., 2160-2000 "
Dynasty XI., 3502-3459 "
_c._ 2000-1850, Middle Minoan II.
(pottery of Kamares Cave; at end
of period destruction of Knossos).
Dynasty XII., 2000-1788 "
Dynasty XII., 3459-3246 "
_c._ 1850-1600, Middle Minoan
III. (Later Palace Knossos;
first Villa Hagia Triada;
early in period, statuette of
Sebek-user; late, Alabastron
of Khyan).
Dynasties XIII.-XVII., 1788-1580 B.C.
Dynasties XIII.-XVII., 3246-1580 B.C.
(Period of confusion and of Hyksos domination.)
1600-1500, Late Minoan I.
(Later Palace Phæstos begun).
1500-1400, Late Minoan II.
(Later Palace Knossos completed;
_c._ 1400, fall of Knossos).
Dynasty XVIII., 1580-1350 B.C.
Dynasty XVIII., 1580-1322 B.C.
(Keftiu on walls of tombs of Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra.)
1400----, Late Minoan III.
(period of partial reoccupation and decline).
Dynasty XIX., 1350-1205 B.C.
Dynasty XIX., 1322-1202 B.C.
_c._ 1200 (?) Homeric Age.
Dynasty XX., 1200-1090 "
Dynasty XX., 1202-1102 "
(Cretan tribes mentioned and portrayed by Ramses
III., Medinet Habu.)
Dynasty XXI., 1090-945 B.C.
Dynasty XXI., 1102-952 B.C.
(Zakru pirates mentioned by Wen-Amon, Golenischeff
Papyrus.)
BIBLIOGRAPHY
In the following short list will be found the volumes on the Minoan
and Mycenæan civilizations which are most accessible to the ordinary
reader:
_Annual of the British School at Athens_, vols. vi.- . (Reports
of excavations by Evans, Hogarth, and others, and many articles
of interest on the results of discovery. Well illustrated.)
_Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vols. xx.- . (Articles by Evans,
Hall, Mackenzie, Rouse, and others. Admirable illustrations.)
BROWNE, H.: _Homeric Study_. (Relations of Homeric and Minoan
civilizations).
BURROWS, R. M.: _The Discoveries in Crete_. (An able discussion
of the results of excavations).
EVANS, A. J.: _Cretan Pictograms and Pre-Phnician Script._ (Dr.
Evans's earlier volume on the Minoan writing.) _Essai de Classification
des Époques de la Civilisation Minoenne._ (Short summary of the
Minoan periods.) _Mycnean Tree and Pillar Cult_. (Reprint from
_Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol. xxi.) _Prehistoric Tombs of
Knossos_. (Isopata, etc.). _Scripta Minoa_. (Latest and fullest
discussion of Minoan script.) Articles in the _Times_ newspaper
and the _Monthly Review_.
HALL, E. H.: _The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age_.
HALL, H. R.: _Egypt and Western Asia_. (Relations of Crete and
Egypt.) _The Oldest Civilization of Greece_. (Deals with Mycenæan
discoveries up to 1901.) Various articles in the Proceedings of the
Society of Biblical Archæology, the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_,
etc.
HARRISON, J. E.: _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion. The
Religion of Ancient Greece_.
HAWES, C. H. and H.: _Crete the Forerunner of Greece_. (Concise
and interesting manual.)
HAWES, H. B.: _Gournia, Vasiliki, and other Prehistoric Sites on
the Isthmus of Hierapetra, Crete_.
HOGARTH, D. G.: _Authority and Archology_; (Contains summary of
earlier Mycenæan discoveries.) _Ionia and the East_. (Relations
of Oriental and early Greek civilizations.) Articles in _Cornhill
Magazine_ and _Fortnightly Review_.
LANG, A.: _Homer and his Age_.
MOSSO, A.: _The Palaces of Crete and their Builders_. (Chiefly useful
for its numerous illustrations.)
MURRAY, G.: _The Rise of the Greek Epic_. (Exceedingly vivid and
suggestive.)
RIDGEWAY, W.: _The Early Age of Greece_.
SCHUCHHARDT, C.: _Schliemann's Excavations_. (Useful summary of
the work of Schliemann, translated by E. Sellers.)
SEAGER, R. B.: _Excavations on the Island of Pseira, Crete_.
Philadelphia, 1910. (Finely illustrated.)
TSOUNTAS AND MANATT: _The Mycenæan Age_.
For the chronology of Ancient Egypt see--
BREASTED, H.: _History of Egypt_. (1906. Abridged issue, 1908.)
PETRIE, W. M. F.: _History of Egypt_, vols. i.-iii. _Researches
in Sinai_.
For the topography of Crete, Pashley's _Travels in Crete_ and Spratt's
_Travels and Researches in Crete_ will still be found interesting
and useful, though published in 1837 and 1865 respectively. For
the history of the island in mediæval and modern times _A Short
Popular History of Crete_, by J. H. Freese, may be consulted.
_Antiquités Crétoises_, by G. Maraghiannis, Candia, Crete, gives
fifty excellent plates of Minoan relics, chiefly from Phæstos and
Hagia Triada, with a short introduction by Signor Pernier, of the
Italian Archæological Mission.
APPENDIX
TRANSLATIONS OF THE PHÆSTOS DISK
Two translations of the Phæstos disk have been put forward. The
first is by Professor George Hempl, of Stanford University, U.S.A.,
and appeared in _Harper's Magazine_ for January, 1911, under the
title, 'The Solving of an Ancient Riddle.' The second, by Miss F.
Melian Stawell, of Newnham College, appeared in the _Burlington
Magazine_ of April, 1911, under the title, 'An Interpretation of
the Phaistos Disk.'
Both are characterized by considerable ingenuity; but the trouble is
that they do not agree in the very least. Professor Hempl maintains
that the disk is the record of a dedication of oxen at a shrine in
Phæstos, in atonement of a robbery perpetrated by Cretan sea-rovers
on some shrine of the great goddess in Asia Minor. Miss Stawell, on
the other hand, believes that the disk is the matrix for casting
a pair of cymbals, and that the inscription is the invocation which
the worshippers had to chant to the goddess.
A comparison of portions of the two renderings will at least show
that certainty can scarcely be said to have been reached. Professor
Hempl thus renders the opening lines of Face A:
'Lo, Xipho the prophetess dedicates spoils from a spoiler of the
prophetess. Zeus, guard us. In silence put aside the most dainty
portions of the still unroasted animal. Athene Minerva, be gracious.
Silence! The victims have been put to death. Silence!'
Compare Miss Stawell's translation of the same lines:
'Lady, 0 hearken! Cunning one! Ah, Queen! I will sing, Lady, oh,
thou must deliver! Divine One, mighty Queen! Divine One, Giver of
Rain! Lady, Mistress, Come! Lady, be gracious! Goddess, be merciful!
Behold, Lady, I call on thee with the clash! Athena, behold, Warrior!
Help! Lady, come! Lady--keep silence, I sacrifice--Lady, come!'
INDEX
A
Aahmes, founder of Eighteenth Dynasty, 147
Abnub, 82, 155, 203
Abydos: First Dynasty graves at, 142, 191; Twelfth Dynasty
grave at, 150, 199
Achæans: position of, in Homeric poems, 23; manners of, 26; invasion of
Greece, 62; influence of, on Cretan customs, 178; conquest of Mycenæ,
182; modifications of Minoan religion by, 247
Achilles: arms of, 27; shield of, 27, 28, 58, 74
Ægean, 13
Ægeus, King of Athens, 10-13
Agamemnon, Tomb of, 37, 42, 43, 45, 46
Agriculture, Minoan, 226
Aigaios, Mount, 136
Aithra, mother of Theseus, 11
Akhenaten, 163, 173, 174, 185, 208
Alabastron of Khyan, 93
Alcinous, Palace of, 25, 26, 47, 49, 56
Altar: in Dictæan Cave, 137; at Shaft-Graves, 251
Amaltheia, 7, 111
Amenemhat III., 150; Labyrinth of, 150-155; pyramid of, 47; cylinders of, 199
Amenhotep, II., 174
Amenhotep III., 158, 162, 173, 174, 184, 185, 208
Amen-Ra, statuette of, in Dictæan Cave, 137
Amor, Amorites, 165
Amorgos, 193
Anatolia, 6; Minoan settlements in, 184
Androgeos, son of Minos, 10
Andromache, 24, 41
Aniconic worship, 245, 246
Aphrodite: aspect of Cretan goddess, 104, 122; identified with Minoan
goddess, 247
Aqayuasha invade Egypt, 164
Archon, the King, 108
Argives, 166
Argolid: place of, in Greek history, 22; conquest of, by Achæans, 182
Ariadne, 3, 179; flees with Theseus and deserted by him, 13; Choros of,
at Knossos, 103; title of Cretan goddess, 104, 122
Aristides, 'The Unjust,' 240
Armour: Homeric, 26-28, 61; Mycenæan, 61
Army, Minoan, 225, 226
Arrows, deposits of, at Knossos, 110, 225
Artemis Dictynna, aspect of Cretan goddess, 122, 247
Asia, community of religious conceptions between Crete and, 141
Athens: conquered by Minos, 10, 170; place in Homeric poems, 21
Atlantis, Plato's legend of, 257-259
Atreus, Treasury of, 43, 46-48
Axos, 166
B
Babylonia, relations with Crete, 139-142
Bacchylides, legend of Theseus and the ring of Minos, 13
Basilica, origin of, 108
Bathroom of Queen's Megaron, 95
Beak-jugs=schnabelkanne, _q.v._
Beehive chamber at Knossos, 113, 114
Beehive tombs: at Mycenæ, 46-48, 56; at Orchomenos, 48, 56; at Phæstos, 229
Bliss finds Minoan pottery at Telles-Safi, 167
Boghaz-Keui, treaty between Hittites and Egyptians discovered at, 162
Bosanquet, Mr.: Minoan purple, 133; marine decoration, 204
Boxer Vase, the, 124, 169, 172, 204
Boxing, Minoan, 103
Breasted, H., Egyptian chronology, 148
Britomartis, 122
Bronze, use of, for weapons, 27, 60, 228
Browne, H., 'Homeric Study,' 30-32, 62
Bucchero: deposit of, at Knossos, 66, 189, 191; at Abydos, 142, 143
Bügelkanne=stirrup-vases, _q.v._
Bull: fresco of, at Tiryns, 49, 90; at Knossos, 66; relief of, at
Knossos, 77, 78, 172; fresco, 88, 89
Bull-god, 105, 252, 253
Bull-grappling, 88-91, 257, 258
Bunarbashi, supposed site of Troy, 38
Burial, 58-60
Burrows, Professor: quoted, 88, 98, 99, 108, 109, 122, 174, 177;
Minoan art in Egypt, 185
Button seals, 143, 194
Byblos, Wen-Amon at, 186
C
Callimachus, character of Cretans, 8
Carians expelled by Minos, 9
Carpenter, tools of, 221, 222
Chariots, 225
Cherethites=Cretans, 168
Chieftain Vase, the, 125, 126, 172, 204, 213
Choros built by Dædalus at Knossos, 14
Chronology, Egyptian and Minoan, 147 _et seq._
Cilicia, 229
Circle-Graves=Shaft-Graves, 43-46, 172, 205; steles of, 182; altars at, 251
Cists in Temple Repositories, 105
Colonnades, Hall of, 85
Cooking utensils, 218
Copper: export of, 223; use of, in beaten work, 229
Corinth in Homeric poems, 21
Cornaro describes ruins at Knossos, 63
Court: Western, Knossos, 66, 83, 84; Central, Knossos, 68, 70, 85; of the
Olive Spout, 88
Cremation, 58-60
Critias, the, legend of Atlantis, 257-259
Cross in Snake Goddess shrine, 107
Cuirass. See Armour
Cuneiform, 81, 142
Cup-Bearer: Fresco of, 67, 68, 173, 206; dress of, 213, 214
Currelly, Mr., 124, 133, 236
Curtius on Treasury of Atreus, 48
Cyclades, 9; influence on Minoan art, 193
Cyprus, 51, 157; Minoan civilization in, 145, 185; export of copper, 223
D
Dædalus, 3; builds Labyrinth, 10, 14; flees to Sicily, 14, 15; makes Choros
at Knossos, 103
Daggers from Shaft-Graves, 57, 58
Dahshur, Egyptian jewellery from 229
Danaos, King of Argos and Rhodes 166
Danauna=Danaoi invade Egypt, 165, 166
Dancing, Minoan, 103
Dancing-girls, fresco of, 220
Danubian civilization, 181, 182
David, 167, 168
Dawkins, Mr., 126
Dead, disposal of, 58-60, 178
Decimal system, Minoan, 238
Deir-el-Bahri: Eleventh Dynasty temple at, 154; Hatshepsut's temple at,
160; tomb of Senmut, 160
Demeter identified with Minoan goddess, 247
Determinatives in Minoan writing, 235, 240
Diana, of Ephesus, 111
Dictæan Cave, 7, 8, 64, 70, 136, 137, 247, 254
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 136
Dionysos, 252
Disc, hieroglyphic, of Phæstos, 121, 241, 242
Dolphin Fresco, 224
Dor, 187
Dorian (Dorians): conquest, 2, 4, 33, 62; invasion of Crete, 178, 210
Dörpfeld, Professor, discovers Sixth City of Troy, 40, 41, 50, 51
Double Axe, 246; pillars of, at Knossos, 70; emblem of Divinity, 70; of
Zeus of Labraunda, 70; at Gournia, 130; in Dictæan Cave, 137; on
sarcophagus, 250; Hall of the, 86, 120; in shrines at Knossos, 100, 105
Drainage: at Knossos, 98, 99; at Hagia Triada, 129
Dress: of Minoan women, 73; of men, 74, 213-216
Dungeons of Knossos, 90, 91, 104
Dynasties, Egyptian: First, date of, 148; Third, 146; Fifth, 146; Sixth,
143, 149; Twelfth, 148, 150-155, 199; Thirteenth, 200; Seventeenth, 158,
200; Eighteenth, 158-163; Nineteenth, 163
E
Egypt: relations of, with Crete, 139; chronology of, 147 _et seq._
Electrum, 229
Enkomi, 51
Epeus, 103
Erman Egyptian chronology, 148
Ethiopia, King of, obliged to slay himself at command of priests, 254
Europa, mother of Minos, 7, 8, 136
Euryalus, 103
Evans, A. J., 1, 2; purchases hill of Kephala, 64, 65; discoveries at
Knossos, 65-116; derivation of Labyrinth, 71; on relief of bull's head,
77, 78; on tablets of Knossos, 79, 80; drains at Knossos, 99; bull's
head _rhyton_, 113; restoration of Queen's Megaron, 115; 'Scripta
Minoa' quoted, 121; excavations at Zafer Papoura, 134; at Isopata, 135;
Minoan chronology, 149; first destruction of Knossos, 171; date of sack
of Knossos, 174; growth of Cretan legends, 179, 180; classification of
Minoan periods, 190; origin of spiral, 194; decline of Minoan oil-trade,
222; Minoan writing, 232, 233, 235, 236, 237-238, 239, 240
F
Fetish shrine at Knossos, 111, 237, 245
Fibula, use of, in late Minoan III., 178
Fig-tree, 227
Figurines: ivory, at Knossos, 96; faïence, 105, 106, 156; banjo, 193
Flute on Hagia Triada sarcophagus, 127, 128
Fortifications: of Knossos, 74, 75, 76; of Tiryns and Mycenæ, 75, 138
Fresco (Frescoes): bull at Tiryns, 49; at Knossos, 66; Procession at
Knossos, 66; Cup-Bearer, 67, 68, 173, 206; of Throne Room, 71, 72; Blue
Boy, 73, 90, 172, 202; miniature, 73, 74, 172, 173, 206; toreador, 88,
89; bird, 95, 220; dancing-girls, 220; Dolphin, 224.
Frieze (Friezes): at Tiryns, 49, 56; at Knossos, 56
G
Gallery, the Long, 68-70
Gaming Board, the King's, Knossos, 87, 88, 204
Garstang, Professor, Kamares vase at Abydos, 150, 199
Gath=Tell-es-Safi, _q.v._
Gaza, 10
Gezer, Minoan pottery at, 140
Gilliéron, M., reconstruction of relief, 93
God, Minoan: insignificance of, 247; identified with Zeus, 247
Goddess: seal-impression of, 94; Dove Goddess, 100, 107, 245; Snake,
105-107, 130, 156, 245; Minoan supreme deity, 244; representations of,
245, 246; identified with Greek goddesses, 246, 247
Gold: abundance of, in Shaft-Graves, 44, 45 ; absence of, at Knossos, 77
Goldsmith's work at Mokhlos, 134
Gortyna, stele of, 182
Gournia: Minoan houses at, 97, 130, 131, 216; shrine at, 107, 130, 245;
Minoan town, 129-132; sack of, 131; stirrup-vases at, 205; furnace near,
228; linear script at, 236
Grote denies historicity of Greek legends, 3, 17
H
Haa-ab-ra, 169
Hagia Triada: Boxer _rhyton_, 103; villa at, 122; artistic work, 122, 203;
vases of, 123-126; sarcophagus, of, 127-129; sanitation of, 129; sack of,
175, 176; bee-hive tomb at, 192; dress on fresco from, 215; linear script
at, 235, 236
Hagios Onouphrios, deposita at, 192
Halbherr, Professor: work at Phæstos, 118; discovery of copper at Hagia
Triada, 223
Hall of Colonnades, Knossos, 85; of Double Axes, Knossos, 86
Hall, H. R., 155; origin of spiral, 48, 143, 193; sea-route to Egypt, 145;
on Labyrinth, 153; Keftiu in tomb of Rekh-ma-ra, 161; identification of
Uashasha, 166; Minoan influence on Egyptian art, 185
Hall, Miss, origin of spiral, 193
Harrison, Miss J., on the Minotaur legend, 252
Harvester Vase, the, 124, 125, 129, 172, 204, 213, 226
Hatshepsut, 158, 160, 208, 223
Hawara, Labyrinth at, 150-155
Hawes, Mrs.: carpenters' tools at Gournia, 222; discoveries at Gournia,
97, 107, 129, 130; sack of Knossos, 174
Hector, 41; slays Periphetes, 61; shield of, 61
Helmet. See Armour
Hephæstos makes arms of Achilles, 27, 28
Hera identified with Minoan goddess, 247
Herakleids, return of, 2
Her-hor, 186, 187
Herodotus: on sea-power of Minos, 9, 76, 256; Labyrinth at Hawara, 151,
152; Greek settlement in Crete, 180
Hesiod: legend of Kronos, 111, 136
Hieroglyphics: Minoan, 64, 78; Egyptian and Hittite, 64, 80, 81
Hilprecht, 141
Hissarlik, site of Troy, 37, 51
Hittites: Treaty with Egypt, 162; absorbed in advance of sea-peoples, 164
Hogarth, D. G.: quoted, 20; duration of Mycenæan civilization, 51, 52; on
bull's head _rhyton_, 113; excavations at Zakro, 133, 224; at Dictæan
Cave, 136, 137; Greek settlement in Crete, 180; geometric vases of Iron
Age, 183, 184; Minoan craftsmanship, 207
Homeric civilization, 21-33; houses, 25, 55; crafts in, 56-58; disposal
of dead, 58
Homeric poems, 20; geography of, 54; houses in, 25, 55; crafts in, 56-58
'Horns of consecration,' 94, 95, 100, 130, 246, 249, 250
Horse on seal-impression at Knossos, 112
Houses: Minoan, 97, 216-218; at Gournia, 130, 131; fabric of, 217
Hyksos, 93, 94, 155, 157, 200, 203
Hyria, foundation of, 15
I
Ialysos, Late Minoan III. work at, 209
Icarus, son of Dædalus, 14
Ida, Mount, 92; Kamares cave on, 197
Idæan Cave, 7; bronzes of, 183, 184
Idomeneus in Iliad, 22
Illahun, 97
Imadua, tomb of, 163
Incised ornament, 189, 192, 193
Iron: use of for weapons, 27, 60; in Late Minoan III., 178
Irus, 103
Isopata, royal tomb at, 135, 136, 156, 203
Ittai, Captain of David's bodyguard, 168
J
Jacob, sacred pillar of, at Bethel, 246
Jade, white, discovered at Troy, 140
Juktas, Mount: tomb of Zeus on, 7, 63; springs on, 110
K
Kahun: Twelfth Dynasty town at, 116; papyrus, 148; Kamares ware at, 150, 199
Kairatos River, 76, 176
Kalochærinos, excavations at Knossos, 64
Kamares ware, 92, 118, 120, 137, 150, 172, 197-199
Kamikos besieged by Minos, 15
Kaphtor=Crete and Kefti, 166
Karnak, 151
Kaselles at Knossos, 69
Keftiu, the, 158-163, 259
Kephala, site of Palace of Knossos, 64, 65
Kerkuon slain by Theseus, 11
Khyan: alabastron of, 93, 157, 203; lion of, 157
King, Minoan, relation to religion, 248, 251-255
Kokalos, King of Kamikos, 14
Klytemnestra, Treasury of, 48
Knossos, 5; in Iliad, 22; Palace of, 63-116; ruins at, 63, 64; Neolithic
remains at, 66; fortifications of, 74, 75; sack of, 86; Royal Villa,
107-109; Minoan road, 110; Little Palace, 110-113; beehive chamber, 113,
114; Queen's Megaron, 115, 116; sack of, 173-176; reoccupation of, 176,
177, 210; first sack of, 199
Kouphonisi. See Leuke
Kronos, 6, 7, 111
Kuanos, 25, 49, 56, 58
L
Labrys: name of Double Axe, 70; derivation of Labyrinth, 71, 100
Labyrinth, 3, 10, 11, 13, 14, 18; derivation of name, 71, 153; beehive
chamber, Knossos, 114; Minoan and Egyptian Labyrinths, 150-155
Lamp, stone, in Royal Villa, 108, 221
Lang, Mr. A., Minoan swords, 135
Layard, 140
Legends of Crete, 6-18
Leuke, deposit of purple shell at, 133
Libation table: of Dictæan Cave, 64, 236, 251; of Palaikastro, 236
Light-wells, 217, 220
Linear Script: Class A, 202, 204, 234-236; Class B, 205, 207, 236, 238
Lion Gate, 42-43, 94, 100, 246
Loin-cloth, 213
Loom-weights, 228; at Gournia, 131
Lotus, Minoan use of, 204
Lucian, 136
Lucretius, 136
Luqsor, 151
Lycian pirates, 184
Lyre on Hagia Triada sarcophagus, 127, 128
Lyttos, 136
M
Macalister finds Minoan pottery at Tell-es-Safi, 167
Mackenzie, Dr.: decay of Minoan art, 177; naturalism in Minoan art, 196,
201; character of Minoan religion, 248, 249; Minoan bathrooms, 252
Magazines at Knossos, 68, 69
Mahler, Egyptian chronology, 148
Manetho, history of, 147
Manolis, 68
Mecca, 111
Medinet Habu, reliefs at, 121, 164, 165, 181
Mediterranean race, 212
Megara conquered by Minos, 10, 170
Megaron: Queen's, 95, 115, 116, 220, 221; of Phæstos, 120
Melos, 51, 193
Menelaus, 15, 23; Palace of, 25
Mentuhotep Neb-hapet-Ra, Temple of, 78, 154
Merenptah, 164
Meriones in Iliad, 22
Messara Valley, 117
Metal-working: Homeric and Mycenæan, 56-58; at Knossos, 109
Meyer, Egyptian chronology, 148
Middle Kingdom of Egypt, 82, 93, 94, 150-155
Minoa, 10, 15
Minoan culture: date of beginning of, 147-149; periods of--Early Minoan
I., Middle Minoan II., 149, 150-155; Middle Minoan III., 155-157; Late
Minoan I., 158; Late Minoan III., pottery of, in Palestine, 167; Middle
Minoan II., catastrophe at close of, 170; Early Minoan I., 190, 191;
Early Minoan II., 191, 192; Early Minoan III., 192-194; Middle Minoan
I., 194-197; Middle Minoan II., 197-200; Middle Minoan III., 200-203;
Late Minoan I., 203-205; Late Minoan II., 205-208; Late Minoan III.,
208-210; wide diffusion of products of, 209
Minoans: physical characteristics, 211-213; dress, 213-216; houses of,
216-218
Minos: legends of, 3-18; birth of, 7; association with Zeus, 8, 253;
Sea-King, 9; conquers Megara and Athens, 10; pursues Dædalus, 14; death
of, 15; and Zeus, 105, 136; laws of, 136
Minotaur, 3, 10, 49, 258; relation of legend to Minoan religion, 256
Minyas, Treasury of, 48
Mitanni, 185
Mokhlos: excavations at, 40; necropolis at, 133, 134, 143; gold ring from, 223
Mortars, 227
Mosso, 112, 120; drainage at Hagia Triada, 129; Minoan democracy, 230;
Minoan bath rooms, 252
Mother: the Great, at Rome, 111; Anatolian, 122; Minoan, 244-247
Mouliana, tombs at, 59
Murex, 133, 222
Murray, Professor: name of Minos, 8; worship of bull-god in Crete, 253
Mycenæ, 1, 5; in Homeric poems, 22; Lion Gate of, 42, 43; Treasuries of,
42, 43, 46-48; Shaft-Graves, 43-46
Mycenæan civilization, 5, 6; extent of, 50, 51; duration of, 51, 52;
inspiration of, 52-54; relation to Homeric civilization, 54-62; crafts
of, 56-58; disposal of dead, 58-60
Myres, Mr. J. L.: discovery of Kamares ware, 92, 197; figurines at Petsofa,
132
N
Naturalism, development of, 196, 201
Nausicaa, 24, 26
Naville, excavations at Deir-el-Bahri, 78
Necho, fleet of, circumnavigates Africa, 259
Neolithic Period at Knossos, 188-190
Nestor, 22; cup of, 56
Niffur, 1; drainage at, 141
Nimrûd, carved ivories at, 140
O
Odysseus, 22; palace of, 25; versatility of, 26; brooch of, 56; defeats
Irus, 103
Olive-oil, export of, 222
Olive Press, Room of the, 222
Olive Spout, Court of the, 88
Olive-tree, 227
Olympiad, First, 2, 52
Opening the mouth, Egyptian funerary ceremony, 128, 251
Orchomenos, 5; in Homeric poems 22, Treasury of Minyas, 48
P
Palace, Homeric, 25, 55
Palace, the Little, 111
Palaikastro, 124; Minoan town at, 132; deposit of purple shell at, 133;
houses at, 216, 217; Linear Script at, 236
Papyrus: Turin, 148; Kahun, 148; Golenischeff, 186
Pashley describes ruins at Knossos, 63
Pasiphae, wife of Minos, 10, 18, 252
Paul, St., Epistle to Titus, 8
Pausanias, on Tomb of Agamemnon, 37, 42, 43
Pelasgi, 161, 167
Pelethites=Philistines, 168
Peloponnese, 6
Pen, the, used in Minoan writing, 241
Penelope, 24
Pepy, statue of, 113
Percentages on Minoan tablets, 238
Perdix slain by Dædalus, 14
Periphetes slain by Hector, 61
Pernier, Dr., stele at Gortyna, 182; work at Phrestos, 118
Perrot, M., Minoan writing, 233
Petrie, Professor: discovers Ægean remains in Egypt, 51; plan of Egyptian
town, 97; Egyptian Sed Festival, 255; identification of Zakkaru, 166;
Egyptian chronology, 194, 199; Minoan pottery at Abydos, 142, 191;
sea-route between Crete and Egypt, 144, 145; Egyptian chronology, 148;
Kamares ware at Kahun, 150
Petsofa: figurines, 126, 132, 195, 213, 215; votive offerings at, 168
Phæstos, 5; in Homeric poems, 117; discovery of Palace, 118; Theatral Area,
118, 119; destruction of palace, 119; staircase, 120; Megaron, 120;
Central Court, 120; hieroglyphic disc, 121, 122; lords of, destroy
Knossos, 171; sack of, 175, 176; earliest buildings at, 197; first sack
of Knossos, 200; beehive tombs at, 229; Linear Script at, 236
Philistines: on reliefs at Medinet Habu, 121; invade Egypt, 165, 166, 186;
settle in Palestine, 166-169
Phnicians: relation to Minoan culture, 53; invention of alphabet, 64;
writing, 81, 243; purple dye of, 132, 133; not the Keftiu, 159
Phylakopi, 51; Linear Script at, 236
Pictographs: beginnings of, 194; decline of, 202, 204; development of, 234
Pillars, sacred, 70, 246
Piracy in Homeric poems, 22
Pithoi, 64, 69, 202, 206
Pits. See Dungeons
Plato, legend of Atlantis, 257-259
Pliny, Labyrinth of Hawara, 152
Plutarch, story of Theseus, 103
Polychrome ware, 104, 132, 172; beginnings of, 194, 195; development of,
197-199
Polycrates, sea-power of, 9
Polyphemus, 22
Porcelain plaques on chest, 97
Portico: southern, Knossos, 68; western, 66, 83, 84
Potter's wheel, introduction of, 193
Præsians, account of Greek settlement in Crete, 180
Præsos, 15
Priam, Palace of, 25, 39; Treasure of, 38, 39, 40, 41
Priestesses (Priests) in Minoan religion, 251
Procession, Corridor of the, Knossos, 67
Proclus, portraits of men of Atlantis in Egypt, 259
Procrustes slain by Theseus, 11
Psamtek I., 152, 169
Psychro, 136
Pulosathu = Philistines, _q.v._
Punt, Egyptian voyages to, 146
Purple, 133, 222
Q
Querns, Minoan, 227
R
Rahotep, statue of, 113
Ramesseum, 151
Ramses II., Treaty with Hittites, 162
Ramses III.: reliefs of, 121, 181; victory over sea-peoples, 164-166
Rekh-ma-ra, tomb of, 160-162, 207, 208, 214, 223, 259
Religion, Minoan: supreme goddess in, 244, 245; representations of goddess,
245-246; identification of, with Greek goddesses, 246, 247; Minoan god
identified with Zeus, 247; absence of temples, 248; family worship, 248;
shrines 249, 250; sacrifice and ritual, 250, 251; place of King in,
251-255
Rhea, 6, 7, 111, 122, 136; identified with Minoan goddess, 247
Rhiphæan Mountains, 3
Rhodes, Late Minoan III. work in, 209
_Rhyton_: from Hagia Triada, 103; bull's head, from Knossos, 113
Ripple ornament, 190
Road, Minoan at Knossos, 110
Rosetta Stone, 80, 162
S
Sack of Knossos, 86
Sacrifice in Minoan worship, 250, 252
Sagalassians=Shakalsha (?), 166
Sahura, King of Fifth Dynasty, 146
Sais, legend of Atlantis at, 257-259
Salamis, late Mycenæan graves at, 59
Samson, 167
Sarcophagus, the, Hagia Triada, 127-129, 213, 250, 251
Sardinia relics of Minoan civilization, 51
Sardinians, 212
Sat-Hathor, 155
Scæan Gate, 39
Schliemann, 1, 2, 5; youth of, 34-36; excavates ancient Troy, 38-41, 227;
Mycenæ, 42-48; discovers Shaft-Graves, 43-46; excavates Treasury of
Atreus, 46-48; excavates at Orchomenos, 48; at Tiryns, 48, 49; considers
excavations at Knossos, 64
Schnabelkanne, 39, 192
Script, Minoan, 64, 78-81; Linear, at Gournia, 131
Sculptor's workshop, 86, 87
Scylla betrays Megara, 10
Seager, excavations at Mokhlos, 40, 133, 134, 143
Seal-impressions at Zakro, 133
Seals: Minoan, 143; button, 143
Sea-power: of Minos, 9, 76; of Knossos, 76, 77
Seats, Minoan, 102
Sebek-user, statuette of, 82, 93, 155, 156, 203
'Sed' Festival in Egypt, 255
Sen-mut, tomb of, 160-162, 207, 208, 259
Senusert (Usertsen), II., III., 150; III., 199
Shakalsha invade Egypt, 165, 166
Shield. See Armour
Ships: Minoan, 112, 223; Egyptian, 144
Shoes, Minoan, 213, 214
Shrines: at Gournia, 130, 131, 250; at Knossos, 249, 250, 252
Sicilians, 212
Sicily, 10; relics of Minoan civilization in, 51, 184
Sickles, 226
Sikels=Shakalsha (?), 166
Sinnis slain by Theseus, 11
Sistrum on Harvester Vase, 125
Sitia, 214
Snake Goddess, 105-107, 245, 250; dress of votaress of, 215
Sneferu, King of Third Dynasty, 146
Socrates, 17
Solon, legend of Atlantis, 257-259
Spain, relics of Minoan civilization in, 51, 184, 210
Sparta in Homeric poems, 21
Spratt describes ruins at Knossos 63
Spiral, origin of, 48, 143, 144, 193, 194
Staircase: at Knossos, 85, 86; at Phæstos, 120
Steles of Shaft-Graves, 43
Stillman, 64
Stirrup vases: at Knossos, 81, 108; at Zafer Papoura, 134; tomb of Ramses
III., 163; at Gournia and Hagia Triada, 205, 210; prevalence of, in Late
Minoan III., 210
'Stoa Basilike,' 108
Suffixes in Minoan Script, 235
Swords: in Shaft-Graves, 44; iron, 60; bronze, at Zafer Papoura, 134, 135;
iron, in Late Minoan III., 178; bronze, in Late Minoan I., 204; from
Zafer Papoura, 206
T
Tablets, clay, of Knossos, 78-81, 110, 238 _et seq._
Tahuti, 69
Tahutmes III., 158, 161, 208
Tahutmes IV., 174
Talent, Babylonian, at Knossos and Hagia Triada, 141
Tarentum, Late Minoan work at 209
Telemachus, 22, 23
Tell-el-Amarna: tablets of, 79; capital of Akhenaten, 163; Minoan pottery
at, 185
Tell-es-Safi, Minoan pottery at, 140, 167
Temple repositories, 104-107, 172, 200
Temples: Egyptian, 25; absence of, in Minoan religion, 248
Terpander, invention of lyre, 128
Teumman, 225
Theatral Area: Knossos, 100-104; Phæstos, 101, 197
Thera, Linear Script at, 236
Theseus, 3, 9; adventures of, 11; vanquishes Minotaur, 12, 13; marries and
deserts Ariadne, 13; brings up ring of Minos, 13, 256
Throne, palace of Knossos, 72
Throne Room: decorations of, 72; _impluvium_ in, 72; date of, 206
Thucydides on sea-power of Minos, 9, 76, 256
Timæus, the, legend of Atlantis, 257-259
Tiryns, 1, 5; in Homeric poems, 22; wall of, 49; frieze, 49; fresco of
bull, 49
Tomb paintings, Egyptian, 74
Tools, carpenters' and smiths', at Gournia, 131, 221, 222
Torcello, Late Minoan work at, 209
Toreadors, 88-91; figurines of, 96
Trees, sacred, 245
Trickle ornament, 202, 203
Troy, I; siege of, 22; site of, 37; First City, 38; Second City, 39, 40,
140; Sixth City, 40, 41, 51
Tsountas, 50
Tyi, Queen, 185
U
Uashasha invade Egypt, 165, 166
V
Vaphio cups, 51, 109, 123, 161, 229
Vases: stone, at Knossos, 81, 86, 143; stirrup, 81, 108, 134; Kamares, 92;
stone, at Mokhlos, 134, 143; at Isopata, 136
Vases à Étrier=stirrup vases, _q.v._
Vasiliki, mottled ware of, 192
Venetian occupation, 63
Villa, Royal, at Knossos, 107-109, 246
Vine, 227
Virgil, 136
W
Water-lily cup, 198
Weaving, 227, 228
Wen-Amon, adventures of, 186, 187
Windows, 217
Women, position of, in Homeric poems, 24
Writing: beginnings of, in Ægean area, 80, 81; Phnician, 81; Minoan, 234-243
Z
Zafer Papoura, swords from, 206
Zakkaru invade Egypt, 165, 166, 186, 187
Zakro: lotus vase from, 204; seals at, 133, 205, 224; houses at, 216;
Minoan town at, 133; pottery at, 133; Zakkaru from, 166, 187; Linear Script
at, 236
Zakru pirates, 187
Zeus: birth of, marriage of, to Europa, death and burial of, 7, 8;
association with Minos, 8, 105, 136; Double Axe emblem, 70; of Labraunda,
70; fetish idol of, 111; associations with Dictæan Cave, 136, 247;
identified with Minoan god, 247
THE END
[Illustration: PLAN OF THE PALACE OF KNOSSOS.
KEY TO NUMBERS
1. Northern Entrance and Portico.
2. Bastion and Guard-House.
3. Northern Piazza.
4. Room of the Flower Gatherer.
5. Room with Stirrup Vases, Walled Pit beneath.
6. Ante room to Throne Room.
7, 7. Throne Room with Tank.
8. Temple Repositories.
9, 9. East and West Pillar-Rooms.
10. Court of the Altar.
11. South Propylæum.
12. Corridor of the Cup Bearer.
13. Corridor of the Procession.
14. West Portico.
15. Long Gallery with Magazines on West Side.
16. North-West House with Bronze Vessels.
17. Northern Bath.
18. Deposit of Pictographic Tablets.
19. North-Eastern Magazines.
20. Corridor of the Draught-Board.
21. Room of the Olive Press.
22. Great Staircase.
23, 23. Hall of the Colonnades, with Light-Well.
24, 24, 24. Hall of the Double Axes, with Light-Well.
25, 25, 25, 25. Queen's Megaron, with Light-Wells.
26. Deposit of Ivory Figurines.
27, 27. Built Drains.
28. Court of the Sanctuary.
29. South-East House with Pillar-Room.
30. Court of the Oil-Spout.
31. Magazines with large Pithoi.
32. East Bastion.
33. Early Buildings, partly in continuous use.
34. Sculptor's Workshop (on upper floor).
A. Altar-Base in Central Court.
B. Shrine of the Snake Goddess.
C, D. Altar-Bases in West Court.
E. Shrine of Dove Goddess and Double Axes.
F. Altar-Base in Court of the Sanctuary.
G. Altar Base in Court of the Altar.
PLAN ACCOMPANYING 'THE SEA-KINGS OF CRETE' BY THE REV. JAMES BAIKIE,
F.R.A.S. (A. AND C. BLACK, LONDON.)]
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