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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sea-Kings of Crete, by James Baikie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Sea-Kings of Crete
+
+Author: James Baikie
+
+Release Date: September 19, 2006 [EBook #19328]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** 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 Trœzen. He had been brought up by his
+mother at Trœzen, 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 Bœotia 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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnicians
+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 Phœnician 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 Phœnicians 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
+Phœnician, 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 Phœnician 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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnicians, 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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnicia, 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 Phœnicians
+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 Phœnicians
+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 Phœnician 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 Phœnicians 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 Phœnician 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 Phœnician 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-Phœnician 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.) _Mycœnean 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 Archœology_; (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
+Phœnicians: 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; Phœnician, 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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+<pre>
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sea-Kings of Crete, by James Baikie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Sea-Kings of Crete
+
+Author: James Baikie
+
+Release Date: September 19, 2006 [EBook #19328]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SEA-KINGS OF CRETE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Robert J. Hall
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 513px;">
+<a name="plate_I">
+<img src="images/plate_I.jpg" width="513" height="809" alt="Plate I"></a>
+<p>THE THRONE OF MINOS (<i>p</i>. <a href="#page_72">72</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<h1>THE SEA-KINGS<br />OF CRETE</h1>
+
+<p class="author">BY REV. JAMES BAIKIE, F.R.A.S.</p>
+
+<p class="center" style="font-size: smaller;">WITH 32 FULL-PAGE
+ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS</p>
+
+<p class="edition">SECOND EDITION</p>
+
+<p class="center">LONDON<br />
+ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK<br />
+1913</p>
+
+<p class="center" style="margin-top: 2em;">
+<a name="page_v"><span class="page">Page v</span></a>
+TO MY SISTERS AND MY BROTHERS</p>
+
+<h2>
+<a name="page_vii"><span class="page">Page vii</span></a>
+PREFACE</h2>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_viii"><span
+class="page">Page viii</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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., <a name="page_ix"><span
+class="page">Page ix</span></a> 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 <i>Journal of Hellenic Studies</i>; to the Committee of
+the British School at Athens for the use of Plate XIX. and the plan
+of Knossos from their <i>Annual</i>; and to Dr. A. J. Evans and
+Mr. John Murray for Plates VI., XIII., and XIV., from the <i>Monthly
+Review</i>, 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.
+</p>
+
+<h2>
+<a name="page_xi"><span class="page">Page xi</span></a>
+CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#page_1">CHAPTER I</a></p>
+
+<p>THE LEGENDS</p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#page_19">CHAPTER II</a></p>
+
+<p>THE HOMERIC CIVILIZATION</p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#page_34">CHAPTER III</a></p>
+
+<p>SCHLIEMANN AND HIS WORK</p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#page_63">CHAPTER IV</a></p>
+
+<p>THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS'</p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#page_83">CHAPTER V</a></p>
+
+<p>THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS'&mdash;<i>continued</i></p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#page_117">CHAPTER VI</a></p>
+
+<p>PH&AElig;STOS, HAGIA TRIADA, AND EASTERN CRETE</p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#page_139">CHAPTER VII</a></p>
+
+<p>CRETE AND EGYPT</p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#page_170">CHAPTER VIII</a></p>
+
+<p>THE DESTROYERS</p>
+
+<p class="center">
+<a name="page_xii"><span class="page">Page xii</span></a>
+<a href="#page_188">CHAPTER IX</a></p>
+
+<p>THE PERIODS OF MINOAN CULTURE</p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#page_211">CHAPTER X</a></p>
+
+<p>LIFE UNDER THE SEA-KINGS</p>
+
+<p class="center"><a href="#page_232">CHAPTER XI</a></p>
+
+<p>LETTERS AND RELIGION</p>
+
+<p><a href="#page_260">CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#page_262">BIBLIOGRAPHY</a></p>
+
+<p><a href="#page_265">INDEX</a></p>
+
+<h2>
+<a name="page_xiii"><span class="page">Page xiii</span></a>
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<table border="0">
+<tr><td>PLATE</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_I">I.</a></td>
+    <td>The Throne of Minos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_II">II.</a></td>
+    <td>(1) The Ramp, Troy, Second City; (2) the Circle-Graves,
+        Mycen&aelig;</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_III">III.</a></td>
+    <td>Wall of Sixth City, Troy</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_IV">IV.</a></td>
+    <td>The Lion Gate, Mycen&aelig;</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_V">V.</a></td>
+    <td>(1) Vaulted Passage in Wall, Tiryns; (2) Beehive Tomb
+        (Treasury of Atreus), Mycen&aelig;</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_VI">VI.</a></td>
+    <td>The Cup-Bearer, Knossos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_VII">VII.</a></td>
+    <td>The Long Gallery, Knossos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_VIII">VIII.</a></td>
+    <td>A Magazine with Jars and Kaselles, Knossos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_IX">IX.</a></td>
+    <td>(1) Magazine with Jars and Kaselles; (2) Great Jar with
+        Trickle Ornament</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_X">X.</a></td>
+    <td>(1) Part of Dolphin Fresco; (2) A Great Jar, Knossos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XI">XI.</a></td>
+    <td>Pillar of the Double Axes</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XII">XII.</a></td>
+    <td>(1) Minoan Paved Road; (2) North Entrance, Knossos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XIII">XIII.</a></td>
+    <td>Relief of Bull's Head</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XIV">XIV.</a></td>
+    <td>Clay Tablet with Linear Script, Knossos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XV">XV.</a></td>
+    <td>(1) Palace Wall, West Side, Mount Juktas in Background;
+        (2) Bathroom, Knossos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XVI">XVI.</a></td>
+    <td>A Flight of the Quadruple Staircase; (2) Wall with Drain</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XVII">XVII.</a></td>
+    <td>(1) Hall of the Double Axes; (2) Great Staircase, Knossos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XVIII">XVIII.</a></td>
+    <td>The King's Gaming-Board</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XIX">XIX.</a></td>
+    <td>Ivory Figurines</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XX">XX.</a></td>
+    <td>(1) Main Drain, Knossos; (2) Terra-cotta Drain-Pipes
+    <a name="page_xiv"><span class="page">Page xiv</span></a></td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXI">XXI.</a></td>
+    <td>Theatral Area, Knossos: Before Restoration</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXII">XXII.</a></td>
+    <td>Theatral Area, Knossos: Restored</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXIII">XXIII.</a></td>
+    <td>Great Jar with Papyrus Reliefs</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXIV">XXIV.</a></td>
+    <td>The Royal Villa: (1) The Basilica; (2) Stone Lamp</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXV">XXV.</a></td>
+    <td>(1) Knossos Valley; (2) Excavating at Knossos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXVI">XXVI.</a></td>
+    <td>Great Staircase, Ph&aelig;stos</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXVII">XXVII.</a></td>
+    <td>The Harvester Vase, Hagia Triada</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXVIII">XXVIII.</a></td>
+    <td>Sarcophagus from Hagia Triada</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXIX">XXIX.</a></td>
+    <td>Minoan Pottery</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXX">XXX.</a></td>
+    <td>Late Minoan Vase from Mycen&aelig;</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXXI">XXXI.</a></td>
+    <td>Kamares Vases from Ph&aelig;stos and Hagia Triada</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right"><a href="#plate_XXXII">XXXII.</a></td>
+    <td>Goldsmiths' Work from Beehive Tombs, Ph&aelig;stos</td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td><a href="#sketch_map">SKETCH MAP OF CRETE</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td>
+    <td><a href="#plan_knossos">PLAN OF KNOSSOS</a></td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 890px;">
+<a name="sketch_map">
+<img src="images/sketch_map.jpg" width="890" height="394"
+alt="SKETCH MAP OF CRETE To Illustrate THE SEA KINGS OF CRETE
+BY The Rev. James Baikie, F.R.A.S."></a>
+</div>
+
+<p class="bigtitle">
+<a name="page_1"><span class="page">Page 1</span></a>
+<span style="font-size: x-large;">THE SEA-KINGS OF CRETE</span><br />
+<span style="font-size: smaller;">AND THE</span><br />
+PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATION OF GREECE
+</p>
+
+<h2>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">THE LEGENDS</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean 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, Mycen&aelig;, and Tiryns, and by that of Evans and the other
+explorers&mdash;Italian, British, and American&mdash;in Crete. The
+Mesopotamian and Egyptian discoveries traced back a little farther
+streams which had already been followed far up <a name="page_2"><span
+class="page">Page 2</span></a> 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&mdash;deities and
+demi-gods, men and fabulous monsters, were mingled in them on the
+same plane&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_3"><span
+class="page">Page 3</span></a> 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 D&aelig;dalus, 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, <i>if any such there be</i>, 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 Rhiph&aelig;an
+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 <a name="page_4"><span class="page">Page
+4</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_5"><span class="page">Page 5</span></a> 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
+&AElig;gean stock filled the r&ocirc;les of these ancient romances,
+and that the wondrous story of their deeds is, in part at least,
+the record of actual achievements.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycenc&aelig;, 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 Ph&aelig;stos began
+to be revealed in 1900 and the subsequent years that it became manifest
+that what was known as the Mycen&aelig;an <a name="page_6"><span
+class="page">Page 6</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean
+world. The position of Crete&mdash;'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'&mdash;marks it out as designed by Nature to be a centre
+of development in the culture of the early &AElig;gean 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 <a name="page_7"><span
+class="page">Page 7</span></a> 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 Id&aelig;an or the Dict&aelig;an 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&mdash;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.)
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+In the Dict&aelig;an 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 <a name="page_8"><span
+class="page">Page 8</span></a> crystallized by Callimachus in the
+form adopted by St. Paul in the Epistle to Titus&mdash;'The Cretans
+are alway liars.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+"C&aelig;sar," 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 Dict&aelig;an 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+That is one side of the Minos legend, perhaps the most ancient;
+but along with it there exists another <a name="page_9"><span
+class="page">Page 9</span></a> 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 &AElig;gean, 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 <a name="page_10"><span class="page">Page
+10</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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, D&aelig;dalus. 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 &AElig;geus, 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 &AElig;geus
+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 <a name="page_11"><span class="page">Page 11</span></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;geus
+and the Princess Aithra of Tr&oelig;zen. He had been brought up by his
+mother at Tr&oelig;zen, and on arriving at early manhood had set out to
+make his way to the Court of &AElig;geus 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 <a name="page_12"><span
+class="page">Page 12</span></a> 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, &AElig;geus, 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. &AElig;geus 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_13"><span class="page">Page
+13</span></a> 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 &AElig;geus, 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 &AElig;gean 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_14"><span class="page">Page 14</span></a> 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.
+D&aelig;dalus, 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 D&aelig;dalus 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
+D&aelig;dalus 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
+D&aelig;dalus; and Kokalos, <a name="page_15"><span class="page">Page
+15</span></a> 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 D&aelig;dalus, 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 519px;">
+<p><a name="plate_II">
+<img src="images/plate_II_1.jpg" width="517" height="411"
+alt="Plate II 1"></a></p>
+<p>(1) THE RAMP, TROY, SECOND CITY (<i>p</i>.
+<a href="#page_38">38</a>)</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_II_2.jpg" width="519" height="383"
+alt="Plate II 2"></p>
+<p>(2) THE CIRCLE GRAVES, MYCEN&AElig; (<i>p</i>.
+<a href="#page_43">43</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Pr&aelig;sos, 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'; <a name="page_16"><span
+class="page">Page 16</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_17"><span class="page">Page
+17</span></a> 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&mdash;the tribute of human victims
+paid by Athens to Crete.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 562px;">
+<a name="plate_III">
+<img src="images/plate_III.jpg" width="562" height="736"
+alt="Plate III"></a><p>WALL OF SIXTH CITY, TROY (<i>p</i>.
+<a href="#page_41">41</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Later Athenian writers of a rationalizing turn endeavoured to bring
+down the noble old legend to the level of the commonplace by
+transforming <a name="page_18"><span class="page">Page 18</span></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_19"><span class="page">Page 19</span></a>
+CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">THE HOMERIC CIVILIZATION</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_20"><span class="page">Page 20</span></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: D. G. Hogarth, 'Ionia and the East,' p. 21.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_21"><span
+class="page">Page 21</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycen&aelig;; 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 <a name="page_22"><span class="page">Page
+22</span></a> Mycen&aelig;, 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 Ach&aelig;an 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_23"><span class="page">Page 23</span></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Along with this primitive rudeness goes, on the other hand, a strongly
+aristocratic constitution of society. The great leaders and chiefs,
+the long-haired Ach&aelig;ans, 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 Ach&aelig;an 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 <a name="page_24"><span
+class="page">Page 24</span></a> and conquering race holding dominion
+over, and using the services of, the vanquished, much after the
+manner of the Norman lordship in Sicily.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_25"><span class="page">Page 25</span></a>
+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 <i>kuanos</i> (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 <a name="page_26"><span class="page">Page
+26</span></a> 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 Ach&aelig;ans
+in general are stately and dignified.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_27"><span class="page">Page
+27</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Heph&aelig;stos, 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 <a
+name="page_28"><span class="page">Page 28</span></a> 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 Heph&aelig;stos in producing his
+effects&mdash;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 Mycen&aelig;an
+period.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;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 <a name="page_29"><span class="page">Page
+29</span></a> different. Now, the question of importance for us
+is&mdash;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?
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_30"><span class="page">Page 30</span></a> 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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_31"><span class="page">Page 31</span></a> 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&mdash;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 <a name="page_32"><span class="page">Page
+32</span></a> the stateliness and grace amid the splendour of it
+all&mdash;why should we obstinately refuse to believe that these
+bards knew more than we&mdash;that they had seen the vision with
+their mortal eye before they took the brush in hand to paint the
+picture?[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: H. Browne, 'Homeric Study,' pp. 242, 243.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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?
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 562px;">
+<a name="plate_IV">
+<img src="images/plate_IV.jpg" width="562" height="730"
+alt="Plate IV"></a><p>THE IRON GATE, MYCEN&AElig; (<i>p</i>.
+<a href="#page_42">42</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_33"><span class="page">Page 33</span></a> 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&mdash;that of
+the legendary period? The answer to this question has come in the
+most surprising and romantic fashion from the arch&aelig;ological
+discoveries of the last forty years.
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_34"><span class="page">Page 34</span></a>
+CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">SCHLIEMANN AND HIS WORK</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;neas 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 <a name="page_35"><span class="page">Page 35</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_36"><span class="page">Page
+36</span></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.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_37"><span
+class="page">Page 37</span></a> 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 arch&aelig;ology, 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 395px;">
+<p><a name="plate_V">
+<img src="images/plate_V_1.jpg" width="384" height="447"
+alt="Plate V 1"></a></p>
+<p>WALLED PASSAGE IN WALL, TIRYNS (<i>p</i>.
+<a href="#page_49">49</a>)</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_V_1.jpg" width="395" height="444"
+alt="Plate V 1"></p>
+<p>BEEHIVE TOMB (TREASURY OF ATREUS), MYCEN&AElig; (<i>p</i>.
+<a href="#page_46">46</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean; 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 Mycen&aelig;, 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 <a name="page_38"><span class="page">Page
+38</span></a> at Hissarlik, but far inland near Bunarbashi; while
+the authority of Pausanias as to the graves of the Atreid&aelig;
+was held to be quite unreliable.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean, ornamented
+frequently with incised patterns which are filled in with a white
+chalky substance. The stratum of d&eacute;bris belonging to the
+First City averages about 8 feet in depth.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Above this lay a layer of soil about 1 foot 9 inches <a
+name="page_39"><span class="page">Page 39</span></a> in depth, and
+then, on the top of a great layer of d&eacute;bris, 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 (<a href="#plate_II">Plate II. 1</a>),
+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 arch&aelig;ologists
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The gate and walls of the Second City&mdash;the fact that it had
+been undoubtedly destroyed by fire, and the evidence of wealth
+and artistic faculty offered by the golden treasure&mdash;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 Sc&aelig;an Gate.' <a name="page_40"><span class="page">Page
+40</span></a> 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&mdash;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 D&ouml;rpfeld, 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 d&eacute;bris had been planed and
+<a name="page_41"><span class="page">Page 41</span></a> 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 Mycen&aelig;an, 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
+<a href="#plate_III">Plate III</a>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_42"><span
+class="page">Page 42</span></a> Porte in the way of the resumption
+of work on the plain of Troy, and in July, 1876, he settled down to
+excavate at Mycen&aelig;, the historic capital of the King of men,
+Agamemnon, with a view to the proving of his second theory&mdash;the
+burial of the Atreid&aelig; within the Acropolis of Mycen&aelig;.
+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
+arch&aelig;ology from the remains of its walls, and particularly
+from the splendid Lion Gate (<a href="#plate_IV">Plate IV.</a>) with
+its famous relief of the sacred pillar supported by two colossal
+lions, and from the great beehive tombs of the lower city&mdash;the
+so-called 'Treasuries.' But the chief thing which drew the explorer
+to Mycen&aelig; 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 Mycen&aelig; 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 <a name="page_43"><span class="page">Page 43</span></a> 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.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+(<a href="#plate_II">Plate II. 2</a>). Schliemann's first idea was
+that he had discovered the Agora of Mycen&aelig;, the 'well-polished
+circle of stones' on which the elders of the city sat for councilor
+judgment, as Heph&aelig;stos 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_44"><span
+class="page">Page 44</span></a> 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 d&eacute;bris 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 431px;">
+<a name="plate_VI">
+<img src="images/plate_VI.jpg" width="431" height="851"
+alt="Plate VI"></a>
+<p>THE CUP-BEARER, KNOSSOS (<i>p</i>.
+<a href="#page_67">67</a>)</p>
+<p>From 'The Palace of Minos,' by Arthur J. Evans, in <i>The Monthly
+Review</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_45"><span class="page">Page 45</span></a>
+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!
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_46"><span class="page">Page 46</span></a> 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 Ach&aelig;ans 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Besides the great discovery of the Shaft-Graves, Schliemann carried
+on the exploration of the famous beehive tombs in the lower city of
+Mycen&aelig;. One of these, the largest, was already well known by the
+name of the 'Treasury of Atreus' (<a href="#plate_V">Plate V. 2</a>).
+It consists of a long entrance passage running back into the hillside,
+and leading to a great vaulted <a name="page_47"><span class="page">
+Page 47</span></a> 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
+fa&ccedil;ade 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 fa&ccedil;ade 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&mdash;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. <a name="page_48"><span
+class="page">Page 48</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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'&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 511px;">
+<a name="plate_VII">
+<img src="images/plate_VII.jpg" width="511" height="815"
+alt="Plate VII"></a>
+<p>THE LONG GALLERY, KNOSSOS (<i>p</i>.
+<a href="#page_68">68</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Following up his excavations at Mycen&aelig;, Schliemann, in 1880-81,
+excavated at Orchomenos in B&oelig;otia 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 <a name="page_49"><span
+class="page">Page 49</span></a> 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
+(<a href="#plate_V">Plate V. 1</a>). 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'
+(<i>kuanos</i>); 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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_50"><span class="page">Page
+50</span></a> 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 Mycen&aelig;an 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?
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The work of Schliemann was continued and extended by successors
+such as D&ouml;rpfeld, 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
+Mycen&aelig; had extended to some extent over <a name="page_51"><span
+class="page">Page 51</span></a> 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 Phyl&acirc;kopi (Melos), while from Vaphio,
+near Amykl&aelig; 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. D&ouml;rpfeld's hands, yielded from the Sixth
+City the evidence of an Asiatic civilization truly contemporaneous
+with that of Mycen&aelig;. 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 &AElig;gean 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 Mycen&aelig;an
+culture.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Roughly, the result came to this: 'that before the epoch at which
+we are used to place the beginnings of Greek civilization&mdash;that
+is, the opening centuries of the last millennial period B.C.&mdash;we
+must allow for <a name="page_52"><span class="page">Page 52</span></a>
+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 &AElig;gean not
+much shorter than in the Nile Valley.[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: Hogarth, 'Authority and Arch&aelig;ology,' p. 230.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+In the earlier stages of the discussion which <a name="page_53"><span
+class="page">Page 53</span></a> 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 Mycen&aelig; were not native
+but borrowed, the Ph&oelig;nicians being generally held to be the
+medium through which the influence of the East had filtered into the
+&AElig;gean area. As time has gone on, however, the Ph&oelig;nicians
+have gradually come to bulk less and less in the view of students of
+the &AElig;gean problem. It is no longer held that they contributed
+anything original to the development of Mycen&aelig;an 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 Ph&oelig;nician 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 &AElig;gean gave quite as much as it borrowed, and that
+its artists were sufficiently great to have originated their own
+culture. Mycen&aelig;an, and still more the great Minoan art of
+which Mycen&aelig;an 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 <a name="page_54"><span
+class="page">Page 54</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycen&aelig;, 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 Mycen&aelig;ans the Greeks of the Iliad and the Odyssey,
+and was it their culture that is depicted for us in these great
+poems?
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;an culture have
+been discovered. Foremost, of course, we have Mycen&aelig; itself.
+To Homer, 'golden,' 'broad-wayed' Mycen&aelig; is the seat of the
+great leader of all the Ach&aelig;ans, the King of men, Agamemnon;
+it is also the chief seat of the culture which goes by its name.
+Orchomenos, Pylos, Laced&aelig;mon, Attica, all prominent in the
+poems, are <a name="page_55"><span class="page">Page 55</span></a>
+also well-known seats of Mycen&aelig;an 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
+Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;ans
+prevailed.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The Homeric house also finds a striking parallel in the details
+of the Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_56"><span class="page">Page 56</span></a> In details,
+we have the frieze of <i>kuanos</i> 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 Mycen&aelig; 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 Mycen&aelig;an 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&mdash;'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 Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig; 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
+Mycen&aelig;an cup is riveted with gold.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_57"><span class="page">Page 57</span></a> 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 Mycen&aelig;. 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 Mycen&aelig;an
+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 <a name="page_58"><span class="page">Page
+58</span></a> 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 <i>kuanos</i>,
+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.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Such are some of the points which countenance the idea that in
+the Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;an 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 <a name="page_59"><span class="page">Page
+59</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycen&aelig;an
+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 Mycen&aelig;an 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 <a name="page_60"><span
+class="page">Page 60</span></a> vampire, ghost of a disagreeable
+ancestor goes along with it.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;an
+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 <a
+name="page_61"><span class="page">Page 61</span></a> as it had
+been gradually doing in the generally bronze-using Mycen&aelig;an
+civilization.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The same remark applies to the differences of equipment between
+the warriors of the Mycen&aelig;an and those of the Homeric period.
+The Mycen&aelig;ans 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 Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;an shield 'like a tower.' Periphetes
+of Mycen&aelig; 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 Mycen&aelig;an remains.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_62"><span class="page">Page 62</span></a>
+anterior to the period of Ach&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;an
+or Minoan stock who created it had passed under the dominion of
+the invading Ach&aelig;an overlords. The Ach&aelig;an invasion
+was not, like that which succeeded it, subversive of the great
+culture that belonged to the conquered Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;an
+culture, still existing, though under Ach&aelig;an 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&mdash;not, indeed, the tomb of Agamemnon&mdash;but the tomb
+of that Homeric life which Agamemnon represents to us. In the
+Mycen&aelig;an 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.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: H. Browne, 'Homeric Study,' pp. 313, 314.]
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_63"><span class="page">Page 63</span></a>
+CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS'</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 D&aelig;dalus, 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.' <a name="page_64"><span class="page">Page 64</span></a>
+But expectation still fixed on Knossos as the most probable site
+for any Cretan discoveries.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 476px;">
+<a name="plate_VIII">
+<img src="images/plate_VIII.jpg" width="476" height="815"
+alt="Plate VIII"></a>
+<p>A MAGAZINE WITH JARS AND KASELLES, KNOSSOS
+(<i>p</i>. <a href="#page_69">69</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+Kaloch&aelig;rinos made some slight excavations, and found a few
+great jars or <i>pithai</i>, and some fragments of Mycen&aelig;an
+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 Ph&oelig;nicians
+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 Dict&aelig;an 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, <a name="page_65"><span class="page">Page
+65</span></a> 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
+&AElig;gean civilization.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;a
+palace which, even at this early stage in its disclosure, was already
+far larger than those of Tiryns and Mycen&aelig;. On the eastern
+slope of the hill, in a deposit of pale <a name="page_66"><span
+class="page">Page 66</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycen&aelig;an and Minoan art&mdash;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 <a
+name="page_67"><span class="page">Page 67</span></a> with a silver
+base. At the southern angle of the building, this corridor&mdash;the
+'Corridor of the Procession'&mdash;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 Mycen&aelig;.
+This was the fresco-painting, preserved almost perfectly in its
+upper part, of a youth bearing a gold-mounted silver cup
+(<a href="#plate_VI">Plate VI.</a>). 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+'The colours,' says Dr. Evans in teat brilliant article in the
+<i>Monthly Review</i> 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 Mycen&aelig;an
+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 Mycen&aelig;an 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 <a name="page_68"><span class="page">Page
+68</span></a> 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"; "&phi;&alpha;&nu;&tau;&alpha;&zeta;&epsilon;&iota," he said,
+in summing up his experiences next morning, "the whole place
+spooks!"'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Monthly Review</i>, March, 1901, pp. 124, 125.]
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 408px;">
+<a name="plate_IX">
+<img src="images/plate_IX_1.jpg" width="397" height="458"
+alt="Plate IX 1"></a>
+<p>MAGAZINE WITH JARS AND KASELLES</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_IX_2.jpg" width="408" height="456"
+alt="Plate IX 2"></p>
+<p>GREAT JAR WITH TRICKLE ORNAMENT</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 (<a href="#plate_VII">Plate VII.</a>),
+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 <a name="page_69"><span class="page">Page 69</span></a>
+of huge earthenware jars, or <i>pithoi</i>, sufficiently large to
+have held the Forty Thieves, or to have accommodated the soldiers
+of Tahuti in their venture on Joppa (<a href="#plate_VIII">Plates
+VIII.</a> and <a href="#plate_IX">IX.</a>). 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 (<a href="#plate_X">Plate X. 2</a>). Down the
+centre line of each magazine ran a row of small square openings in
+the floor&mdash;'kaselles,' as they came to be called&mdash;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 <a name="page_70"><span class="page">Page 70</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+(<a href="#plate_XI">Plate XI.</a>). 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&mdash;a word found also in the title of the Carian Zeus, Zeus
+of Labraunda. But tradition linked the names of <a name="page_71"><span
+class="page">Page 71</span></a> Minos and Knossos with a great and
+wonderful structure of D&aelig;dalus 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 D&aelig;dalus
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, p. 131.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_72"><span class="page">Page 72</span></a> 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&mdash;a feature
+borrowed perhaps from an Egyptian palace&mdash;approached by a
+descending flight of steps, and originally surmounted by cypress-wood
+columns, supporting a kind of <i>impluvium</i>. Here truly was the
+council chamber of a Mycen&aelig;an 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 (<a href="#plate_I">Plate I.</a>).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Monthly Review</i>, March, 1901, pp. 123, 124.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The Throne Room still preserved among its d&eacute;bris 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, <a name="page_73"><span class="page">Page 73</span></a>
+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&mdash;the
+figure of a Little Boy Blue&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_74"><span class="page">Page 74</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Monthly Review</i>, March, 1901, p. 126.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_75"><span class="page">Page 75</span></a> room
+and sally-port&mdash;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 (<a href="#plate_XII">Plate XII. 2</a>). How was it that so great
+and rich a structure came to be left thus practically defenceless? The
+mainland palaces of the Mycen&aelig;an Age at Tiryns and Mycen&aelig;
+are, so to speak, buried in fortifications. Their vast walls, 57 feet
+thick in some parts at Tiryns, 46 feet at Mycen&aelig;, towering still
+after so many centuries of ruin to a height of 24&frac12; 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&mdash;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 Mycen&aelig;, 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 <a name="page_76"><span
+class="page">Page 76</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 391px;">
+<p><a name="plate_X">
+<img src="images/plate_X_1.jpg" width="391" height="496"
+alt="Plate X 1"></a></p>
+<p>PART OF DOLPHIN FRESCO</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_X_2.jpg" width="360" height="498"
+alt="Plate X 2"></p>
+<p>A GREAT JAR, KNOSSOS</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+'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&mdash;the first Sea-Kings known
+to history, over-lords of the &AElig;gean 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 &AElig;gean. 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 name="page_77"><span class="page">Page 77</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycen&aelig;an 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 <a name="page_78"><span
+class="page">Page 78</span></a> the relief are of exceptionally
+hard plaster, answering to the Italian <i>gesso duro</i>.... Such
+as it is, this painted relief is the most magnificent monument of
+Mycen&aelig;an 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.'[*] <a href="#plate_XIII">Plate
+XIII.</a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Annual of the British School at Athens</i>, vol.
+vi., p. 52.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_79"><span class="page">Page 79</span></a>
+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 formul&aelig; 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 <a name="page_80"><span class="page">Page
+80</span></a> animals. But&mdash;as if this precaution was not in
+itself considered sufficient&mdash;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 Mycen&aelig;an script as that inscribed on the tablets
+themselves.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Monthly Review</i>, March, 1901, pp. 129, 130.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+(<a href="#plate_XIV">Plate XIV.</a>).
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 513px;">
+<a name="plate_XI">
+<img src="images/plate_XI.jpg" width="513" height="815"
+alt="Plate XI"></a>
+<p>PILLAR OF THE DOUBLE AXES (<i>p</i>.
+<a href="#page_70">70</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+Ph&oelig;nician, but to have had an ancestor of its own race; and the
+old Cretan tradition on <a name="page_81"><span class="page">Page
+81</span></a> 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
+Mycen&aelig;an 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 Ph&oelig;nician writing.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Monthly Review</i>, March, 1901, p. 130.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycen&aelig;an 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, <a name="page_82"><span class="page">Page
+82</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_83"><span class="page">Page 83</span></a>
+CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS' (<i>continued</i>)</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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. <a
+name="page_84"><span class="page">Page 84</span></a> 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 (<a href="#plate_XV">Plate XV. 1</a>). 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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_85"><span class="page">Page 85</span></a> 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 d&eacute;bris
+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 (<a href="#plate_XVI">Plate XVI. 1</a>).
+Far down below the level of the Central Court lay a fine Colonnaded
+Hall about 26 feet square, <a name="page_86"><span class="page">Page
+86</span></a> from which the great staircase, with pillars and
+balustrades, led to the upper quarter (<a href="#plate_XVII">Plate
+XVII. 2</a>), while adjoining it was a stately and finely-proportioned
+hall&mdash;the Hall of the Double Axes&mdash;about 80 feet in length
+by 26 feet in breadth, and divided transversely by a row of square-sided
+pillars (<a href="#plate_XVII">Plate XVII. 1</a>). 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&frac14; inches in height, while its girth
+was 6 feet 8&frac34; 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 <a name="page_87"><span class="page">Page
+87</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_88"><span class="page">Page
+88</span></a> 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&mdash;for so gorgeous
+a piece of workmanship can scarcely have been designed for anyone but
+a King&mdash;must have been as splendid in his amusements as in all
+the other appointments of his royalty (<a href="#plate_XVIII">Plate
+XVIII.</a>).
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+d&eacute;bris 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 <a name="page_89"><span class="page">Page 89</span></a>
+Minoan and Mycen&aelig;an 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_90"><span class="page">Page 90</span></a> That the
+sport of the bull-ring, and particularly this exciting and dangerous
+game of bull-grappling, or
+&tau;&alpha;&nu;&rho;&omicron;&kappa;&alpha;&theta;&alpha;&psi;&iota;&alpha;,
+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&mdash;painted upon walls, engraved upon gems, and stamped on
+seal impressions&mdash;which show that the Cretans and Mycen&aelig;ans
+were as fond of their bull-fights as a modern Spaniard of his.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Where did they get the toreadors, male and female, whose lives were
+to be devoted to such a terrible sport&mdash;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&mdash;an innocent figure to cover so grim a
+revelation&mdash;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 <a name="page_91"><span
+class="page">Page 91</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_92"><span class="page">Page 92</span></a> 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&mdash;zigzags, crosses, spirals, and concentric
+semicircles&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_93"><span class="page">Page 93</span></a>
+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.
+Gilli&eacute;ron, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;Khyan&mdash;'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 <a
+name="page_94"><span class="page">Page 94</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;, 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 <a
+name="page_95"><span class="page">Page 95</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;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&mdash;a fragment
+of which, in painted terra-cotta, was found in the portico of the
+adjoining hall.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_96"><span class="page">Page 96</span></a> treasury, of
+a deposit of ivory figurines of the most exquisite workmanship.
+The height of the best preserved specimen is about 11&frac12; 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 (<a href="#plate_XIX">Plate
+XIX.</a>).
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 427px;">
+<p><a name="plate_XII">
+<img src="images/plate_XII_1.jpg" width="364" height="529"
+ alt="Plate XII 1"></a></p>
+<p>MINOAN PAVED ROAD (<i>p</i>.
+ <a href="#page_110">110</a>)</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_XII_2.jpg" width="427" height="533"
+ alt="Plate XII 2"></p>
+<p>NORTH ENTRANCE, KNOSSOS (<i>p</i>.
+ <a href="#page_75">75</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+One of the season's finds was peculiarly useful and interesting, as
+having yielded a considerable mass of material for reconstructing
+the appearance <a name="page_97"><span class="page">Page 97</span></a>
+of a Minoan town. A great chest of cypress wood&mdash;in which
+perhaps some Knossian Nausicaa once kept her store of linen&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Most surprising of all, however, in many respects, <a
+name="page_98"><span class="page">Page 98</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&frac12; 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 <a name="page_99"><span
+class="page">Page 99</span></a> bear the pressure of the next pipe's
+stop-ridge, and gave an extra hold for the cement that bound the
+two pipes together'[*] (<a href="#plate_XX">Plate XX. 2</a>).
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: R. M. Burrows, 'The Discoveries in Crete,' p. 9.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 (<a href="#plate_XVI">Plates
+XVI. 2</a> and <a href="#plate_XX">XX. 1</a>).
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_100"><span class="page">Page 100</span></a>
+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 Mycen&aelig;; and on the top
+of the beams doves were perched. Here is the evidence of a cult in
+which a Dove Goddess&mdash;a Goddess of the Air&mdash;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 <i>Labrys</i> 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.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: A. J. Evans, <i>Annual of the British School at Athens</i>,
+vol. viii., p. 103.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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. <a name="page_101"><span class="page">Page 101</span></a> (<a
+href="#plate_XXI">Plates XXI.</a> and <a href="#plate_XXII">XXII.</a>).
+Such an area had been found at Ph&aelig;stos 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 Ph&aelig;stos; 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 888px;">
+<a name="plate_XIII">
+<img src="images/plate_XIII.jpg" width="888" height="525"
+ alt="Plate XIII"></a>
+<p>RELIEF OF BULL'S HEAD (<i>p</i>.
+ <a href="#page_77">77</a>)</p>
+<p>From 'The Palace of Minos,' by Arthur J. Evans, in <i>The Monthly
+ Review</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_102"><span
+class="page">Page 102</span></a> majesty and its Court circle surveyed
+the games. There would be accommodation on the steps for some four
+or five hundred spectators.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_103"><span
+class="page">Page 103</span></a> 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&mdash;'the
+Choros (or dancing-ground) which D&aelig;dalus wrought in broad
+Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne' (Iliad XVIII., 590).
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_104"><span class="page">Page
+104</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_105"><span
+class="page">Page 105</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 fa&iuml;ence, 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
+fa&iuml;ence; 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 fa&iuml;ence being taken by gold-foil
+and crystal plaques.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Some of the small fa&iuml;ence reliefs are of particularly <a
+name="page_106"><span class="page">Page 106</span></a> 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&frac12; 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 <i>panier</i>
+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.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_107"><span class="page">Page 107</span></a> There
+can be little doubt that these tiny figures point to the worship
+of an earth goddess, whose emblem is the snake&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_108"><span
+class="page">Page 108</span></a> 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 (<a href="#plate_XXIII">Plate XXIII.</a>).
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 608px;">
+<a name="plate_XIV">
+<img src="images/plate_XIV.jpg" width="608" height="784"
+ alt="Plate XIV"></a>
+<p>CLAY TABLET WITH LINEAR SCRIPT, KNOSSOS (<i>pp</i>.
+ <a href="#page_80">80</a> &amp; <a href="#page_241">241</a>)</p>
+<p>From 'The Palace of Minos,' by Arthur J. Evans, in <i>The Monthly
+ Review</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 da&iuml;s,
+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 da&iuml;s,
+and here stand the broken fragments of a gypsum throne. A fine stone
+lamp of lilac gypsum stands on the second step of the da&iuml;s
+(<a href="#plate_XXIV">Plate XXIV.</a>). 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
+<a name="page_109"><span class="page">Page 109</span></a> gave
+his decisions,' says Professor Burrows, 'a direct ancestor of
+Pr&aelig;tor and Bishop, seated in the Apse within the Chancel,
+speaking to the people that stood below in Nave and Aisles?'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: 'The Discoveries in Crete,' pp. 10, 11.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 d&eacute;bris were found
+five magnificent bronze vessels&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_110"><span class="page">Page 110</span></a> 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 (<a href="#plate_XII">Plate XII. 1</a>). 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&frac12; feet wide, while
+on either side of this there extended to a breadth of more than
+3&frac12; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_111"><span
+class="page">Page 111</span></a> hill, which was covered by an olive
+wood, beneath whose roots lay a stratum made up of the remains of
+Gr&aelig;co-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
+<a name="page_112"><span class="page">Page 112</span></a> of a
+worship in which such natural idols as these were adored.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 417px;">
+<p><a name="plate_XV">
+<img src="images/plate_XV_1.jpg" width="421" height="392"
+ alt="Plate XV 1"></a></p>
+<p>(1) PALACE WALL, WEST SIDE. MOUNT JUKTAS IN BACKGROUND
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_84">84</a>)</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_XV_2.jpg" width="417" height="463"
+ alt="Plate XV 2"></p>
+<p>(2) BATHROOM, KNOSSOS</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_113"><span class="page">Page 113</span></a>
+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 Mycenc&aelig; dagger blades,
+one was still not prepared for the bull's head <i>rhyton</i> ... 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.[**]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: The <i>Times</i>, August 27, 1908.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote **: <i>Fortnightly Review</i>, October, 1908, pp. 600,
+601.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Within the palace proper, the work of 1907 witnessed the discovery
+of a huge beehive chamber excavated in the rock underlying the
+Southern Portico. <a name="page_114"><span class="page">Page
+114</span></a> It had been filled in with later d&eacute;bris 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_115"><span
+class="page">Page 115</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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, <a name="page_116"><span
+class="page">Page 116</span></a> 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"&mdash;a hope that failed.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: The <i>Times</i>, August 27, 1908.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Lempri&egrave;re's 'Classical Dictionary' or
+Rollin's 'Ancient History.'
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_117"><span class="page">Page 117</span></a>
+CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">PH&AElig;STOS, HAGIA TRIADA, AND EASTERN CRETE</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean
+civilization.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Both in the Iliad and the Odyssey Ph&aelig;stos is mentioned along
+with Knossos as one of the chief towns of Crete; and it is at and
+near Ph&aelig;stos 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 <a
+name="page_118"><span class="page">Page 118</span></a> three,
+overlooking the plain, stood the Palace of Ph&aelig;stos, 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 Arch&aelig;ological 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 Ph&aelig;stos, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_119"><span class="page">Page 119</span></a> This
+first palace of Ph&aelig;stos 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 Ph&aelig;stos overthrew their northern brethren of the
+greater palace, but the evidence seems somewhat scanty to bear
+such an inference.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+After the catastrophe at Ph&aelig;stos, 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 Ph&aelig;stos 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 <a name="page_120"><span
+class="page">Page 120</span></a> building, with a number of very
+fine Kamares vases (<a href="#plate_XXVI">Plate XXVI.</a>).
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+But the chief glory of the palace at Ph&aelig;stos 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 (<a href="#plate_XXVI">Plate XXVI.</a>). '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 Ph&aelig;stos are comparable for spaciousness even with
+the finest of those at Knossos, and, indeed, the Megaron, so called
+(wrongly), of Ph&aelig;stos is a more spacious apartment than the
+Hall of the Double Axes at the sister palace, the area of the
+Ph&aelig;stos 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Ph&aelig;stos 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 <a name="page_121"><span
+class="page">Page 121</span></a> 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 Ph&aelig;stos
+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 <a
+name="page_122"><span class="page">Page 122</span></a> 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.[**]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: A. J. Evans, 'Scripta Minoa,' p. 24.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote **: See Appendix, p. 264.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The hill of Hagia Triada, about two miles to the north-west of
+Ph&aelig;stos, proved sufficiently fruitful to compensate the Italian
+explorers for the incomprehensible barrenness of Ph&aelig;stos.
+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 arch&aelig;ological 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 Ph&aelig;stos 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 Ph&aelig;stos 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 Mycen&aelig; 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 <a name="page_123"><span class="page">Page 123</span></a> the
+wonderful dash of the Egyptian work in question this will seem a
+hard saying.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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, <a
+name="page_124"><span class="page">Page 124</span></a> 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&mdash;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 (<a href="#plate_XXVII">Plate
+XXVII.</a>) 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 <a name="page_125"><span class="page">Page
+125</span></a> the Cretans, but is quite normally developed, and he
+bears in his hand the <i>sistrum</i>, 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.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_126"><span class="page">Page
+126</span></a> 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.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_127"><span class="page">Page 127</span></a> 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 (<a href="#plate_XXVIII">Plate
+XXVIII.</a>). 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 <a name="page_128"><span class="page">Page 128</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 417px;">
+<a name="plate_XVI">
+<img src="images/plate_XVI_1.jpg" width="383" height="463"
+ alt="Plate XVI 1"></a>
+<p>A FLIGHT OF THE QUADRUPLE STAIRCASE
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_85">85</a>)</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_XVI_2.jpg" width="417" height="463"
+ alt="Plate XVI 2"></p>
+<p>WALL WITH DRAIN (<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_98">98</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;this is an Egyptian funeral with the
+mourners dressed in Cretan clothes. We have <a name="page_129"><span
+class="page">Page 129</span></a> 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. Ph&aelig;stos 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The excavations at Knossos, Ph&aelig;stos, 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 <a name="page_130"><span class="page">Page 130</span></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <i>temenos</i>, 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
+<a name="page_131"><span class="page">Page 131</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: 'Crete the Forerunner of Greece,' p. 98.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 fa&iuml;ence 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&mdash;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, <a
+name="page_132"><span class="page">Page 132</span></a> 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 &aelig;gis of the great sea-power of the
+House of Minos.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;'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'&mdash;as evidence of how utterly unlike was the costume
+of prehistoric woman in the &AElig;gean area to the stately and
+simple lines of the classic Greek dress.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Ph&oelig;nicians 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 <a name="page_133"><span class="page">Page 133</span></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 545px;">
+<p><a name="plate_XVII">
+<img src="images/plate_XVII_1.jpg" width="543" height="330"
+ alt="Plate XVII 1"></a></p>
+<p>(1) HALL OF THE DOUBLE AXES
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_86">86</a>)</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_XVII_2.jpg" width="545" height="403"
+ alt="Plate XVII 2"></p>
+<p>(2) GREAT STAIRCASE, KNOSSOS
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_86">86</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 (<a href="#plate_XIX">Plate
+XXIX. 2</a>).
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_134"><span class="page">Page
+134</span></a> 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&mdash;as beautifully wrought as the best
+Alexandrian fabrics of the beginning of our era&mdash;artificial
+leaves and flowers, and (the distant anticipation, surely, of the
+gold masks of the Mycen&aelig; graves) gold bands with engraved
+and <i>repouss&eacute;</i> eyes for the protective blinding of
+the dead.'[*][**]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: A. J. Evans, the <i>Times</i>, August 27, 1908.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[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.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_135"><span class="page">Page 135</span></a>
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycen&aelig;. 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, <a
+name="page_136"><span class="page">Page 136</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The Dict&aelig;an 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 Dict&aelig;an
+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 Dict&aelig;an 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_137"><span class="page">Page 137</span></a> 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 Mycen&aelig;an 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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Throughout all these explorations, covering a <a name="page_138"><span
+class="page">Page 138</span></a> considerable portion of the island,
+one common feature presents itself&mdash;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 Mycen&aelig; and Tiryns.
+Ph&aelig;stos 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 &AElig;gean.
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_139"><span class="page">Page 139</span></a>
+CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">CRETE AND EGYPT</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_140"><span class="page">Page 140</span></a> Empire.
+As it is, this has so far proved to be impossible by reason of the
+absence from the chain of the Babylonian link.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;the Second City, roughly contemporary
+with Early Minoan III.&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 811px;">
+<a name="plate_XVIII">
+<img src="images/plate_XVIII.jpg" width="811" height="469"
+ alt="Plate XVIII"></a>
+<p>THE KING'S GAMING-BOARD
+ (<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_87">87</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Up to the present time it cannot be said that any object unquestionably
+Mesopotamian has been found on any &AElig;gean site, nor any object
+unquestionably &AElig;gean on a Mesopotamian one. But it has been
+suggested that certain carved ivories found by Layard at Nimr&ucirc;d
+in the Palace of Sennacherib show manifest traces of &AElig;gean
+influence; and in Southern Syria, at all events&mdash;at Gezer,
+Tell-es-Safi, and elsewhere&mdash;indisputably &AElig;gean pottery
+<a name="page_141"><span class="page">Page 141</span></a> 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&mdash;the guardian lions of the goddess
+on the hill, the Double Axe, and the triple pillars with perching
+doves&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_142"><span
+class="page">Page 142</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;a period contemporaneous with Middle
+Minoan II. and III.&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_143"><span
+class="page">Page 143</span></a> '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 Sa&iuml;tes 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 &AElig;geans 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, <a name="page_144"><span class="page">Page
+144</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Arch&aelig;ology,
+vol. xxxi., part v., p. 222.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;the period of the Pyramid Builders (Third to Sixth
+Dynasty)&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 391px;">
+<p><a name="plate_XIX">
+<img src="images/plate_XIX_1.jpg" width="391" height="535"
+ alt="Plate XIX 1"></a></p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_XIX_2.jpg" width="383" height="539"
+ alt="Plate XIX 2"></p>
+<p>IVORY FIGURES AND HEADS FROM KNOSSOS (<i>p</i>.
+<a href="#page_76">76</a>)</p>
+<p>From 'Annual of the British School of Athens,' by permission</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_145"><span class="page">Page
+145</span></a> 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 <i>not</i> 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 <a name="page_146"><span class="page">Page
+146</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: 'Egypt and Western Asia,' p. 129.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote **: H. R. Hall, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical
+Arch&aelig;ology, vol. xxxi., part v., p. 227.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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, <a name="page_147"><span
+class="page">Page 147</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_148"><span
+class="page">Page 148</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_149"><span class="page">Page 149</span></a> 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&mdash;a
+reasonable supposition&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+Ph&aelig;stos 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 <a
+name="page_150"><span class="page">Page 150</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_151"><span class="page">Page
+151</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_152"><span class="page">Page
+152</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: Herodotus II. 148.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_153"><span class="page">Page
+153</span></a> 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&mdash;a period when,
+as we know from the other evidence, there was certainly active
+intercourse between the two nations.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_154"><span
+class="page">Page 154</span></a> 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
+<a name="page_155"><span class="page">Page 155</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Journal of Hellenic Studies</i>, 1905, part ii.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_156"><span class="page">Page 156</span></a> 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?
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 fa&iuml;ence 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 fa&iuml;ence
+of the time is of strictly conventional type, with black design
+on <a name="page_157"><span class="page">Page 157</span></a> blue;
+but the Cretan emancipated himself from these limits, and made his
+fa&iuml;ence reliefs in the polychrome style, which still persisted,
+though now no longer so prevalent as it had once been.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_158"><span class="page">Page 158</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_159"><span
+class="page">Page 159</span></a> products of commerce and art. Who,
+then, were the Keftiu? The word means the people or the country 'at
+the back of'&mdash;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'&mdash;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 Ph&oelig;nicians, 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
+Ph&oelig;nicians 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 Ph&oelig;nicians 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, <a
+name="page_160"><span class="page">Page 160</span></a> 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 <a name="page_161"><span
+class="page">Page 161</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 497px;">
+<p><a name="plate_XX">
+<img src="images/plate_XX_1.jpg" width="497" height="361"
+ alt="Plate XX 1"></a></p>
+<p>(1) MAIN DRAIN, KNOSSOS
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_98">98</a>)</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_XX_2.jpg" width="496" height="421"
+ alt="Plate XX 2"></p>
+<p>(2) TERRA-COTTA DRAIN PIPES
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_98">98</a>)
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;elderly, with a
+most forbidding visage, Roman nose, and nut-cracker jaws. Most of
+the others are very much alike&mdash;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.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: H. R. Hall, 'Egypt and Western Asia,' p. 362.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_162"><span
+class="page">Page 162</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+After the time of Tahutmes, the evidences of connection between the
+two lands grow scanty once more. The fact that the fa&iuml;ence 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. <a name="page_163"><span class="page">Page 163</span></a>
+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.&mdash;possibly twenty years
+before that event&mdash;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&mdash;a broken and dwindling race&mdash;were still trying
+to maintain a slowly failing tradition of art under the new masters,
+perhaps the Mycen&aelig;ans of the mainland, who, driven forth
+themselves by the pressure of Northern invaders, had crushed in
+their turn the gentler sister civilization of Crete.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The Mycen&aelig;an '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 <a name="page_164"><span class="page">Page
+164</span></a> 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 Ach&aelig;ans; but that is
+another story.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean 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 <a name="page_165"><span
+class="page">Page 165</span></a> 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 Ph&oelig;nicia, 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 809px;">
+<a name="plate_XXI">
+<img src="images/plate_XXI.jpg" width="809" height="476"
+ alt="Plate XXI"></a>
+<p>THEATRAL AREA, KNOSSOS: BEFORE RESTORATION
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_100">100</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_166"><span
+class="page">Page 166</span></a> are evidently the Danaoi, or Argives,
+the same race which, under Ach&aelig;an 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 <a name="page_167"><span class="page">Page
+167</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean. 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 <a name="page_168"><span class="page">Page
+168</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_169"><span class="page">Page 169</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_170"><span class="page">Page 170</span></a>
+CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">THE DESTROYERS</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_171"><span
+class="page">Page 171</span></a> the end of the preceding period
+was marked by a similar disaster.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+Ph&aelig;stos, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+From the beginning of Middle Minoan III. to the end of Late Minoan
+II.&mdash;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&mdash;the civilization of Crete apparently followed
+<a name="page_172"><span class="page">Page 172</span></a> a course
+of even and peaceful development. At Knossos, Ph&aelig;stos, 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 fa&iuml;ence
+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 Mycen&aelig; 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 <a name="page_173"><span
+class="page">Page 173</span></a> to the date of this last development
+of Minoan greatness.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 775px;">
+<a name="plate_XXII">
+<img src="images/plate_XXII.jpg" width="775" height="556"
+ alt="Plate XXII"></a>
+<p>THEATRAL AREA, KNOSSOS: RESTORED
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_100">100</a>)<br />
+<i>G. Maraghiannis</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 (<a href="#plate_XXIII">Plate
+XXIII.</a>), decorated the halls and courts, and were rivalled by
+huge stone amphor&aelig;, exquisitely carved. The King and his
+courtiers were served in costly vessels of gold, silver, and bronze
+<i>repouss&eacute;</i> work. The Empire of the Sea-Kings was at
+its apogee, and on every hand there were the evidences of security
+and luxury.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_174"><span class="page">Page 174</span></a>
+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.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' pp. 52, 53.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_175"><span
+class="page">Page 175</span></a> 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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The evidence from Ph&aelig;stos and Hagia Triada tallies with that from
+Knossos. Everywhere there <a name="page_176"><span class="page">Page
+176</span></a> 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
+Ph&aelig;stos and Hagia Triada, either by other forces of invaders,
+or by the same host sweeping round the island.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_177"><span class="page">Page 177</span></a> stately
+rooms and those of its dependencies by rude walls into poor
+dwelling-houses, where they lived on&mdash;a very different life
+from that of the golden days before the sack.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 563px;">
+<a name="plate_XXIII">
+<img src="images/plate_XXIII.jpg" width="563" height="709"
+ alt="Plate XXIII"></a>
+<p>GREAT JAR WITH PAPYRUS RELIEFS
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_206">206</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gospotami, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Annual of the British School at Athens</i>, vol.
+xiii., p. 426.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote **: R. M. Burrows, 'The Discoveries in Crete,' p. 100.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_178"><span class="page">Page 178</span></a> The long
+decay was to some extent arrested by the coming of other waves
+of invaders, probably Ach&aelig;ans, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_179"><span
+class="page">Page 179</span></a> 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&mdash;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
+Mycen&aelig;an 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+'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&mdash;the dark passages, the lifelike figures <a
+name="page_180"><span class="page">Page 180</span></a> 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.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Monthly Review</i>, March, 1901, pp. 131, 132.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Pr&aelig;sos, 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 Pr&aelig;sos 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 <a name="page_181"><span class="page">Page
+181</span></a> process which finally resulted in the island of
+Crete becoming 'the mixed land,' with a heterogeneous population
+of Pelasgians, Dorians, Ach&aelig;ans, 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 Ph&aelig;stos were overthrown, there was
+nothing to hinder the gradual drifting in of the wandering tribes
+of the &AElig;gean and of the North.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_182"><span class="page">Page 182</span></a>
+themselves, who had occupied the lands of the Mycen&aelig;an
+civilization.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+We know that long before the Homeric poems took shape the Ach&aelig;ans
+had established themselves as the ruling caste in the Argolid,
+in Laconia, and elsewhere; and that the pressure had begun even
+while Mycen&aelig; was at the height of its power is suggested
+by the figures on one of the steles of the Circle-Graves, where a
+Mycen&aelig;an chieftain in his chariot is pursuing an enemy whose
+leaf-shaped sword shows that he was one of the Danubian race. The
+Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;. The Mycen&aelig;an stele, where the chief
+of the ancient stock pursues his Northern assailant, has its
+<i>motif</i> 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 Mycen&aelig;an, 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
+Mycen&aelig;.' Pressed upon thus by the warlike Ach&aelig;ans,
+perhaps already forced from their homes on the mainland, the
+Mycen&aelig;ans of Tiryns and Mycen&aelig; 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 <a
+name="page_183"><span class="page">Page 183</span></a> 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.[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Cf</i>. Dr. Mackenzie, <i>Annual of the British
+School at Athens</i>, vol. xiii., pp. 424, 425.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+Ach&aelig;ans, and, later still, the Dorians, followed in the wake
+of the Mycen&aelig;an 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 Id&aelig;an Cave, the latest of
+which come down probably to <a name="page_184"><span class="page">Page
+184</span></a> 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.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Fortnightly Review</i>, October, 1908, p. 602.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean, 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; <a name="page_185"><span class="page">Page 185</span></a>
+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 &AElig;gean 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' p. 59.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The Mycen&aelig;an pottery found at Tell-el-Amarna shows that there
+was still an opening in Egypt for the products of &AElig;gean art
+at least as late as the reign of Akhenaten; and it is more than
+probable that in Egypt many of the <i>&eacute;migr&eacute;s</i>
+of the Minoan <i>d&eacute;b&acirc;cle</i> 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 <a name="page_186"><span
+class="page">Page 186</span></a> 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 <i>&eacute;migr&eacute;s</i>,
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: R. M. Burrows, 'The Discoveries in Crete,' p. 96.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;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, <a name="page_187"><span class="page">Page
+187</span></a> the priest-King of Upper Egypt (<i>circa</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean.
+The ring of Minos was destined to lie for long ages beneath the
+waves before the descendants of Theseus brought it up again.
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_188"><span class="page">Page 188</span></a>
+CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">THE PERIODS OF MINOAN CULTURE</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_189"><span class="page">Page
+189</span></a> when Neolithic man began his first settlement on
+the hill of Knossos.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Neolithic Age</i>.&mdash;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 <a name="page_190"><span class="page">Page 190</span></a>
+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&mdash;Early, Middle,
+and Late Minoan&mdash;each in its turn subdivided into three
+sub-periods.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Early Minoan I</i>.&mdash;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 <a
+name="page_191"><span class="page">Page 191</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Early Minoan II</i>.&mdash;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; <a
+name="page_192"><span class="page">Page 192</span></a> but the
+vases now develop long spouts or beaks, and are the 'beak-jugs'
+(Schnabelkanne) of the German arch&aelig;ologists. 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 419px;">
+<p><a name="plate_XXIV">
+<img src="images/plate_XXIV_1.jpg" width="419" height="420"
+ alt="Plate XXIV 1"></a></p>
+<p>THE BASILICA.</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_XXIV_2.jpg" width="384" height="421"
+ alt="Plate XXIV 2"></p>
+<p>STONE LAMP.</p>
+<p>THE ROYAL VILLA, KNOSSOS
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_108">108</a>)</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Early Minoan III</i>.&mdash;In this period the proportion of
+painted vases steadily increases, though for a time there is also
+a revival of the incised ornament, <a name="page_193"><span
+class="page">Page 193</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_194"><span class="page">Page
+194</span></a> 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
+&AElig;gean.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: 'The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age,' p. 9.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote **: Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Arch&aelig;ology,
+vol. xxxi., part 5, pp. 221, 222.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote ***: 'Scripta Minoa,' p. 126.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Middle Minoan I</i>.&mdash;With this period we have distinct
+advance in more directions than one. The Minoan artist is beginning
+to feel his way towards <a name="page_195"><span class="page">Page
+195</span></a> 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&mdash;the
+use of relief to enhance the effect of the polychrome decoration
+through the addition of contrasts of light and shade&mdash;is seen
+coming into use in the earliest part of the period.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Decoration is still geometric, and was to continue so for long.
+Not until Middle Minoan III. do we <a name="page_196"><span
+class="page">Page 196</span></a> 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, <a name="page_197"><span
+class="page">Page 197</span></a> almost as though it had been a
+humorous afterthought of the potter.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Journal of Hellenic Studies</i>, vol. xxvi., part
+I, plate ix. 3.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 500px;">
+<p><a name="plate_XXV">
+<img src="images/plate_XXV_1.jpg" width="500" height="332"
+ alt="Plate XXV 1"></a></p>
+<p>(1) KNOSSOS VALLEY</p>
+<p><img src="images/plate_XXV_2.jpg" width="500" height="458"
+ alt="Plate XXV 2"></p>
+<p>(2) EXCAVATING AT KNOSSOS</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Middle Minoan II</i>.&mdash;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 Ph&aelig;stos. 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 <a
+name="page_198"><span class="page">Page 198</span></a> 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
+(<a href="#plate_XXIX">Plate XXIX. 4</a>). 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 <a name="page_199"><span
+class="page">Page 199</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_200"><span class="page">Page 200</span></a> was burned;
+and, as already mentioned, the fact that Ph&aelig;stos shows no
+evidence of such a disaster at this point has roused the suspicion
+that the Lords of Ph&aelig;stos may have been responsible for the
+destruction of the greater palace.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Middle Minoan III</i>.&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_201"><span class="page">Page 201</span></a> 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.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Journal of Hellenic Studies</i>, vol. Xxvi., part
+I, pp. 257, 258.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_202"><span class="page">Page 202</span></a> is second
+to that of other artistic products. It is to Middle Minoan III. that
+there belongs the wonderful fabric of fa&iuml;ence, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <i>pithoi</i>, 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 <a name="page_203"><span class="page">Page
+203</span></a> called beautiful (<a href="#plate_IX">Plate IX.
+2</a>). '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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Late Minoan I</i>.&mdash;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 <a
+name="page_204"><span class="page">Page 204</span></a> 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.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: R. C. Bosanquet, <i>Journal of Hellenic Studies</i>,
+vol. xxiv., part 2, p. 322.]
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 778px;">
+<a name="plate_XXVI">
+<img src="images/plate_XXVI.jpg" width="778" height="563"
+ alt="Plate XXVI"></a>
+<p>GREAT STAIRCASE, PH&AElig;STOS
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_120">120</a>)<br />
+<i>G. Maraghiannis</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Along with the marine designs went naturalistic representations of
+flowers and grasses&mdash;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 (<a
+href="#plate_XXIX">Plate XXIX. 2</a>). 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 <a name="page_205"><span
+class="page">Page 205</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+At Hagia Triada and Gournia the older forms of vase are mingled with
+early specimens of the type variously known as 'B&uuml;gelkanne,'
+'Vases &agrave; &Eacute;trier,' 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
+Mycen&aelig;an 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 Mycen&aelig;, so that
+now for the first time Minoan can be equated with Mycen&aelig;an. 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Late Minoan II</i>.&mdash;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
+<a name="page_206"><span class="page">Page 206</span></a> were
+built the Throne Room and its antechamber, and the Royal Villa
+with its da&iuml;s 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 <i>pithoi</i>, such as
+the beautiful papyrus relief vase of the Royal Villa, nearly 4
+feet in height (<a href="#plate_XXIII">Plate XXIII.</a>; see also
+<a href="#plate_XXX">Plate XXX.</a>). 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_207"><span class="page">Page 207</span></a>
+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 <i>inside</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: D. G. Hogarth, <i>Cornhill Magazine</i>, March, 1903,
+p. 329.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The linear script, Class B, now supersedes the earlier type, Class
+A.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_208"><span
+class="page">Page 208</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 783px;">
+<a name="plate_XXVII">
+<img src="images/plate_XXVII.jpg" width="783" height="572"
+ alt="Plate XXVII"></a>
+<p>THE HARVESTER VASE, HAGIA TRIADA
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_124">124</a>)<br />
+<i>G. Maraghiannis</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Late Minoan III</i>.&mdash;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. <a name="page_209"><span class="page">Page 209</span></a>
+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 Mycen&aelig;ans 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&mdash;in fact, it is that of what is
+considered the best Mycen&aelig;an art&mdash;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 Mycen&aelig;an art. At Ialysos in Rhodes,
+and in the lower town of Mycen&aelig;, 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 <a name="page_210"><span class="page">Page
+210</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_211"><span class="page">Page 211</span></a>
+CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">LIFE UNDER THE SEA-KINGS</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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. <a name="page_212"><span
+class="page">Page 212</span></a> 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&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_213"><span class="page">Page 213</span></a>
+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 (<a href="#plate_XXVIII">Plate
+XXVIII.</a>), 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_214"><span class="page">Page
+214</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_215"><span class="page">Page 215</span></a> 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 fa&iuml;ence among the belongings of the Snake Goddess found
+in the Temple Repositories. In some cases&mdash;<i>e.g.</i>, that
+of the votaress of the Snake Goddess&mdash;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 Mycen&aelig;, 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 <a name="page_216"><span class="page">Page
+216</span></a> is astonishingly fine (<a href="#plate_XXXII">Plate
+XXXII.</a>). 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 fa&iuml;ence
+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 <a name="page_217"><span
+class="page">Page 217</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 fa&iuml;ence 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 <a
+name="page_218"><span class="page">Page 218</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_219"><span
+class="page">Page 219</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_220"><span class="page">Page
+220</span></a> 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
+<a name="page_221"><span class="page">Page 221</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_222"><span class="page">Page 222</span></a> Knossos a
+carefully hewn tomb held, along with the body of the dead artificer,
+specimens of the tools of his trade&mdash;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 Ph&oelig;nicians
+dreamed of Tyrian purple. Minoan pottery was manifestly also an
+article of export&mdash;a fragile cargo <a name="page_223"><span
+class="page">Page 223</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: C. H. and H. Hawes, 'Crete the Forerunner of Greece,'
+p. 37.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 &AElig;gean 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 <a name="page_224"><span
+class="page">Page 224</span></a> 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 alg&aelig;, occur continually, and
+are utilized with great skill, while such pictures as the Dolphin
+Fresco (<a href="#plate_X">Plate X. 1</a>) 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 811px;">
+<a name="plate_XXVIII">
+<img src="images/plate_XXVIII.jpg" width="811" height="519"
+ alt="Plate XXVIII"></a>
+<p>SARCOPHAGUS FROM HAGIA TRIADA
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_127">127</a>)<br />
+<i>G. Maraghiannis</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_225"><span class="page">Page 225</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_226"><span
+class="page">Page 226</span></a> 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 Mycen&aelig; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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. <a name="page_227"><span class="page">Page
+227</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_228"><span class="page">Page 228</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_229"><span class="page">Page 229</span></a>
+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 Ph&aelig;stos (<a
+href="#plate_XXXII">Plate XXXII.</a>), 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 &AElig;gean 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&mdash;'electrum,'
+of which the Egyptians were so fond&mdash;was used by the Minoans.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 743px;">
+<a name="plate_XXIX">
+<img src="images/plate_XXIX.jpg" width="743" height="542"
+ alt="Plate XXIX"></a>
+<p>MINOAN POTTERY (<i>pp</i>&nbsp;<a href="#page_198">198</a>
+&amp; <a href="#page_204">204</a>)</p>
+<p>Reproduced from <i>The Journal of Hellenic Studies</i>, by
+permission of the Council of the Hellenic Society</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Of the social life of the people in these prehistoric times we know
+practically nothing. Only one inference, <a name="page_230"><span
+class="page">Page 230</span></a> 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 Ph&aelig;stos 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: Mosso, 'The Palaces of Crete,' p. 163.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_231"><span class="page">Page 231</span></a> 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
+Mycen&aelig;an 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.
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_232"><span class="page">Page 232</span></a>
+CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">LETTERS AND RELIGION</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_233"><span class="page">Page 233</span></a> 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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Mycen&aelig;, and <a name="page_234"><span class="page">Page
+234</span></a> 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&mdash;tablets, labels, and other articles-inscribed
+with the various Cretan scripts can be counted by thousands.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: Perrot et Chipiez, 'La Gr&egrave;ce primitive: l'Art
+myc&eacute;nien,' p. 985.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_235"><span class="page">Page 235</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;larger, indeed, than the representation
+of Class A at Knossos&mdash;belong <a name="page_236"><span
+class="page">Page 236</span></a> 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 Ph&aelig;stos 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
+&AElig;gean area. The inscription on the libation table found by
+Dr. Evans at the Dict&aelig;an Cave belongs to this class, and also
+that upon the similar object found by Mr. Currelly at Palaikastro.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 545px;">
+<a name="plate_XXX">
+<img src="images/plate_XXX.jpg" width="545" height="805"
+ alt="Plate XXX"></a>
+<p>LATE MINOAN VASE FROM MYCEN&AElig;
+(<i>p</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_206">206</a>)</p>
+<p>Reproduced from <i>The Journal of Hellenic Studies</i>, by
+permission of the Council of the Hellenic Society</p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_237"><span class="page">Page
+237</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The records of Class B give evidence of a <a name="page_238"><span
+class="page">Page 238</span></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 <i>espacement</i> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' pp. 39, 40.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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. <a name="page_239"><span class="page">Page
+239</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;a
+certain <a name="page_240"><span class="page">Page 240</span></a>
+Aristides&mdash;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&mdash;"the
+Unjust"&mdash;was thus condemned to three months' imprisonment.'
+Few criminals attain to the dignity of being convicted on evidence
+3,500 years old.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+<a name="page_241"><span class="page">Page 241</span></a> in <a
+href="#plate_XIV">Plate XIV</a>. 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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 545px;">
+<a name="plate_XXXI">
+<img src="images/plate_XXXI.jpg" width="545" height="743"
+ alt="Plate XXXI"></a>
+<p>KAMARES VASES FROM PH&AElig;STOS AND HAGIA TRIADA
+(<i>pp</i>.&nbsp;<a href="#page_120">120</a> &amp;
+<a href="#page_197">197</a>)<br />
+<i>G. Maraghiannis</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;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 arch&aelig;ologist.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Into quite a different category from any of the ordinary Minoan
+tablets comes the disc found at Ph&aelig;stos in 1908. Its general
+character has been <a name="page_242"><span class="page">Page
+242</span></a> 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&mdash;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.[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: See Appendix, p. 264.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_243"><span class="page">Page 243</span></a> 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 Ph&oelig;nicians
+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 Ph&oelig;nician mind, if not original,
+was at all events practical. The great stumbling-block in the way of
+the ancient scripts was their complexity&mdash;a fault which the
+Minoan users of the Linear Script, Class B, had evidently already
+begun to recognize and endeavour to amend. What the Ph&oelig;nicians
+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 Ph&oelig;nician 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,
+Ph&aelig;stos, and Hagia Triada are the lineal ancestors of all
+the written literature of Europe.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_244"><span class="page">Page 244</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;a
+Nature Goddess, a Great Mother&mdash; &pi;&omicron;&tau;&nu;&iota;&alpha;
+&theta;&eta;&rho;&omega;&nu;, the Lady of the Wild Creatures&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The functions of this great deity, it has been aptly pointed out,
+are substantially those claimed for herself <a name="page_245"><span
+class="page">Page 245</span></a> by Artemis in Browning's poem,
+'Artemis Prologizes':
+</p>
+
+<p class="bquote">
+'Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;I shed in hell o'er my pale people peace;<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;On earth, I, caring for the creatures, guard<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And every feathered mother's callow brood,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;And all that love green haunts and loneliness.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 fa&iuml;ence 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_246"><span class="page">Page
+246</span></a> 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 Mycen&aelig;, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_247"><span
+class="page">Page 247</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 Ach&aelig;ans
+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, <a name="page_248"><span
+class="page">Page 248</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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. <a
+name="page_249"><span class="page">Page 249</span></a> 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.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Annual of the British School at Athens</i>, vol.
+xiv., p. 366.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <i>kuanos</i>. Over this rises the open chamber of
+the shrine, which contains nothing but two pillars of the familiar
+Minoan-Mycen&aelig;an type, tapering downwards from the capitals.
+These rise from between the sacred horns, which occur in practically
+every religious scene as emblems of consecration (<i>cf.</i> 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 <a name="page_250"><span
+class="page">Page 250</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 (<a
+href="#plate_XXVIII">Plate XXVIII.</a>), 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 <a
+name="page_251"><span class="page">Page 251</span></a> receptacles
+of the Dict&aelig;an 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 r&ocirc;les. 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 Mycen&aelig; 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_252"><span
+class="page">Page 252</span></a> 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 Ph&aelig;stos
+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
+(&iota;&epsilon;&rho;&omicron;&sigmaf; &gamma;&alpha;&mu;&omicron;&sigmaf;)
+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, <a name="page_253"><span
+class="page">Page 253</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: <i>Annual of the British School at Athens</i>, xiv.,
+p. 366. The suggestion is also made by Mosso, 'The Palaces of Crete,'
+pp. 64-66.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote **: 'Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,' pp.
+482, 483.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a
+name="page_254"><span class="page">Page 254</span></a> 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 Dict&aelig;an 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: 'The Rise of the Greek Epic,' pp. 127, 128.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_255"><span class="page">Page
+255</span></a> 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: 'Researches in Sinai,' pp. 181-185.]
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_256"><span
+class="page">Page 256</span></a> 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 &AElig;gean from the once-omnipotent
+Minoans to the Ach&aelig;ans 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&mdash;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.
+</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 779px;">
+<a name="plate_XXXII">
+<img src="images/plate_XXXII.jpg" width="779" height="561"
+ alt="Plate XXXII"></a>
+<p>GOLDSMITHS' WORK FROM BEEHIVE TOMBS, PH&AElig;STOS
+(<i>p</i>. <a href="#page_216">216</a>)<br />
+<i>G. Maraghiannis</i></p>
+</div>
+
+<p class="indent">
+The recollections of the fallen power that survived <a
+name="page_257"><span class="page">Page 257</span></a> in the Greek
+mind were chiefly those connected with the oppressive aspect of the
+dominion which the Lord of Knossos exercised over the &AElig;gean
+area; but in Egypt there lingered for centuries a tradition which did
+more justice to the glories of Minoan Crete. In the Tim&aelig;us,
+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 Tim&aelig;us 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&mdash;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 <a name="page_258"><span class="page">Page
+258</span></a> most, and which gave rise to the legend of the
+Minotaur.'[*]
+</p>
+
+<p class="footnote">
+[Footnote *: 'The Lost Continent,' <i>Times</i>, February 19, 1909.
+The anonymous writer was the first to identify Crete with the 'Lost
+Atlantis.']
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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&mdash;'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'&mdash;there can be
+little doubt that the two descriptions refer to the same island.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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 <a name="page_259"><span class="page">Page
+259</span></a> 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 Ph&oelig;nician 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_260"><span class="page">Page 260</span></a>
+CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY</h2>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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.
+</p>
+
+<table border="0">
+ <tr>
+  <td colspan="2" class="center">CRETE.</td>
+  <td class="center" style="width: 33%;">EGYPT (BERLIN).</td>
+  <td class="center" style="width: 33%;">EGYPT (PETRIE).</td></tr>
+ <tr><td class="center">B.C.</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" class="right">10000-3000,</td>
+     <td valign="top">Neolithic Age.</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" class="right"><i>c.</i>&nbsp;3000-2600,</td>
+     <td valign="top">Early Minoan I.</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasties I.-V., 3400-2625 B.C.</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasties I.-V., 5510-4206 B.C.</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" class="right"><i>c.</i>&nbsp;2600-2400</td>
+     <td valign="top"> &nbsp; &nbsp; " &nbsp; &nbsp; " &nbsp; II.</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty VI., 2625-2475 &nbsp; "</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty VI., 4206-4003 &nbsp; "</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" class="right"><i>c.</i>&nbsp;2400-2200</td>
+     <td valign="top"> &nbsp; &nbsp; " &nbsp; &nbsp; " &nbsp; III.</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasties VII.-X., 2475-2160 &nbsp; "</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasties VII.-X., 4003-3502 &nbsp; "</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" class="right"><i>c.</i>&nbsp;2200-2000,</td>
+     <td valign="top">Middle Minoan I. (earlier palaces at Knossos
+       and Ph&aelig;stos).</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XI., 2160-2000 &nbsp; "</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XI., 3502-3459 &nbsp; "</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" class="right"><i>c.</i>&nbsp;2000-1850,</td>
+     <td valign="top">Middle Minoan II. (pottery of Kamares Cave;
+       at end of period destruction of Knossos).</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XII., 2000-1788 &nbsp; "</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XII., 3459-3246 &nbsp; "</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" rowspan="2" class="right">
+      <i>c.</i>&nbsp;1850-1600,</td>
+     <td valign="top" rowspan="2">Middle Minoan III. (Later Palace
+       Knossos; first Villa Hagia Triada; early in period, statuette
+       of Sebek-user; late, Alabastron of Khyan).</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasties XIII.-XVII., 1788-1580 B.C.</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasties XIII.-XVII., 3246-1580 B.C.</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">
+       (Period of confusion and of Hyksos domination.)
+       <a name="page_261"><span class="page">Page
+       261</span></a></td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" class="right">1600-1500,</td>
+     <td valign="top">Late Minoan I. (Later Palace Ph&aelig;stos
+       begun).</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" rowspan="2" class="right">1500-1400,</td>
+     <td valign="top" rowspan="2">Late Minoan II. (Later Palace Knossos
+       completed; <i>c.</i> 1400, fall of Knossos).</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XVIII., 1580-1350 B.C.</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XVIII., 1580-1322 B.C.</td></tr>
+ <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align: center;">
+       (Keftiu on walls of tombs of Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra.)</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" class="right">1400&mdash;&mdash;</td>
+     <td valign="top">Late Minoan III. (period of partial
+       reoccupation and decline).</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XIX., 1350-1205 B.C.</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XIX., 1322-1202 B.C.</td></tr>
+ <tr><td valign="top" class="right"><i>c.</i>&nbsp;1200&nbsp;(?)</td>
+     <td valign="top">Homeric Age.</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XX., 1200-1090 &nbsp; "</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XX., 1202-1102 &nbsp; "</td></tr>
+ <tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
+     <td colspan="2" valign="top" style="text-align: center;">
+       (Cretan tribes mentioned and portrayed by Ramses III.,
+       Medinet Habu.)</td></tr>
+ <tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XXI., 1090-945 B.C.</td>
+     <td valign="top">Dynasty XXI., 1102-952 B.C.</td></tr>
+ <tr><td colspan="2">&nbsp;</td>
+     <td colspan="2" valign="top" style="text-align: center;">
+       (Zakru pirates mentioned by Wen-Amon, Golenischeff
+       Papyrus.)</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h2><a name="page_262"><span class="page">Page 262</span></a>
+BIBLIOGRAPHY</h2>
+
+<p class="indent">
+In the following short list will be found the volumes on the Minoan
+and Mycen&aelig;an civilizations which are most accessible to the
+ordinary reader:
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Annual of the British School at Athens</i>, vols. vi.- . (Reports
+of excavations by Evans, Hogarth, and others, and many articles
+of interest on the results of discovery. Well illustrated.)
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Journal of Hellenic Studies</i>, vols. xx.- . (Articles by Evans,
+Hall, Mackenzie, Rouse, and others. Admirable illustrations.)
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+BROWNE, H.: <i>Homeric Study</i>. (Relations of Homeric and Minoan
+civilizations).
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+BURROWS, R. M.: <i>The Discoveries in Crete</i>. (An able discussion
+of the results of excavations).
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+EVANS, A. J.: <i>Cretan Pictograms and Pre-Ph&oelig;nician Script.</i>
+(Dr. Evans's earlier volume on the Minoan writing.) <i>Essai de
+Classification des &Eacute;poques de la Civilisation Minoenne.</i>
+(Short summary of the Minoan periods.) <i>Myc&oelig;nean Tree and Pillar
+Cult</i>. (Reprint from <i>Journal of Hellenic Studies</i>, vol.
+xxi.) <i>Prehistoric Tombs of Knossos</i>. (Isopata, etc.). <i>Scripta
+Minoa</i>. (Latest and fullest discussion of Minoan script.) Articles
+in the <i>Times</i> newspaper and the <i>Monthly Review</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+HALL, E. H.: <i>The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+HALL, H. R.: <i>Egypt and Western Asia</i>. (Relations of Crete
+and Egypt.) <i>The Oldest Civilization of Greece</i>. (Deals with
+Mycen&aelig;an discoveries up to 1901.) Various articles in the
+Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Arch&aelig;ology, the <i>Journal
+of Hellenic Studies</i>, etc.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+HARRISON, J. E.: <i>Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion.
+The Religion of Ancient Greece</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<a name="page_263"><span class="page">Page 263</span></a> HAWES,
+C. H. and H.: <i>Crete the Forerunner of Greece</i>. (Concise and
+interesting manual.)
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+HAWES, H. B.: <i>Gournia, Vasiliki, and other Prehistoric Sites
+on the Isthmus of Hierapetra, Crete</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+HOGARTH, D. G.: <i>Authority and Arch&oelig;ology</i>; (Contains summary
+of earlier Mycen&aelig;an discoveries.) <i>Ionia and the East</i>.
+(Relations of Oriental and early Greek civilizations.) Articles
+in <i>Cornhill Magazine</i> and <i>Fortnightly Review</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+LANG, A.: <i>Homer and his Age</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+MOSSO, A.: <i>The Palaces of Crete and their Builders</i>. (Chiefly
+useful for its numerous illustrations.)
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+MURRAY, G.: <i>The Rise of the Greek Epic</i>. (Exceedingly vivid
+and suggestive.)
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+RIDGEWAY, W.: <i>The Early Age of Greece</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+SCHUCHHARDT, C.: <i>Schliemann's Excavations</i>. (Useful summary
+of the work of Schliemann, translated by E. Sellers.)
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+SEAGER, R. B.: <i>Excavations on the Island of Pseira, Crete</i>.
+Philadelphia, 1910. (Finely illustrated.)
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+TSOUNTAS AND MANATT: <i>The Mycen&aelig;an Age</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+For the chronology of Ancient Egypt see&mdash;
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+BREASTED, H.: <i>History of Egypt</i>. (1906. Abridged issue, 1908.)
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+PETRIE, W. M. F.: <i>History of Egypt</i>, vols. i.-iii. <i>Researches
+in Sinai</i>.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+For the topography of Crete, Pashley's <i>Travels in Crete</i>
+and Spratt's <i>Travels and Researches in Crete</i> will still be
+found interesting and useful, though published in 1837 and 1865
+respectively. For the history of the island in medi&aelig;val and
+modern times <i>A Short Popular History of Crete</i>, by J. H.
+Freese, may be consulted.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+<i>Antiquit&eacute;s Cr&eacute;toises</i>, by G. Maraghiannis,
+Candia, Crete, gives fifty excellent plates of Minoan relics, chiefly
+from Ph&aelig;stos and Hagia Triada, with a short introduction by
+Signor Pernier, of the Italian Arch&aelig;ological Mission.
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_264"><span class="page">Page 264</span></a>
+APPENDIX</h2>
+
+<p class="subtitle">TRANSLATIONS OF THE PH&AElig;STOS DISK</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Two translations of the Ph&aelig;stos disk have been put forward.
+The first is by Professor George Hempl, of Stanford University,
+U.S.A., and appeared in <i>Harper's Magazine</i> 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
+<i>Burlington Magazine</i> of April, 1911, under the title, 'An
+Interpretation of the Phaistos Disk.'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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
+Ph&aelig;stos, 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.
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+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:
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+'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!'
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+Compare Miss Stawell's translation of the same lines:
+</p>
+
+<p class="indent">
+'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&mdash;keep silence, I sacrifice&mdash;Lady,
+come!'
+</p>
+
+<h2><a name="page_265"><span class="page">Page 265</span></a>
+INDEX</h2>
+
+<p class="center">A</p>
+
+<p class="index">Aahmes, founder of Eighteenth Dynasty,
+<a href="#page_147">147</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Abnub, <a href="#page_82">82</a>,
+<a href="#page_155">155</a>, <a href="#page_203">203</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Abydos: First Dynasty graves at,
+<a href="#page_142">142</a>, <a href="#page_191">191</a>;
+Twelfth Dynasty grave at, <a href="#page_150">150</a>,
+<a href="#page_199">199</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ach&aelig;ans: position of, in Homeric poems,
+<a href="#page_23">23</a>; manners of, <a href="#page_26">26</a>;
+invasion of Greece, <a href="#page_62">62</a>; influence of, on
+Cretan customs, <a href="#page_178">178</a>;
+conquest of Mycen&aelig;, <a href="#page_182">182</a>; modifications
+of Minoan religion by, <a href="#page_247">247</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Achilles: arms of, <a href="#page_27">27</a>;
+shield of, <a href="#page_27">27</a>, <a href="#page_28">28</a>,
+<a href="#page_58">58</a>, <a href="#page_74">74</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">&AElig;gean, <a href="#page_13">13</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">&AElig;geus, King of Athens,
+<a href="#page_10">10-13</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Agamemnon, Tomb of, <a href="#page_37">37</a>,
+<a href="#page_42">42</a>, <a href="#page_43">43</a>,
+<a href="#page_45">45</a>, <a href="#page_46">46</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Agriculture, Minoan, <a href="#page_226">226</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Aigaios, Mount, <a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Aithra, mother of Theseus, <a href="#page_11">11</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Akhenaten, <a href="#page_163">163</a>,
+<a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_174">174</a>,
+<a href="#page_185">185</a>, <a href="#page_208">208</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Alabastron of Khyan, <a href="#page_93">93</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Alcinous, Palace of, <a href="#page_25">25</a>,
+<a href="#page_26">26</a>, <a href="#page_47">47</a>,
+<a href="#page_49">49</a>, <a href="#page_56">56</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Altar: in Dict&aelig;an Cave,
+<a href="#page_137">137</a>; at Shaft-Graves,
+<a href="#page_251">251</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Amaltheia, <a href="#page_7">7</a>,
+<a href="#page_111">111</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Amenemhat III., <a href="#page_150">150</a>;
+Labyrinth of, <a href="#page_150">150-155</a>; pyramid of,
+<a href="#page_47">47</a>; cylinders of, <a href="#page_199">199</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Amenhotep, II., <a href="#page_174">174</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Amenhotep III., <a href="#page_158">158</a>,
+<a href="#page_162">162</a>, <a href="#page_173">173</a>,
+<a href="#page_174">174</a>, <a href="#page_184">184</a>,
+<a href="#page_185">185</a>, <a href="#page_208">208</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Amen-Ra, statuette of, in Dict&aelig;an Cave,
+<a href="#page_137">137</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Amor, Amorites, <a href="#page_165">165</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Amorgos, <a href="#page_193">193</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Anatolia, <a href="#page_6">6</a>; Minoan settlements
+in, <a href="#page_184">184</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Androgeos, son of Minos, <a href="#page_10">10</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Andromache, <a href="#page_24">24</a>,
+<a href="#page_41">41</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Aniconic worship, <a href="#page_245">245</a>,
+<a href="#page_246">246</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Aphrodite: aspect of Cretan goddess,
+<a href="#page_104">104</a>, <a href="#page_122">122</a>;
+identified with Minoan goddess, <a href="#page_247">247</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Aqayuasha invade Egypt, <a href="#page_164">164</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Archon, the King, <a href="#page_108">108</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Argives, <a href="#page_166">166</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Argolid: place of, in Greek history,
+<a href="#page_22">22</a>; conquest of, by Ach&aelig;ans,
+<a href="#page_182">182</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ariadne, <a href="#page_3">3</a>,
+<a href="#page_179">179</a>; flees with Theseus and deserted by him,
+<a href="#page_13">13</a>; Choros of, at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_103">103</a>; title of Cretan goddess,
+<a href="#page_104">104</a>, <a href="#page_122">122</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Aristides, 'The Unjust,' <a href="#page_240">240</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Armour: Homeric, <a href="#page_26">26-28</a>,
+<a href="#page_61">61</a>; Mycen&aelig;an, <a href="#page_61">61</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Army, Minoan, <a href="#page_225">225</a>,
+<a href="#page_226">226</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Arrows, deposits of, at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_110">110</a>, <a href="#page_225">225</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Artemis Dictynna, aspect of Cretan goddess,
+<a href="#page_122">122</a>, <a href="#page_247">247</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Asia, community of religious conceptions between Crete
+and, <a href="#page_141">141</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Athens: conquered by Minos, <a href="#page_10">10</a>,
+<a href="#page_170">170</a>; place in Homeric poems,
+<a href="#page_21">21</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Atlantis, Plato's legend of,
+<a href="#page_257">257-259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Atreus, Treasury of, <a href="#page_43">43</a>,
+<a href="#page_46">46-48</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Axos, <a href="#page_166">166</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">B</p>
+
+<p class="index">Babylonia, relations with Crete,
+<a href="#page_139">139-142</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">
+<a name="page_266"><span class="page">Page 266</span></a>
+Bacchylides, legend of Theseus and the ring of Minos,
+<a href="#page_13">13</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Basilica, origin of, <a href="#page_108">108</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Bathroom of Queen's Megaron, <a href="#page_95">95</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Beak-jugs=schnabelkanne, <i>q.v.</i></p>
+
+<p class="index">Beehive chamber at Knossos, <a href="#page_113">113</a>,
+<a href="#page_114">114</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Beehive tombs: at Mycen&aelig;,
+<a href="#page_46">46-48</a>, <a href="#page_56">56</a>; at
+Orchomenos, <a href="#page_48">48</a>, <a href="#page_56">56</a>;
+at Ph&aelig;stos, <a href="#page_229">229</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Bliss finds Minoan pottery at Telles-Safi,
+<a href="#page_167">167</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Boghaz-Keui, treaty between Hittites and Egyptians
+discovered at, <a href="#page_162">162</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Bosanquet, Mr.: Minoan purple,
+<a href="#page_133">133</a>; marine decoration,
+<a href="#page_204">204</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Boxer Vase, the, <a href="#page_124">124</a>,
+<a href="#page_169">169</a>, <a href="#page_172">172</a>,
+<a href="#page_204">204</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Boxing, Minoan, <a href="#page_103">103</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Breasted, H., Egyptian chronology,
+<a href="#page_148">148</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Britomartis, <a href="#page_122">122</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Bronze, use of, for weapons,
+<a href="#page_27">27</a>, <a href="#page_60">60</a>,
+<a href="#page_228">228</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Browne, H., 'Homeric Study,'
+<a href="#page_30">30-32</a>, <a href="#page_62">62</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Bucchero: deposit of, at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_66">66</a>, <a href="#page_189">189</a>,
+<a href="#page_191">191</a>; at Abydos, <a href="#page_142">142</a>,
+<a href="#page_143">143</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">B&uuml;gelkanne=stirrup-vases, <i>q.v.</i></p>
+
+<p class="index">Bull: fresco of, at Tiryns, <a href="#page_49">49</a>,
+<a href="#page_90">90</a>; at Knossos, <a href="#page_66">66</a>; relief
+of, at Knossos, <a href="#page_77">77</a>, <a href="#page_78">78</a>,
+<a href="#page_172">172</a>; fresco, <a href="#page_88">88</a>,
+<a href="#page_89">89</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Bull-god, <a href="#page_105">105</a>,
+<a href="#page_252">252</a>, <a href="#page_253">253</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Bull-grappling, <a href="#page_88">88-91</a>,
+<a href="#page_257">257</a>, <a href="#page_258">258</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Bunarbashi, supposed site of Troy,
+<a href="#page_38">38</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Burial, <a href="#page_58">58-60</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Burrows, Professor: quoted, <a href="#page_88">88</a>,
+<a href="#page_98">98</a>, <a href="#page_99">99</a>,
+<a href="#page_108">108</a>, <a href="#page_109">109</a>,
+<a href="#page_122">122</a>, <a href="#page_174">174</a>,
+<a href="#page_177">177</a>; Minoan art in Egypt,
+<a href="#page_185">185</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Button seals, <a href="#page_143">143</a>,
+<a href="#page_194">194</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Byblos, Wen-Amon at, <a href="#page_186">186</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">C</p>
+
+<p class="index">Callimachus, character of Cretans,
+<a href="#page_8">8</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Carians expelled by Minos, <a href="#page_9">9</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Carpenter, tools of, <a href="#page_221">221</a>,
+<a href="#page_222">222</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Chariots, <a href="#page_225">225</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cherethites=Cretans, <a href="#page_168">168</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Chieftain Vase, the, <a href="#page_125">125</a>,
+<a href="#page_126">126</a>, <a href="#page_172">172</a>,
+<a href="#page_204">204</a>, <a href="#page_213">213</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Choros built by D&aelig;dalus at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_14">14</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Chronology, Egyptian and Minoan,
+<a href="#page_147">147</a> <i>et seq.</i></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cilicia, <a href="#page_229">229</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Circle-Graves=Shaft-Graves,
+<a href="#page_43">43-46</a>, <a href="#page_172">172</a>,
+<a href="#page_205">205</a>; steles of, <a href="#page_182">182</a>;
+altars at, <a href="#page_251">251</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cists in Temple Repositories,
+<a href="#page_105">105</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Colonnades, Hall of, <a href="#page_85">85</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cooking utensils, <a href="#page_218">218</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Copper: export of, <a href="#page_223">223</a>;
+use of, in beaten work, <a href="#page_229">229</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Corinth in Homeric poems, <a href="#page_21">21</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cornaro describes ruins at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_63">63</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Court: Western, Knossos, <a href="#page_66">66</a>,
+<a href="#page_83">83</a>, <a href="#page_84">84</a>; Central, Knossos,
+<a href="#page_68">68</a>, <a href="#page_70">70</a>,
+<a href="#page_85">85</a>; of the Olive Spout, <a href="#page_88">88</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cremation, <a href="#page_58">58-60</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Critias, the, legend of Atlantis,
+<a href="#page_257">257-259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cross in Snake Goddess shrine,
+<a href="#page_107">107</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cuirass. See Armour</p>
+
+<p class="index">Cuneiform, <a href="#page_81">81</a>,
+<a href="#page_142">142</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cup-Bearer: Fresco of, <a href="#page_67">67</a>,
+<a href="#page_68">68</a>, <a href="#page_173">173</a>,
+<a href="#page_206">206</a>; dress of, <a href="#page_213">213</a>,
+<a href="#page_214">214</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Currelly, Mr., <a href="#page_124">124</a>,
+<a href="#page_133">133</a>, <a href="#page_236">236</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Curtius on Treasury of Atreus,
+<a href="#page_48">48</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cyclades, <a href="#page_9">9</a>;
+influence on Minoan art, <a href="#page_193">193</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Cyprus, <a href="#page_51">51</a>,
+<a href="#page_157">157</a>; Minoan civilization in,
+<a href="#page_145">145</a>, <a href="#page_185">185</a>;
+export of copper, <a href="#page_223">223</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">D</p>
+
+<p class="index">D&aelig;dalus, <a href="#page_3">3</a>; builds
+Labyrinth, <a href="#page_10">10</a>, <a href="#page_14">14</a>;
+flees to Sicily, <a href="#page_14">14</a>, <a href="#page_15">15</a>;
+makes Choros at Knossos, <a href="#page_103">103</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Daggers from Shaft-Graves, <a href="#page_57">57</a>,
+<a href="#page_58">58</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dahshur, Egyptian jewellery from
+<a href="#page_229">229</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Danaos, King of Argos and Rhodes
+<a href="#page_166">166</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Danauna=Danaoi invade Egypt,
+<a href="#page_165">165</a>, <a href="#page_166">166</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">
+<a name="page_267"><span class="page">Page 267</span></a>
+Dancing, Minoan, <a href="#page_103">103</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dancing-girls, fresco of, <a href="#page_220">220</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Danubian civilization, <a href="#page_181">181</a>,
+<a href="#page_182">182</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">David, <a href="#page_167">167</a>,
+<a href="#page_168">168</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dawkins, Mr., <a href="#page_126">126</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dead, disposal of, <a href="#page_58">58-60</a>,
+<a href="#page_178">178</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Decimal system, Minoan, <a href="#page_238">238</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Deir-el-Bahri: Eleventh Dynasty temple at,
+<a href="#page_154">154</a>; Hatshepsut's temple at,
+<a href="#page_160">160</a>; tomb of Senmut, <a href="#page_160">160</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Demeter identified with Minoan goddess,
+<a href="#page_247">247</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Determinatives in Minoan writing,
+<a href="#page_235">235</a>, <a href="#page_240">240</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Diana, of Ephesus, <a href="#page_111">111</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dict&aelig;an Cave, <a href="#page_7">7</a>,
+<a href="#page_8">8</a>, <a href="#page_64">64</a>,
+<a href="#page_70">70</a>, <a href="#page_136">136</a>,
+<a href="#page_137">137</a>, <a href="#page_247">247</a>,
+<a href="#page_254">254</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dionysius of Halicarnassus, <a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dionysos, <a href="#page_252">252</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Disc, hieroglyphic, of Ph&aelig;stos,
+<a href="#page_121">121</a>, <a href="#page_241">241</a>,
+<a href="#page_242">242</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dolphin Fresco, <a href="#page_224">224</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dor, <a href="#page_187">187</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dorian (Dorians): conquest, <a href="#page_2">2</a>,
+<a href="#page_4">4</a>, <a href="#page_33">33</a>,
+<a href="#page_62">62</a>; invasion of Crete,
+<a href="#page_178">178</a>, <a href="#page_210">210</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">D&ouml;rpfeld, Professor, discovers Sixth City of
+Troy, <a href="#page_40">40</a>, <a href="#page_41">41</a>,
+<a href="#page_50">50</a>, <a href="#page_51">51</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Double Axe, <a href="#page_246">246</a>; pillars of,
+at Knossos, <a href="#page_70">70</a>; emblem of Divinity,
+<a href="#page_70">70</a>;</p>
+
+<p class="index">of Zeus of Labraunda, <a href="#page_70">70</a>; at
+Gournia, <a href="#page_130">130</a>; in Dict&aelig;an Cave,
+<a href="#page_137">137</a>; on</p>
+
+<p class="index">sarcophagus, <a href="#page_250">250</a>; Hall of
+the, <a href="#page_86">86</a>, <a href="#page_120">120</a>; in shrines
+at Knossos, <a href="#page_100">100</a>, <a href="#page_105">105</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Drainage: at Knossos, <a href="#page_98">98</a>,
+<a href="#page_99">99</a>; at Hagia Triada,
+<a href="#page_129">129</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dress: of Minoan women, <a href="#page_73">73</a>;
+of men, <a href="#page_74">74</a>, <a href="#page_213">213-216</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dungeons of Knossos, <a href="#page_90">90</a>,
+<a href="#page_91">91</a>, <a href="#page_104">104</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Dynasties, Egyptian: First, date of,
+<a href="#page_148">148</a>; Third, <a href="#page_146">146</a>;
+Fifth, <a href="#page_146">146</a>; Sixth, <a href="#page_143">143</a>,
+<a href="#page_149">149</a>; Twelfth, <a href="#page_148">148</a>,
+<a href="#page_150">150-155</a>, <a href="#page_199">199</a>; Thirteenth,
+<a href="#page_200">200</a>; Seventeenth, <a href="#page_158">158</a>,
+<a href="#page_200">200</a>; Eighteenth, <a href="#page_158">158-163</a>;
+Nineteenth, <a href="#page_163">163</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">E</p>
+
+<p class="index">Egypt: relations of, with Crete,
+<a href="#page_139">139</a>; chronology of, <a href="#page_147">147</a>
+<i>et seq.</i></p>
+
+<p class="index">Electrum, <a href="#page_229">229</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Enkomi, <a href="#page_51">51</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Epeus, <a href="#page_103">103</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Erman Egyptian chronology, <a href="#page_148">148</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ethiopia, King of, obliged to slay himself at command
+of priests, <a href="#page_254">254</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Europa, mother of Minos, <a href="#page_7">7</a>,
+<a href="#page_8">8</a>, <a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Euryalus, <a href="#page_103">103</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Evans, A. J., <a href="#page_1">1</a>,
+<a href="#page_2">2</a>; purchases hill of Kephala,
+<a href="#page_64">64</a>, <a href="#page_65">65</a>; discoveries at
+Knossos, <a href="#page_65">65-116</a>; derivation of Labyrinth,
+<a href="#page_71">71</a>; on relief of bull's head,
+<a href="#page_77">77</a>, <a href="#page_78">78</a>; on tablets of
+Knossos, <a href="#page_79">79</a>, <a href="#page_80">80</a>; drains
+at Knossos, <a href="#page_99">99</a>; bull's head <i>rhyton</i>,
+<a href="#page_113">113</a>; restoration of Queen's Megaron,
+<a href="#page_115">115</a>; 'Scripta Minoa' quoted,
+<a href="#page_121">121</a>; excavations at Zafer Papoura,
+<a href="#page_134">134</a>; at Isopata, <a href="#page_135">135</a>;
+Minoan chronology, <a href="#page_149">149</a>; first destruction of
+Knossos, <a href="#page_171">171</a>; date of sack
+of Knossos, <a href="#page_174">174</a>; growth of Cretan legends,
+<a href="#page_179">179</a>, <a href="#page_180">180</a>; classification
+of Minoan periods, <a href="#page_190">190</a>; origin of spiral,
+<a href="#page_194">194</a>; decline of Minoan oil-trade,
+<a href="#page_222">222</a>; Minoan writing, <a href="#page_232">232</a>,
+<a href="#page_233">233</a>, <a href="#page_235">235</a>,
+<a href="#page_236">236</a>, <a href="#page_237">237-238</a>,
+<a href="#page_239">239</a>, <a href="#page_240">240</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">F</p>
+
+<p class="index">Fetish shrine at Knossos, <a href="#page_111">111</a>,
+<a href="#page_237">237</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Fibula, use of, in late Minoan III.,
+<a href="#page_178">178</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Fig-tree, <a href="#page_227">227</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Figurines: ivory, at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_96">96</a>; fa&iuml;ence, <a href="#page_105">105</a>,
+<a href="#page_106">106</a>, <a href="#page_156">156</a>; banjo,
+<a href="#page_193">193</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Flute on Hagia Triada sarcophagus,
+<a href="#page_127">127</a>, <a href="#page_128">128</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Fortifications: of Knossos, <a href="#page_74">74</a>,
+<a href="#page_75">75</a>, <a href="#page_76">76</a>; of Tiryns and
+Mycen&aelig;, <a href="#page_75">75</a>, <a href="#page_138">138</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">
+<a name="page_268"><span class="page">Page 268</span></a>
+Fresco (Frescoes): bull at Tiryns, <a href="#page_49">49</a>; at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_66">66</a>; Procession at
+Knossos, <a href="#page_66">66</a>; Cup-Bearer, <a href="#page_67">67</a>,
+<a href="#page_68">68</a>, <a href="#page_173">173</a>,
+<a href="#page_206">206</a>; of Throne Room, <a href="#page_71">71</a>,
+<a href="#page_72">72</a>; Blue Boy, <a href="#page_73">73</a>,
+<a href="#page_90">90</a>, <a href="#page_172">172</a>,
+<a href="#page_202">202</a>; miniature, <a href="#page_73">73</a>,
+<a href="#page_74">74</a>, <a href="#page_172">172</a>,
+<a href="#page_173">173</a>, <a href="#page_206">206</a>; toreador,
+<a href="#page_88">88</a>, <a href="#page_89">89</a>; bird,
+<a href="#page_95">95</a>, <a href="#page_220">220</a>; dancing-girls,
+<a href="#page_220">220</a>; Dolphin, <a href="#page_224">224</a>.</p>
+
+<p class="index">Frieze (Friezes): at Tiryns, <a href="#page_49">49</a>,
+<a href="#page_56">56</a>; at Knossos, <a href="#page_56">56</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">G</p>
+
+<p class="index">Gallery, the Long, <a href="#page_68">68-70</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Gaming Board, the King's, Knossos,
+<a href="#page_87">87</a>, <a href="#page_88">88</a>,
+<a href="#page_204">204</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Garstang, Professor, Kamares vase at Abydos,
+<a href="#page_150">150</a>, <a href="#page_199">199</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Gath=Tell-es-Safi, <i>q.v.</i></p>
+
+<p class="index">Gaza, <a href="#page_10">10</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Gezer, Minoan pottery at, <a href="#page_140">140</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Gilli&eacute;ron, M., reconstruction of relief,
+<a href="#page_93">93</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">God, Minoan: insignificance of,
+<a href="#page_247">247</a>; identified with Zeus,
+<a href="#page_247">247</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Goddess: seal-impression of,
+<a href="#page_94">94</a>; Dove Goddess, <a href="#page_100">100</a>,
+<a href="#page_107">107</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a>; Snake,
+<a href="#page_105">105-107</a>, <a href="#page_130">130</a>,
+<a href="#page_156">156</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a>;
+Minoan supreme deity, <a href="#page_244">244</a>; representations
+of, <a href="#page_245">245</a>, <a href="#page_246">246</a>;
+identified with Greek goddesses, <a href="#page_246">246</a>,
+<a href="#page_247">247</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Gold: abundance of, in Shaft-Graves,
+<a href="#page_44">44</a>, <a href="#page_45">45</a> ; absence of, at
+Knossos, <a href="#page_77">77</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Goldsmith's work at Mokhlos, <a href="#page_134">134</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Gortyna, stele of, <a href="#page_182">182</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Gournia: Minoan houses at, <a href="#page_97">97</a>,
+<a href="#page_130">130</a>, <a href="#page_131">131</a>,
+<a href="#page_216">216</a>; shrine at, <a href="#page_107">107</a>,
+<a href="#page_130">130</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a>; Minoan town,
+<a href="#page_129">129-132</a>; sack of, <a href="#page_131">131</a>;
+stirrup-vases at, <a href="#page_205">205</a>; furnace near,
+<a href="#page_228">228</a>; linear script at,
+<a href="#page_236">236</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Grote denies historicity of Greek legends,
+<a href="#page_3">3</a>, <a href="#page_17">17</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">H</p>
+
+<p class="index">Haa-ab-ra, <a href="#page_169">169</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hagia Triada: Boxer <i>rhyton</i>,
+<a href="#page_103">103</a>; villa at, <a href="#page_122">122</a>;
+artistic work, <a href="#page_122">122</a>, <a href="#page_203">203</a>;
+vases of, <a href="#page_123">123-126</a>; sarcophagus, of,
+<a href="#page_127">127-129</a>; sanitation of,
+<a href="#page_129">129</a>; sack of, <a href="#page_175">175</a>,
+<a href="#page_176">176</a>; bee-hive tomb at,
+<a href="#page_192">192</a>; dress on fresco from,
+<a href="#page_215">215</a>; linear script at,
+<a href="#page_235">235</a>, <a href="#page_236">236</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hagios Onouphrios, deposita at,
+<a href="#page_192">192</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Halbherr, Professor: work at Ph&aelig;stos,
+<a href="#page_118">118</a>; discovery of copper at Hagia Triada,
+<a href="#page_223">223</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hall of Colonnades, Knossos, <a href="#page_85">85</a>;
+of Double Axes, Knossos, <a href="#page_86">86</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hall, H. R., <a href="#page_155">155</a>; origin of
+spiral, <a href="#page_48">48</a>, <a href="#page_143">143</a>,
+<a href="#page_193">193</a>; sea-route to Egypt,
+<a href="#page_145">145</a>; on Labyrinth, <a href="#page_153">153</a>;
+Keftiu in tomb of Rekh-ma-ra, <a href="#page_161">161</a>;
+identification of Uashasha, <a href="#page_166">166</a>; Minoan influence
+on Egyptian art, <a href="#page_185">185</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hall, Miss, origin of spiral,
+<a href="#page_193">193</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Harrison, Miss J., on the Minotaur legend,
+<a href="#page_252">252</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Harvester Vase, the, <a href="#page_124">124</a>,
+<a href="#page_125">125</a>, <a href="#page_129">129</a>,
+<a href="#page_172">172</a>, <a href="#page_204">204</a>,
+<a href="#page_213">213</a>, <a href="#page_226">226</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hatshepsut, <a href="#page_158">158</a>,
+<a href="#page_160">160</a>, <a href="#page_208">208</a>,
+<a href="#page_223">223</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hawara, Labyrinth at, <a href="#page_150">150-155</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hawes, Mrs.: carpenters' tools at Gournia,
+<a href="#page_222">222</a>; discoveries at Gournia,
+<a href="#page_97">97</a>, <a href="#page_107">107</a>,
+<a href="#page_129">129</a>, <a href="#page_130">130</a>; sack of
+Knossos, <a href="#page_174">174</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hector, <a href="#page_41">41</a>; slays Periphetes,
+<a href="#page_61">61</a>; shield of, <a href="#page_61">61</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Helmet. See Armour</p>
+
+<p class="index">Heph&aelig;stos makes arms of Achilles,
+<a href="#page_27">27</a>, <a href="#page_28">28</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hera identified with Minoan goddess,
+<a href="#page_247">247</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Herakleids, return of, <a href="#page_2">2</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Her-hor, <a href="#page_186">186</a>,
+<a href="#page_187">187</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Herodotus: on sea-power of Minos,
+<a href="#page_9">9</a>, <a href="#page_76">76</a>,
+<a href="#page_256">256</a>; Labyrinth at Hawara,
+<a href="#page_151">151</a>, <a href="#page_152">152</a>;</p>
+
+<p class="index">Greek settlement in Crete, <a href="#page_180">180</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hesiod: legend of Kronos, <a href="#page_111">111</a>,
+<a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hieroglyphics: Minoan, <a href="#page_64">64</a>,
+<a href="#page_78">78</a>; Egyptian and Hittite,
+<a href="#page_64">64</a>, <a href="#page_80">80</a>,
+<a href="#page_81">81</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hilprecht, <a href="#page_141">141</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hissarlik, site of Troy, <a href="#page_37">37</a>,
+<a href="#page_51">51</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hittites: Treaty with Egypt,
+<a href="#page_162">162</a>; absorbed in advance of sea-peoples,
+<a href="#page_164">164</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">
+<a name="page_269"><span class="page">Page 269</span></a>
+Hogarth, D. G.: quoted, <a href="#page_20">20</a>; duration of
+Mycen&aelig;an civilization, <a href="#page_51">51</a>,
+<a href="#page_52">52</a>; on bull's head <i>rhyton</i>,
+<a href="#page_113">113</a>; excavations at Zakro,
+<a href="#page_133">133</a>, <a href="#page_224">224</a>; at
+Dict&aelig;an Cave, <a href="#page_136">136</a>,
+<a href="#page_137">137</a>; Greek settlement in Crete,
+<a href="#page_180">180</a>; geometric vases of Iron Age,
+<a href="#page_183">183</a>, <a href="#page_184">184</a>; Minoan
+craftsmanship, <a href="#page_207">207</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Homeric civilization, <a href="#page_21">21-33</a>;
+houses, <a href="#page_25">25</a>, <a href="#page_55">55</a>; crafts
+in, <a href="#page_56">56-58</a>; disposal of dead,
+<a href="#page_58">58</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Homeric poems, <a href="#page_20">20</a>; geography of,
+<a href="#page_54">54</a>; houses in, <a href="#page_25">25</a>,
+<a href="#page_55">55</a>; crafts in, <a href="#page_56">56-58</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">'Horns of consecration,' <a href="#page_94">94</a>,
+<a href="#page_95">95</a>, <a href="#page_100">100</a>,
+<a href="#page_130">130</a>, <a href="#page_246">246</a>,
+<a href="#page_249">249</a>, <a href="#page_250">250</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Horse on seal-impression at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_112">112</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Houses: Minoan, <a href="#page_97">97</a>,
+<a href="#page_216">216-218</a>; at Gournia, <a href="#page_130">130</a>,
+<a href="#page_131">131</a>; fabric of, <a href="#page_217">217</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hyksos, <a href="#page_93">93</a>,
+<a href="#page_94">94</a>, <a href="#page_155">155</a>,
+<a href="#page_157">157</a>, <a href="#page_200">200</a>,
+<a href="#page_203">203</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Hyria, foundation of, <a href="#page_15">15</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">I</p>
+
+<p class="index">Ialysos, Late Minoan III. work at,
+<a href="#page_209">209</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Icarus, son of D&aelig;dalus, <a href="#page_14">14</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ida, Mount, <a href="#page_92">92</a>; Kamares cave
+on, <a href="#page_197">197</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Id&aelig;an Cave, <a href="#page_7">7</a>; bronzes
+of, <a href="#page_183">183</a>, <a href="#page_184">184</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Idomeneus in Iliad, <a href="#page_22">22</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Illahun, <a href="#page_97">97</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Imadua, tomb of, <a href="#page_163">163</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Incised ornament, <a href="#page_189">189</a>,
+<a href="#page_192">192</a>, <a href="#page_193">193</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Iron: use of for weapons, <a href="#page_27">27</a>,
+<a href="#page_60">60</a>; in Late Minoan III.,
+<a href="#page_178">178</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Irus, <a href="#page_103">103</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Isopata, royal tomb at, <a href="#page_135">135</a>,
+<a href="#page_136">136</a>, <a href="#page_156">156</a>,
+<a href="#page_203">203</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ittai, Captain of David's bodyguard,
+<a href="#page_168">168</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">J</p>
+
+<p class="index">Jacob, sacred pillar of, at Bethel,
+<a href="#page_246">246</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Jade, white, discovered at Troy,
+<a href="#page_140">140</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Juktas, Mount: tomb of Zeus on,
+<a href="#page_7">7</a>, <a href="#page_63">63</a>; springs on,
+<a href="#page_110">110</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">K</p>
+
+<p class="index">Kahun: Twelfth Dynasty town at,
+<a href="#page_116">116</a>; papyrus, <a href="#page_148">148</a>;
+Kamares ware at, <a href="#page_150">150</a>,
+<a href="#page_199">199</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kairatos River, <a href="#page_76">76</a>,
+<a href="#page_176">176</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kaloch&aelig;rinos, excavations at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_64">64</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kamares ware, <a href="#page_92">92</a>,
+<a href="#page_118">118</a>, <a href="#page_120">120</a>,
+<a href="#page_137">137</a>, <a href="#page_150">150</a>,
+<a href="#page_172">172</a>, <a href="#page_197">197-199</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kamikos besieged by Minos, <a href="#page_15">15</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kaphtor=Crete and Kefti, <a href="#page_166">166</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Karnak, <a href="#page_151">151</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kaselles at Knossos, <a href="#page_69">69</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Keftiu, the, <a href="#page_158">158-163</a>,
+<a href="#page_259">259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kephala, site of Palace of Knossos,
+<a href="#page_64">64</a>, <a href="#page_65">65</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kerkuon slain by Theseus, <a href="#page_11">11</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Khyan: alabastron of, <a href="#page_93">93</a>,
+<a href="#page_157">157</a>, <a href="#page_203">203</a>; lion of,
+<a href="#page_157">157</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">King, Minoan, relation to religion,
+<a href="#page_248">248</a>, <a href="#page_251">251-255</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kokalos, King of Kamikos, <a href="#page_14">14</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Klytemnestra, Treasury of, <a href="#page_48">48</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Knossos, <a href="#page_5">5</a>; in Iliad,
+<a href="#page_22">22</a>; Palace of, <a href="#page_63">63-116</a>;
+ruins at, <a href="#page_63">63</a>, <a href="#page_64">64</a>;
+Neolithic remains at, <a href="#page_66">66</a>; fortifications of,
+<a href="#page_74">74</a>, <a href="#page_75">75</a>; sack of,
+<a href="#page_86">86</a>; Royal Villa, <a href="#page_107">107-109</a>;
+Minoan road, <a href="#page_110">110</a>; Little Palace,
+<a href="#page_110">110-113</a>; beehive chamber,
+<a href="#page_113">113</a>, <a href="#page_114">114</a>; Queen's Megaron,
+<a href="#page_115">115</a>, <a href="#page_116">116</a>; sack of,
+<a href="#page_173">173-176</a>; reoccupation of,
+<a href="#page_176">176</a>, <a href="#page_177">177</a>,
+<a href="#page_210">210</a>; first sack of, <a href="#page_199">199</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kouphonisi. See Leuke</p>
+
+<p class="index">Kronos, <a href="#page_6">6</a>,
+<a href="#page_7">7</a>, <a href="#page_111">111</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Kuanos, <a href="#page_25">25</a>,
+<a href="#page_49">49</a>, <a href="#page_56">56</a>,
+<a href="#page_58">58</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">L</p>
+
+<p class="index">Labrys: name of Double Axe, <a href="#page_70">70</a>;
+derivation of Labyrinth, <a href="#page_71">71</a>,
+<a href="#page_100">100</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Labyrinth, <a href="#page_3">3</a>,
+<a href="#page_10">10</a>, <a href="#page_11">11</a>,
+<a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_14">14</a>,
+<a href="#page_18">18</a>; derivation of name,
+<a href="#page_71">71</a>, <a href="#page_153">153</a>;
+beehive chamber, Knossos, <a href="#page_114">114</a>; Minoan and
+Egyptian Labyrinths, <a href="#page_150">150-155</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Lamp, stone, in Royal Villa,
+<a href="#page_108">108</a>, <a href="#page_221">221</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">
+<a name="page_270"><span class="page">Page 270</span></a>
+Lang, Mr. A., Minoan swords, <a href="#page_135">135</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Layard, <a href="#page_140">140</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Legends of Crete, <a href="#page_6">6-18</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Leuke, deposit of purple shell at,
+<a href="#page_133">133</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Libation table: of Dict&aelig;an Cave,
+<a href="#page_64">64</a>, <a href="#page_236">236</a>,
+<a href="#page_251">251</a>; of Palaikastro, <a href="#page_236">236</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Light-wells, <a href="#page_217">217</a>,
+<a href="#page_220">220</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Linear Script: Class A, <a href="#page_202">202</a>,
+<a href="#page_204">204</a>, <a href="#page_234">234-236</a>; Class B,
+<a href="#page_205">205</a>, <a href="#page_207">207</a>,
+<a href="#page_236">236</a>, <a href="#page_238">238</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Lion Gate, <a href="#page_42">42-43</a>,
+<a href="#page_94">94</a>, <a href="#page_100">100</a>,
+<a href="#page_246">246</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Loin-cloth, <a href="#page_213">213</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Loom-weights, <a href="#page_228">228</a>; at Gournia,
+<a href="#page_131">131</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Lotus, Minoan use of, <a href="#page_204">204</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Lucian, <a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Lucretius, <a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Luqsor, <a href="#page_151">151</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Lycian pirates, <a href="#page_184">184</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Lyre on Hagia Triada sarcophagus,
+<a href="#page_127">127</a>, <a href="#page_128">128</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Lyttos, <a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">M</p>
+
+<p class="index">Macalister finds Minoan pottery at Tell-es-Safi,
+<a href="#page_167">167</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mackenzie, Dr.: decay of Minoan art,
+<a href="#page_177">177</a>; naturalism in Minoan art,
+<a href="#page_196">196</a>, <a href="#page_201">201</a>; character of
+Minoan religion, <a href="#page_248">248</a>,
+<a href="#page_249">249</a>; Minoan bathrooms,
+<a href="#page_252">252</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Magazines at Knossos, <a href="#page_68">68</a>,
+<a href="#page_69">69</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mahler, Egyptian chronology, <a href="#page_148">148</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Manetho, history of, <a href="#page_147">147</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Manolis, <a href="#page_68">68</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mecca, <a href="#page_111">111</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Medinet Habu, reliefs at, <a href="#page_121">121</a>,
+<a href="#page_164">164</a>, <a href="#page_165">165</a>,
+<a href="#page_181">181</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mediterranean race, <a href="#page_212">212</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Megara conquered by Minos, <a href="#page_10">10</a>,
+<a href="#page_170">170</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Megaron: Queen's, <a href="#page_95">95</a>,
+<a href="#page_115">115</a>, <a href="#page_116">116</a>,
+<a href="#page_220">220</a>, <a href="#page_221">221</a>; of
+Ph&aelig;stos, <a href="#page_120">120</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Melos, <a href="#page_51">51</a>,
+<a href="#page_193">193</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Menelaus, <a href="#page_15">15</a>,
+<a href="#page_23">23</a>; Palace of, <a href="#page_25">25</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mentuhotep Neb-hapet-Ra, Temple of,
+<a href="#page_78">78</a>, <a href="#page_154">154</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Merenptah, <a href="#page_164">164</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Meriones in Iliad, <a href="#page_22">22</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Messara Valley, <a href="#page_117">117</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Metal-working: Homeric and Mycen&aelig;an,
+<a href="#page_56">56-58</a>; at Knossos, <a href="#page_109">109</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Meyer, Egyptian chronology, <a href="#page_148">148</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Middle Kingdom of Egypt, <a href="#page_82">82</a>,
+<a href="#page_93">93</a>, <a href="#page_94">94</a>,
+<a href="#page_150">150-155</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Minoa, <a href="#page_10">10</a>,
+<a href="#page_15">15</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Minoan culture: date of beginning of,
+<a href="#page_147">147-149</a>; periods of&mdash;Early Minoan I.,
+Middle Minoan II., <a href="#page_149">149</a>,
+<a href="#page_150">150-155</a>; Middle Minoan III.,
+<a href="#page_155">155-157</a>; Late Minoan I.,
+<a href="#page_158">158</a>; Late Minoan III., pottery of, in Palestine,
+<a href="#page_167">167</a>; Middle Minoan II., catastrophe at close of,
+<a href="#page_170">170</a>; Early Minoan I., <a href="#page_190">190</a>,
+<a href="#page_191">191</a>; Early Minoan II., <a href="#page_191">191</a>,
+<a href="#page_192">192</a>; Early Minoan III.,
+<a href="#page_192">192-194</a>; Middle Minoan I.,
+<a href="#page_194">194-197</a>; Middle Minoan II.,
+<a href="#page_197">197-200</a>; Middle Minoan III.,
+<a href="#page_200">200-203</a>; Late Minoan I.,
+<a href="#page_203">203-205</a>; Late Minoan II.,
+<a href="#page_205">205-208</a>; Late Minoan III.,
+<a href="#page_208">208-210</a>; wide diffusion of products of,
+<a href="#page_209">209</a>
+
+<p class="index">Minoans: physical characteristics,
+<a href="#page_211">211-213</a>; dress,
+<a href="#page_213">213-216</a>; houses of,
+<a href="#page_216">216-218</a>
+
+<p class="index">Minos: legends of, <a href="#page_3">3-18</a>; birth of,
+<a href="#page_7">7</a>; association with Zeus, <a href="#page_8">8</a>,
+<a href="#page_253">253</a>; Sea-King, <a href="#page_9">9</a>; conquers
+Megara and Athens, <a href="#page_10">10</a>; pursues D&aelig;dalus,
+<a href="#page_14">14</a>; death of, <a href="#page_15">15</a>; and Zeus,
+<a href="#page_105">105</a>, <a href="#page_136">136</a>; laws of,
+<a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Minotaur, <a href="#page_3">3</a>,
+<a href="#page_10">10</a>, <a href="#page_49">49</a>,
+<a href="#page_258">258</a>; relation of legend to Minoan religion,
+<a href="#page_256">256</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Minyas, Treasury of, <a href="#page_48">48</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mitanni, <a href="#page_185">185</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mokhlos: excavations at, <a href="#page_40">40</a>;
+necropolis at, <a href="#page_133">133</a>, <a href="#page_134">134</a>,
+<a href="#page_143">143</a>; gold ring from, <a href="#page_223">223</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mortars, <a href="#page_227">227</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mosso, <a href="#page_112">112</a>,
+<a href="#page_120">120</a>; drainage at Hagia Triada,
+<a href="#page_129">129</a>; Minoan democracy,
+<a href="#page_230">230</a>;</p>
+
+<p class="index">Minoan bath rooms, <a href="#page_252">252</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mother: the Great, at Rome,
+<a href="#page_111">111</a>; Anatolian, <a href="#page_122">122</a>;
+Minoan, <a href="#page_244">244-247</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mouliana, tombs at, <a href="#page_59">59</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">
+<a name="page_271"><span class="page">Page 271</span></a>
+Murex, <a href="#page_133">133</a>, <a href="#page_222">222</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Murray, Professor: name of Minos,
+<a href="#page_8">8</a>; worship of bull-god in Crete,
+<a href="#page_253">253</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mycen&aelig;, <a href="#page_1">1</a>,
+<a href="#page_5">5</a>; in Homeric poems, <a href="#page_22">22</a>;
+Lion Gate of, <a href="#page_42">42</a>, <a href="#page_43">43</a>;
+Treasuries of, <a href="#page_42">42</a>, <a href="#page_43">43</a>,
+<a href="#page_46">46-48</a>; Shaft-Graves, <a href="#page_43">43-46</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Mycen&aelig;an civilization, <a href="#page_5">5</a>,
+<a href="#page_6">6</a>; extent of, <a href="#page_50">50</a>,
+<a href="#page_51">51</a>; duration of, <a href="#page_51">51</a>,
+<a href="#page_52">52</a>; inspiration of, <a href="#page_52">52-54</a>;
+relation to Homeric civilization, <a href="#page_54">54-62</a>; crafts
+of, <a href="#page_56">56-58</a>; disposal of dead,
+<a href="#page_58">58-60</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Myres, Mr. J. L.: discovery of Kamares ware,
+<a href="#page_92">92</a>, <a href="#page_197">197</a>; figurines at
+Petsofa, <a href="#page_132">132</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">N</p>
+
+<p class="index">Naturalism, development of, <a href="#page_196">196</a>,
+<a href="#page_201">201</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Nausicaa, <a href="#page_24">24</a>,
+<a href="#page_26">26</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Naville, excavations at Deir-el-Bahri,
+<a href="#page_78">78</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Necho, fleet of, circumnavigates Africa,
+<a href="#page_259">259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Neolithic Period at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_188">188-190</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Nestor, <a href="#page_22">22</a>; cup of,
+<a href="#page_56">56</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Niffur, <a href="#page_1">1</a>; drainage at,
+<a href="#page_141">141</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Nimr&ucirc;d, carved ivories at,
+<a href="#page_140">140</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">O</p>
+
+<p class="index">Odysseus, <a href="#page_22">22</a>; palace of,
+<a href="#page_25">25</a>; versatility of, <a href="#page_26">26</a>;
+brooch of, <a href="#page_56">56</a>; defeats Irus,
+<a href="#page_103">103</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Olive-oil, export of, <a href="#page_222">222</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Olive Press, Room of the, <a href="#page_222">222</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Olive Spout, Court of the, <a href="#page_88">88</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Olive-tree, <a href="#page_227">227</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Olympiad, First, <a href="#page_2">2</a>,
+<a href="#page_52">52</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Opening the mouth, Egyptian funerary ceremony,
+<a href="#page_128">128</a>, <a href="#page_251">251</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Orchomenos, <a href="#page_5">5</a>; in Homeric poems
+<a href="#page_22">22</a>, Treasury of Minyas, <a href="#page_48">48</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">P</p>
+
+<p class="index">Palace, Homeric, <a href="#page_25">25</a>,
+<a href="#page_55">55</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Palace, the Little, <a href="#page_111">111</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Palaikastro, <a href="#page_124">124</a>; Minoan town
+at, <a href="#page_132">132</a>; deposit of purple shell at,
+<a href="#page_133">133</a>; houses at, <a href="#page_216">216</a>,
+<a href="#page_217">217</a>; Linear Script at,
+<a href="#page_236">236</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Papyrus: Turin, <a href="#page_148">148</a>; Kahun,
+<a href="#page_148">148</a>; Golenischeff, <a href="#page_186">186</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pashley describes ruins at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_63">63</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pasiphae, wife of Minos, <a href="#page_10">10</a>,
+<a href="#page_18">18</a>, <a href="#page_252">252</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Paul, St., Epistle to Titus, <a href="#page_8">8</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pausanias, on Tomb of Agamemnon,
+<a href="#page_37">37</a>, <a href="#page_42">42</a>,
+<a href="#page_43">43</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pelasgi, <a href="#page_161">161</a>,
+<a href="#page_167">167</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pelethites=Philistines, <a href="#page_168">168</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Peloponnese, <a href="#page_6">6</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pen, the, used in Minoan writing,
+<a href="#page_241">241</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Penelope, <a href="#page_24">24</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pepy, statue of, <a href="#page_113">113</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Percentages on Minoan tablets,
+<a href="#page_238">238</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Perdix slain by D&aelig;dalus,
+<a href="#page_14">14</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Periphetes slain by Hector, <a href="#page_61">61</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pernier, Dr., stele at Gortyna,
+<a href="#page_182">182</a>; work at Phrestos,
+<a href="#page_118">118</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Perrot, M., Minoan writing, <a href="#page_233">233</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Petrie, Professor: discovers &AElig;gean remains in
+Egypt, <a href="#page_51">51</a>; plan of Egyptian town,
+<a href="#page_97">97</a>; Egyptian Sed Festival,
+<a href="#page_255">255</a>; identification of Zakkaru,
+<a href="#page_166">166</a>; Egyptian chronology,
+<a href="#page_194">194</a>, <a href="#page_199">199</a>;
+Minoan pottery at Abydos, <a href="#page_142">142</a>,
+<a href="#page_191">191</a>; sea-route between Crete and Egypt,
+<a href="#page_144">144</a>, <a href="#page_145">145</a>;
+Egyptian chronology, <a href="#page_148">148</a>; Kamares ware at
+Kahun, <a href="#page_150">150</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Petsofa: figurines, <a href="#page_126">126</a>,
+<a href="#page_132">132</a>, <a href="#page_195">195</a>,
+<a href="#page_213">213</a>, <a href="#page_215">215</a>; votive
+offerings at, <a href="#page_168">168</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ph&aelig;stos, <a href="#page_5">5</a>; in Homeric
+poems, <a href="#page_117">117</a>; discovery of Palace,
+<a href="#page_118">118</a>; Theatral Area, <a href="#page_118">118</a>,
+<a href="#page_119">119</a>; destruction of palace,
+<a href="#page_119">119</a>; staircase, <a href="#page_120">120</a>;
+Megaron, <a href="#page_120">120</a>; Central Court,
+<a href="#page_120">120</a>; hieroglyphic disc,
+<a href="#page_121">121</a>, <a href="#page_122">122</a>; lords of,
+destroy Knossos, <a href="#page_171">171</a>; sack of,
+<a href="#page_175">175</a>, <a href="#page_176">176</a>; earliest
+buildings at, <a href="#page_197">197</a>; first sack of Knossos,
+<a href="#page_200">200</a>; beehive tombs at,
+<a href="#page_229">229</a>; Linear Script at,
+<a href="#page_236">236</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">
+<a name="page_272"><span class="page">Page 272</span></a>
+Philistines: on reliefs at Medinet Habu, <a href="#page_121">121</a>;9
+invade Egypt, <a href="#page_165">165</a>, <a href="#page_166">166</a>,
+<a href="#page_186">186</a>; settle in Palestine,
+<a href="#page_166">166-169</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ph&oelig;nicians: relation to Minoan culture,
+<a href="#page_53">53</a>; invention of alphabet,
+<a href="#page_64">64</a>; writing, <a href="#page_81">81</a>,
+<a href="#page_243">243</a>; purple dye of, <a href="#page_132">132</a>,
+<a href="#page_133">133</a>; not the Keftiu, <a href="#page_159">159</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Phylakopi, <a href="#page_51">51</a>; Linear Script
+at, <a href="#page_236">236</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pictographs: beginnings of, <a href="#page_194">194</a>;
+decline of, <a href="#page_202">202</a>, <a href="#page_204">204</a>;
+development of, <a href="#page_234">234</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pillars, sacred, <a href="#page_70">70</a>,
+<a href="#page_246">246</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Piracy in Homeric poems, <a href="#page_22">22</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pithoi, <a href="#page_64">64</a>,
+<a href="#page_69">69</a>, <a href="#page_202">202</a>,
+<a href="#page_206">206</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pits. See Dungeons</p>
+
+<p class="index">Plato, legend of Atlantis,
+<a href="#page_257">257-259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pliny, Labyrinth of Hawara,
+<a href="#page_152">152</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Plutarch, story of Theseus, <a href="#page_103">103</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Polychrome ware, <a href="#page_104">104</a>,
+<a href="#page_132">132</a>, <a href="#page_172">172</a>; beginnings
+of, <a href="#page_194">194</a>, <a href="#page_195">195</a>;
+development of, <a href="#page_197">197-199</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Polycrates, sea-power of, <a href="#page_9">9</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Polyphemus, <a href="#page_22">22</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Porcelain plaques on chest, <a href="#page_97">97</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Portico: southern, Knossos, <a href="#page_68">68</a>;
+western, <a href="#page_66">66</a>, <a href="#page_83">83</a>,
+<a href="#page_84">84</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Potter's wheel, introduction of,
+<a href="#page_193">193</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pr&aelig;sians, account of Greek settlement in
+Crete, <a href="#page_180">180</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pr&aelig;sos, <a href="#page_15">15</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Priam, Palace of, <a href="#page_25">25</a>,
+<a href="#page_39">39</a>; Treasure of, <a href="#page_38">38</a>,
+<a href="#page_39">39</a>, <a href="#page_40">40</a>,
+<a href="#page_41">41</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Priestesses (Priests) in Minoan religion,
+<a href="#page_251">251</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Procession, Corridor of the, Knossos,
+<a href="#page_67">67</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Proclus, portraits of men of Atlantis in Egypt,
+<a href="#page_259">259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Procrustes slain by Theseus, <a href="#page_11">11</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Psamtek I., <a href="#page_152">152</a>,
+<a href="#page_169">169</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Psychro, <a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Pulosathu = Philistines, <i>q.v.</i></p>
+
+<p class="index">Punt, Egyptian voyages to, <a href="#page_146">146</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Purple, <a href="#page_133">133</a>,
+<a href="#page_222">222</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">Q</p>
+
+<p class="index">Querns, Minoan, <a href="#page_227">227</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">R</p>
+
+<p class="index">Rahotep, statue of, <a href="#page_113">113</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ramesseum, <a href="#page_151">151</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ramses II., Treaty with Hittites,
+<a href="#page_162">162</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ramses III.: reliefs of, <a href="#page_121">121</a>,
+<a href="#page_181">181</a>; victory over sea-peoples,
+<a href="#page_164">164-166</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Rekh-ma-ra, tomb of, <a href="#page_160">160-162</a>,
+<a href="#page_207">207</a>, <a href="#page_208">208</a>,
+<a href="#page_214">214</a>, <a href="#page_223">223</a>,
+<a href="#page_259">259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Religion, Minoan: supreme goddess in,
+<a href="#page_244">244</a>, <a href="#page_245">245</a>;
+representations of goddess, <a href="#page_245">245-246</a>;
+identification of, with Greek goddesses, <a href="#page_246">246</a>,
+<a href="#page_247">247</a>; Minoan god identified with Zeus,
+<a href="#page_247">247</a>; absence of temples,
+<a href="#page_248">248</a>; family worship, <a href="#page_248">248</a>;
+shrines <a href="#page_249">249</a>, <a href="#page_250">250</a>;
+sacrifice and ritual, <a href="#page_250">250</a>,
+<a href="#page_251">251</a>; place of King in,
+<a href="#page_251">251-255</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Rhea, <a href="#page_6">6</a>, <a href="#page_7">7</a>,
+<a href="#page_111">111</a>, <a href="#page_122">122</a>,
+<a href="#page_136">136</a>; identified with Minoan goddess,
+<a href="#page_247">247</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Rhiph&aelig;an Mountains, <a href="#page_3">3</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Rhodes, Late Minoan III. work in,
+<a href="#page_209">209</a></p>
+
+<p class="index"><i>Rhyton</i>: from Hagia Triada,
+<a href="#page_103">103</a>; bull's head, from Knossos,
+<a href="#page_113">113</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Ripple ornament, <a href="#page_190">190</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Road, Minoan at Knossos, <a href="#page_110">110</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Rosetta Stone, <a href="#page_80">80</a>,
+<a href="#page_162">162</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">S</p>
+
+<p class="index">Sack of Knossos, <a href="#page_86">86</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sacrifice in Minoan worship,
+<a href="#page_250">250</a>, <a href="#page_252">252</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sagalassians=Shakalsha (?), <a href="#page_166">166</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sahura, King of Fifth Dynasty,
+<a href="#page_146">146</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sais, legend of Atlantis at,
+<a href="#page_257">257-259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Salamis, late Mycen&aelig;an graves at,
+<a href="#page_59">59</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Samson, <a href="#page_167">167</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sarcophagus, the, Hagia Triada,
+<a href="#page_127">127-129</a>, <a href="#page_213">213</a>,
+<a href="#page_250">250</a>, <a href="#page_251">251</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sardinia relics of Minoan civilization,
+<a href="#page_51">51</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sardinians, <a href="#page_212">212</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sat-Hathor, <a href="#page_155">155</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sc&aelig;an Gate, <a href="#page_39">39</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">
+<a name="page_273"><span class="page">Page 273</span></a>
+Schliemann, <a href="#page_1">1</a>, <a href="#page_2">2</a>,
+<a href="#page_5">5</a>; youth of, <a href="#page_34">34-36</a>;
+excavates ancient Troy, <a href="#page_38">38-41</a>,
+<a href="#page_227">227</a>; Mycen&aelig;, <a href="#page_42">42-48</a>;
+discovers Shaft-Graves, <a href="#page_43">43-46</a>; excavates
+Treasury of Atreus, <a href="#page_46">46-48</a>; excavates
+at Orchomenos, <a href="#page_48">48</a>; at Tiryns,
+<a href="#page_48">48</a>, <a href="#page_49">49</a>;
+considers excavations at Knossos, <a href="#page_64">64</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Schnabelkanne, <a href="#page_39">39</a>,
+<a href="#page_192">192</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Script, Minoan, <a href="#page_64">64</a>,
+<a href="#page_78">78-81</a>; Linear, at Gournia,
+<a href="#page_131">131</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sculptor's workshop, <a href="#page_86">86</a>,
+<a href="#page_87">87</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Scylla betrays Megara, <a href="#page_10">10</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Seager, excavations at Mokhlos,
+<a href="#page_40">40</a>, <a href="#page_133">133</a>,
+<a href="#page_134">134</a>, <a href="#page_143">143</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Seal-impressions at Zakro, <a href="#page_133">133</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Seals: Minoan, <a href="#page_143">143</a>; button,
+<a href="#page_143">143</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sea-power: of Minos, <a href="#page_9">9</a>,
+<a href="#page_76">76</a>; of Knossos, <a href="#page_76">76</a>,
+<a href="#page_77">77</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Seats, Minoan, <a href="#page_102">102</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sebek-user, statuette of, <a href="#page_82">82</a>,
+<a href="#page_93">93</a>, <a href="#page_155">155</a>,
+<a href="#page_156">156</a>, <a href="#page_203">203</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">'Sed' Festival in Egypt, <a href="#page_255">255</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sen-mut, tomb of, <a href="#page_160">160-162</a>,
+<a href="#page_207">207</a>, <a href="#page_208">208</a>,
+<a href="#page_259">259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Senusert (Usertsen), II., III.,
+<a href="#page_150">150</a>; III., <a href="#page_199">199</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Shakalsha invade Egypt, <a href="#page_165">165</a>,
+<a href="#page_166">166</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Shield. See Armour</p>
+
+<p class="index">Ships: Minoan, <a href="#page_112">112</a>,
+<a href="#page_223">223</a>; Egyptian, <a href="#page_144">144</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Shoes, Minoan, <a href="#page_213">213</a>,
+<a href="#page_214">214</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Shrines: at Gournia, <a href="#page_130">130</a>,
+<a href="#page_131">131</a>, <a href="#page_250">250</a>; at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_249">249</a>, <a href="#page_250">250</a>,
+<a href="#page_252">252</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sicilians, <a href="#page_212">212</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sicily, <a href="#page_10">10</a>; relics of Minoan
+civilization in, <a href="#page_51">51</a>, <a href="#page_184">184</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sickles, <a href="#page_226">226</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sikels=Shakalsha (?), <a href="#page_166">166</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sinnis slain by Theseus, <a href="#page_11">11</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sistrum on Harvester Vase, <a href="#page_125">125</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sitia, <a href="#page_214">214</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Snake Goddess, <a href="#page_105">105-107</a>,
+<a href="#page_245">245</a>, <a href="#page_250">250</a>; dress of
+votaress of, <a href="#page_215">215</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sneferu, King of Third Dynasty,
+<a href="#page_146">146</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Socrates, <a href="#page_17">17</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Solon, legend of Atlantis,
+<a href="#page_257">257-259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Spain, relics of Minoan civilization in,
+<a href="#page_51">51</a>, <a href="#page_184">184</a>,
+<a href="#page_210">210</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Sparta in Homeric poems, <a href="#page_21">21</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Spratt describes ruins at Knossos
+<a href="#page_63">63</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Spiral, origin of, <a href="#page_48">48</a>,
+<a href="#page_143">143</a>, <a href="#page_144">144</a>,
+<a href="#page_193">193</a>, <a href="#page_194">194</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Staircase: at Knossos, <a href="#page_85">85</a>,
+<a href="#page_86">86</a>; at Ph&aelig;stos, <a href="#page_120">120</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Steles of Shaft-Graves, <a href="#page_43">43</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Stillman, <a href="#page_64">64</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Stirrup vases: at Knossos, <a href="#page_81">81</a>,
+<a href="#page_108">108</a>; at Zafer Papoura, <a href="#page_134">134</a>;
+tomb of Ramses III., <a href="#page_163">163</a>; at Gournia and Hagia
+Triada, <a href="#page_205">205</a>, <a href="#page_210">210</a>;
+prevalence of, in Late Minoan III., <a href="#page_210">210</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">'Stoa Basilike,' <a href="#page_108">108</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Suffixes in Minoan Script, <a href="#page_235">235</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Swords: in Shaft-Graves, <a href="#page_44">44</a>;
+iron, <a href="#page_60">60</a>; bronze, at Zafer Papoura,
+<a href="#page_134">134</a>, <a href="#page_135">135</a>; iron, in Late
+Minoan III., <a href="#page_178">178</a>; bronze, in Late Minoan I.,
+<a href="#page_204">204</a>; from Zafer Papoura,
+<a href="#page_206">206</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">T</p>
+
+<p class="index">Tablets, clay, of Knossos, <a href="#page_78">78-81</a>,
+<a href="#page_110">110</a>, <a href="#page_238">238</a> <i>et seq.</i></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tahuti, <a href="#page_69">69</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tahutmes III., <a href="#page_158">158</a>,
+<a href="#page_161">161</a>, <a href="#page_208">208</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tahutmes IV., <a href="#page_174">174</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Talent, Babylonian, at Knossos and Hagia Triada,
+<a href="#page_141">141</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tarentum, Late Minoan work at
+<a href="#page_209">209</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Telemachus, <a href="#page_22">22</a>,
+<a href="#page_23">23</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tell-el-Amarna: tablets of, <a href="#page_79">79</a>;
+capital of Akhenaten, <a href="#page_163">163</a>; Minoan pottery at,
+<a href="#page_185">185</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tell-es-Safi, Minoan pottery at,
+<a href="#page_140">140</a>, <a href="#page_167">167</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Temple repositories, <a href="#page_104">104-107</a>,
+<a href="#page_172">172</a>, <a href="#page_200">200</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Temples: Egyptian, <a href="#page_25">25</a>; absence
+of, in Minoan religion, <a href="#page_248">248</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Terpander, invention of lyre,
+<a href="#page_128">128</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Teumman, <a href="#page_225">225</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Theatral Area: Knossos, <a href="#page_100">100-104</a>;
+Ph&aelig;stos, <a href="#page_101">101</a>, <a href="#page_197">197</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Thera, Linear Script at, <a href="#page_236">236</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">
+<a name="page_274"><span class="page">Page 274</span></a>
+Theseus, <a href="#page_3">3</a>, <a href="#page_9">9</a>; adventures
+of, <a href="#page_11">11</a>; vanquishes Minotaur,
+<a href="#page_12">12</a>, <a href="#page_13">13</a>; marries and
+deserts Ariadne, <a href="#page_13">13</a>; brings up ring of Minos,
+<a href="#page_13">13</a>, <a href="#page_256">256</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Throne, palace of Knossos, <a href="#page_72">72</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Throne Room: decorations of,
+<a href="#page_72">72</a>; <i>impluvium</i> in,
+<a href="#page_72">72</a>; date of, <a href="#page_206">206</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Thucydides on sea-power of Minos,
+<a href="#page_9">9</a>, <a href="#page_76">76</a>,
+<a href="#page_256">256</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tim&aelig;us, the, legend of Atlantis,
+<a href="#page_257">257-259</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tiryns, <a href="#page_1">1</a>,
+<a href="#page_5">5</a>; in Homeric poems, <a href="#page_22">22</a>;
+wall of, <a href="#page_49">49</a>; frieze, <a href="#page_49">49</a>;
+fresco of bull, <a href="#page_49">49</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tomb paintings, Egyptian, <a href="#page_74">74</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tools, carpenters' and smiths', at Gournia,
+<a href="#page_131">131</a>, <a href="#page_221">221</a>,
+<a href="#page_222">222</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Torcello, Late Minoan work at,
+<a href="#page_209">209</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Toreadors, <a href="#page_88">88-91</a>; figurines of,
+<a href="#page_96">96</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Trees, sacred, <a href="#page_245">245</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Trickle ornament, <a href="#page_202">202</a>,
+<a href="#page_203">203</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Troy, I; siege of, <a href="#page_22">22</a>; site of,
+<a href="#page_37">37</a>; First City, <a href="#page_38">38</a>; Second
+City, <a href="#page_39">39</a>, <a href="#page_40">40</a>,
+<a href="#page_140">140</a>; Sixth City, <a href="#page_40">40</a>,
+<a href="#page_41">41</a>, <a href="#page_51">51</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tsountas, <a href="#page_50">50</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Tyi, Queen, <a href="#page_185">185</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">U</p>
+
+<p class="index">Uashasha invade Egypt, <a href="#page_165">165</a>,
+<a href="#page_166">166</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">V</p>
+
+<p class="index">Vaphio cups, <a href="#page_51">51</a>,
+<a href="#page_109">109</a>, <a href="#page_123">123</a>,
+<a href="#page_161">161</a>, <a href="#page_229">229</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Vases: stone, at Knossos, <a href="#page_81">81</a>,
+<a href="#page_86">86</a>, <a href="#page_143">143</a>; stirrup,
+<a href="#page_81">81</a>, <a href="#page_108">108</a>,
+<a href="#page_134">134</a>; Kamares, <a href="#page_92">92</a>;
+stone, at Mokhlos, <a href="#page_134">134</a>,
+<a href="#page_143">143</a>; at Isopata, <a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Vases &agrave; &Eacute;trier=stirrup vases, <i>q.v.</i></p>
+
+<p class="index">Vasiliki, mottled ware of, <a href="#page_192">192</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Venetian occupation, <a href="#page_63">63</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Villa, Royal, at Knossos,
+<a href="#page_107">107-109</a>, <a href="#page_246">246</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Vine, <a href="#page_227">227</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Virgil, <a href="#page_136">136</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">W</p>
+
+<p class="index">Water-lily cup, <a href="#page_198">198</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Weaving, <a href="#page_227">227</a>,
+<a href="#page_228">228</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Wen-Amon, adventures of, <a href="#page_186">186</a>,
+<a href="#page_187">187</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Windows, <a href="#page_217">217</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Women, position of, in Homeric poems,
+<a href="#page_24">24</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Writing: beginnings of, in &AElig;gean area,
+<a href="#page_80">80</a>, <a href="#page_81">81</a>; Ph&oelig;nician,
+<a href="#page_81">81</a>; Minoan, <a href="#page_234">234-243</a></p>
+
+<p class="center">Z</p>
+
+<p class="index">Zafer Papoura, swords from, <a href="#page_206">206</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Zakkaru invade Egypt, <a href="#page_165">165</a>,
+<a href="#page_166">166</a>, <a href="#page_186">186</a>,
+<a href="#page_187">187</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Zakro: lotus vase from, <a href="#page_204">204</a>;
+seals at, <a href="#page_133">133</a>, <a href="#page_205">205</a>,
+<a href="#page_224">224</a>; houses at, <a href="#page_216">216</a>;
+Minoan town at, <a href="#page_133">133</a>; pottery at,
+<a href="#page_133">133</a>; Zakkaru from, <a href="#page_166">166</a>,
+<a href="#page_187">187</a>; Linear Script at,
+<a href="#page_236">236</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Zakru pirates, <a href="#page_187">187</a></p>
+
+<p class="index">Zeus: birth of, marriage of, to Europa, death and
+burial of, <a href="#page_7">7</a>, <a href="#page_8">8</a>;
+association with Minos, <a href="#page_8">8</a>,
+<a href="#page_105">105</a>, <a href="#page_136">136</a>; Double Axe
+emblem, <a href="#page_70">70</a>; of Labraunda,
+<a href="#page_70">70</a>; fetish idol of, <a href="#page_111">111</a>;
+associations with Dict&aelig;an Cave,
+<a href="#page_136">136</a>, <a href="#page_247">247</a>; identified
+with Minoan god, <a href="#page_247">247</a></p>
+
+
+<p class="center">THE END</p>
+
+<div class="image" style="width: 516px;">
+<a name="plan_knossos"></a>
+<a href="images/knossos_palace_plan.jpg">
+<img src="images/knossos_palace_plan_sm.jpg" width="555" height="473"
+ alt="Plan of the Palace of Knossos"></a>
+
+<p>KEY TO NUMBERS</p>
+
+<table border="0" cellspacing="0">
+<tr><td class="right">1.</td>
+    <td>Northern Entrance and Portico.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">2.</td>
+    <td>Bastion and Guard-House.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">3.</td>
+    <td>Northern Piazza.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">4.</td>
+    <td>Room of the Flower Gatherer.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">5.</td>
+    <td>Room with Stirrup Vases, Walled Pit beneath.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">6.</td>
+    <td>Ante room to Throne Room.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">7, 7.</td>
+    <td>Throne Room with Tank.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">8.</td>
+    <td>Temple Repositories.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">9, 9.</td>
+    <td>East and West Pillar-Rooms.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">10.</td>
+    <td>Court of the Altar.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">11.</td>
+    <td>South Propyl&aelig;um.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">12.</td>
+    <td>Corridor of the Cup Bearer.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">13.</td>
+    <td>Corridor of the Procession.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">14.</td>
+    <td>West Portico.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">15.</td>
+    <td>Long Gallery with Magazines on West Side.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">16.</td>
+    <td>North-West House with Bronze Vessels.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">17.</td>
+    <td>Northern Bath.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">18.</td>
+    <td>Deposit of Pictographic Tablets.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">19.</td>
+    <td>North-Eastern Magazines.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">20.</td>
+    <td>Corridor of the Draught-Board.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">21.</td>
+    <td>Room of the Olive Press.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">23, 23.</td>
+    <td>Hall of the Colonnades, with Light-Well.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">24, 24, 24.</td>
+    <td>Hall of the Double Axes, with Light-Well.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">25, 25, 25, 25.</td>
+    <td>Queen's Megaron, with Light-Wells.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">26.</td>
+    <td>Deposit of Ivory Figurines.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">27, 27.</td>
+    <td>Built Drains.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">28.</td>
+    <td>Court of the Sanctuary.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">29.</td>
+    <td>South-East House with Pillar-Room.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">30.</td>
+    <td>Court of the Oil-Spout.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">31.</td>
+    <td>Magazines with large Pithoi.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">32.
+    <td>East Bastion.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">33.
+    <td>Early Buildings, partly in continuous use.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">34.
+    <td>Sculptor's Workshop (on upper floor).</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">A.
+    <td>Altar-Base in Central Court.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">B.
+    <td>Shrine of the Snake Goddess.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">C, D.
+    <td>Altar-Bases in West Court.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">E.
+    <td>Shrine of Dove Goddess and Double Axes.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">F.
+    <td>Altar-Base in Court of the Sanctuary.</td></tr>
+<tr><td class="right">G.
+    <td>Altar Base in Court of the Altar.</td></tr>
+</table>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,8012 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sea-Kings of Crete, by James Baikie
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Sea-Kings of Crete
+
+Author: James Baikie
+
+Release Date: September 19, 2006 [EBook #19328]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** 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
+
+PHAESTOS, 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, Mycenae
+   III. Wall of Sixth City, Troy
+    IV. The Lion Gate, Mycenae
+     V. (1) Vaulted Passage in Wall, Tiryns; (2) Beehive Tomb
+        (Treasury of Atreus), Mycenae
+    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, Phaestos
+ XXVII. The Harvester Vase, Hagia Triada
+XXVIII. Sarcophagus from Hagia Triada
+  XXIX. Minoan Pottery
+   XXX. Late Minoan Vase from Mycenae
+  XXXI. Kamares Vases from Phaestos and Hagia Triada
+ XXXII. Goldsmiths' Work from Beehive Tombs, Phaestos
+
+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 AEgean 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, Mycenae, 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 Daedalus, 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 Rhiphaean
+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 AEgean stock filled the roles 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 Mycencae,
+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
+Phaestos began to be revealed in 1900 and the subsequent years that
+it became manifest that what was known as the Mycenaean 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 AEgean 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 AEgean 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 Idaean or the Dictaean
+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 Dictaean 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
+"Caesar," 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 Dictaean
+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 AEgean, 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, Daedalus. 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 AEgeus, 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 AEgeus 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 AEgeus
+and the Princess Aithra of Troezen. He had been brought up by his
+mother at Troezen, and on arriving at early manhood had set out
+to make his way to the Court of AEgeus 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, AEgeus,
+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. AEgeus 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 AEgeus,
+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 AEgean 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. Daedalus,
+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
+Daedalus 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 Daedalus 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 Daedalus; 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 Daedalus, 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, MYCENAE (_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 Praesos, 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 Mycenae; 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 Mycenae, 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 Achaean 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 Achaeans, 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 Achaean 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 Achaeans 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 Hephaestos, 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 Hephaestos 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 Mycenaean 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, MYCENAE (_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 archaeological
+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 AEneas 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 archaeology, 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), MYCENAE (_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 AEgean; 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 Mycenae,
+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 Atreidae 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 AEgean, ornamented frequently with incised
+patterns which are filled in with a white chalky substance. The
+stratum of debris 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 debris, 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 archaeologists 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 Scaean 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 Doerpfeld, 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
+debris 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
+Mycenaean, 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 Mycenae, the historic capital of the King of men,
+Agamemnon, with a view to the proving of his second theory--the
+burial of the Atreidae within the Acropolis of Mycenae. 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 archaeology 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 Mycenae 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 Mycenae
+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 Mycenae, the 'well-polished circle of stones' on which
+the elders of the city sat for councilor judgment, as Hephaestos
+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 debris 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 Achaeans 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 Mycenae. 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 facade 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 facade 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 Mycenae, Schliemann, in 1880-81,
+excavated at Orchomenos in Boeotia 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 Mycenaean 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 Doerpfeld, 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 Mycenae 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 Phylakopi (Melos), while from Vaphio, near
+Amyklae 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. Doerpfeld's hands, yielded from the Sixth City the evidence
+of an Asiatic civilization truly contemporaneous with that of Mycenae.
+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 AEgean 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 Mycenaean 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 AEgean
+not much shorter than in the Nile Valley.[*]
+
+[Footnote *: Hogarth, 'Authority and Archaeology,' 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 Mycenae were
+not native but borrowed, the Phoenicians being generally held to
+be the medium through which the influence of the East had filtered
+into the AEgean area. As time has gone on, however, the Phoenicians
+have gradually come to bulk less and less in the view of students
+of the AEgean problem. It is no longer held that they contributed
+anything original to the development of Mycenaean 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 Phoenician 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 AEgean gave quite as much as it borrowed, and that its
+artists were sufficiently great to have originated their own culture.
+Mycenaean, and still more the great Minoan art of which Mycenaean 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 Mycenae, 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 Mycenaeans 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 Mycenaean
+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 Mycenaean culture have been discovered.
+Foremost, of course, we have Mycenae itself. To Homer, 'golden,'
+'broad-wayed' Mycenae is the seat of the great leader of all the
+Achaeans, the King of men, Agamemnon; it is also the chief seat of
+the culture which goes by its name. Orchomenos, Pylos, Lacedaemon,
+Attica, all prominent in the poems, are also well-known seats of
+Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaeans
+prevailed.
+
+The Homeric house also finds a striking parallel in the details
+of the Mycenaean 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 Mycenae, 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 Mycenae 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenae 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 Mycenaean
+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 Mycenae. 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 Mycenaean
+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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean
+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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean
+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
+Mycenaean civilization.
+
+The same remark applies to the differences of equipment between
+the warriors of the Mycenaean and those of the Homeric period. The
+Mycenaeans 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean shield 'like a tower.' Periphetes of Mycenae 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 Mycenaean 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 Achaean 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 Mycenaean
+or Minoan stock who created it had passed under the dominion of the
+invading Achaean overlords. The Achaean invasion was not, like that
+which succeeded it, subversive of the great culture that belonged to
+the conquered Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean culture, still existing, though under Achaean
+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 Mycenaean
+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 Daedalus, 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
+Kalochaerinos made some slight excavations, and found a few great
+jars or _pithai_, and some fragments of Mycenaean 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 Phoenicians 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
+Dictaean 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
+AEgean 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 Mycenae. 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenae. 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean 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 Daedalus 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
+Daedalus 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 Mycenaean 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 debris 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 Mycenaean Age at Tiryns and Mycenae are, so to speak,
+buried in fortifications. Their vast walls, 57 feet thick in some
+parts at Tiryns, 46 feet at Mycenae, 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 Mycenae, 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 AEgean 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 AEgean. 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 Mycenaean 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
+Mycenaean 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 formulae 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
+Mycenaean 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
+Phoenician, 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
+Mycenaean 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 Phoenician 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 Mycenaean 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 debris
+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
+debris 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaeans
+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.
+Gillieron, 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenae, 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 Mycenae; 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 Phaestos
+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 Phaestos; 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 Daedalus 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
+faience, 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 faience; 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 faience being taken by gold-foil and crystal plaques.
+
+Some of the small faience 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 dais, 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 dais,
+and here stand the broken fragments of a gypsum throne. A fine
+stone lamp of lilac gypsum stands on the second step of the dais
+(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 Praetor 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 debris 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 Graeco-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 AEgean.
+
+[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 Mycencae 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 debris 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 Lempriere's 'Classical Dictionary' or Rollin's
+'Ancient History.'
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+PHAESTOS, 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 AEgean civilization.
+
+Both in the Iliad and the Odyssey Phaestos is mentioned along with
+Knossos as one of the chief towns of Crete; and it is at and near
+Phaestos 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 Phaestos, 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 Archaeological 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 Phaestos, 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 Phaestos 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 Phaestos overthrew their northern brethren of the greater
+palace, but the evidence seems somewhat scanty to bear such an
+inference.
+
+After the catastrophe at Phaestos, 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 Phaestos 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 Phaestos 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 Phaestos are comparable for
+spaciousness even with the finest of those at Knossos, and, indeed,
+the Megaron, so called (wrongly), of Phaestos is a more spacious
+apartment than the Hall of the Double Axes at the sister palace,
+the area of the Phaestos 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 Phaestos 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 Phaestos 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
+Phaestos, proved sufficiently fruitful to compensate the Italian
+explorers for the incomprehensible barrenness of Phaestos. 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 archaeological 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 Phaestos 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 Phaestos 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 Mycenae 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. Phaestos
+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, Phaestos, 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 faience 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 aegis 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 AEgean 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 Phoenicians 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 Mycenae graves) gold bands with engraved and _repousse_
+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 Mycenae. 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 Dictaean 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 Dictaean
+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 Dictaean 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenae and
+Tiryns. Phaestos 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 AEgean.
+
+
+
+
+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 AEgean site, nor any object
+unquestionably AEgean on a Mesopotamian one. But it has been suggested
+that certain carved ivories found by Layard at Nimrud in the Palace
+of Sennacherib show manifest traces of AEgean influence; and in
+Southern Syria, at all events--at Gezer, Tell-es-Safi, and
+elsewhere--indisputably AEgean 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 Saites 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 AEgeans 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 Archaeology,
+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
+Archaeology, 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 Phaestos 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 faience 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 faience of the time is
+of strictly conventional type, with black design on blue; but the
+Cretan emancipated himself from these limits, and made his faience
+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 Phoenicians, 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 Phoenicians 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 Phoenicians 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 faience 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 Mycenaeans 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 Mycenaean '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 Achaeans; 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 AEgean 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 Phoenicia, 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 Achaean 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 AEgean. 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
+Phaestos, 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, Phaestos, 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 faience 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 Mycenae 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
+amphorae, exquisitely carved. The King and his courtiers were served
+in costly vessels of gold, silver, and bronze _repousse_ 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 Phaestos 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 Phaestos 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 AEgospotami, 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 Achaeans, 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 Mycenaean 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 Praesos, 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 Praesos
+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, Achaeans, 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
+Phaestos were overthrown, there was nothing to hinder the gradual
+drifting in of the wandering tribes of the AEgean 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 Mycenaean
+civilization.
+
+We know that long before the Homeric poems took shape the Achaeans
+had established themselves as the ruling caste in the Argolid,
+in Laconia, and elsewhere; and that the pressure had begun even
+while Mycenae was at the height of its power is suggested by the
+figures on one of the steles of the Circle-Graves, where a Mycenaean
+chieftain in his chariot is pursuing an enemy whose leaf-shaped
+sword shows that he was one of the Danubian race. The Mycenaean
+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 Mycenae. The
+Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean,
+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 Mycenae.' Pressed upon thus by the warlike Achaeans, perhaps
+already forced from their homes on the mainland, the Mycenaeans
+of Tiryns and Mycenae 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
+Achaeans, and, later still, the Dorians, followed in the wake of the
+Mycenaean 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
+Idaean 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 AEgean, 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 AEgean 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 Mycenaean pottery found at Tell-el-Amarna shows that there was
+still an opening in Egypt for the products of AEgean art at least as
+late as the reign of Akhenaten; and it is more than probable that
+in Egypt many of the _emigres_ of the Minoan _debacle_ 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 _emigres_, 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 AEgean.
+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 archaeologists. 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 AEgean.
+
+[Footnote *: 'The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age,' p.
+9.]
+
+[Footnote **: Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology,
+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 Phaestos. 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 Phaestos shows no
+evidence of such a disaster at this point has roused the suspicion
+that the Lords of Phaestos 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 faience, 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, PHAESTOS (_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 'Buegelkanne,'
+'Vases a Etrier,' 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenae, so that now for the first time Minoan
+can be equated with Mycenaean. 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 dais 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 Mycenaeans 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 Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean art. At Ialysos in Rhodes, and in the lower
+town of Mycenae, 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 faience 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 Mycenae,
+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 faience
+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 faience 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 Phoenicians
+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 AEgean 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 algae, 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 Mycenae 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 Phaestos
+(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
+AEgean 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 Phaestos 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
+Mycenaean 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 Mycenae, 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 Grece primitive: l'Art mycenien,'
+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 Phaestos 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 AEgean area. The inscription on
+the libation table found by Dr. Evans at the Dictaean Cave belongs
+to this class, and also that upon the similar object found by Mr.
+Currelly at Palaikastro.
+
+[Illustration XXX: LATE MINOAN VASE FROM MYCENAE (_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 PHAESTOS 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 archaeologist.
+
+Into quite a different category from any of the ordinary Minoan
+tablets comes the disc found at Phaestos 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 Phoenicians
+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 Phoenician 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 Phoenicians 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 Phoenician 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, Phaestos, 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 faience 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 Mycenae, 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 Achaeans 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-Mycenaean 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 Dictaean 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 roles. 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 Mycenae 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
+Phaestos 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 Dictaean 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 AEgean from the once-omnipotent Minoans
+to the Achaeans 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, PHAESTOS
+(_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 AEgean
+area; but in Egypt there lingered for centuries a tradition which
+did more justice to the glories of Minoan Crete. In the Timaeus,
+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 Timaeus 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 Phoenician 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 Phaestos).
+                  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 Phaestos 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 Mycenaean 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-Phoenician Script._ (Dr.
+Evans's earlier volume on the Minoan writing.) _Essai de Classification
+des Epoques de la Civilisation Minoenne._ (Short summary of the
+Minoan periods.) _Mycoenean 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 Mycenaean
+discoveries up to 1901.) Various articles in the Proceedings of the
+Society of Biblical Archaeology, 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 Archoeology_; (Contains summary of
+earlier Mycenaean 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 Mycenaean 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 mediaeval and modern times _A Short
+Popular History of Crete_, by J. H. Freese, may be consulted.
+
+_Antiquites Cretoises_, by G. Maraghiannis, Candia, Crete, gives
+fifty excellent plates of Minoan relics, chiefly from Phaestos and
+Hagia Triada, with a short introduction by Signor Pernier, of the
+Italian Archaeological Mission.
+
+
+
+
+APPENDIX
+
+TRANSLATIONS OF THE PHAESTOS DISK
+
+Two translations of the Phaestos 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
+Phaestos, 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
+Achaeans: position of, in Homeric poems, 23; manners of, 26; invasion of
+  Greece, 62; influence of, on Cretan customs, 178; conquest of Mycenae,
+  182; modifications of Minoan religion by, 247
+Achilles: arms of, 27; shield of, 27, 28, 58, 74
+AEgean, 13
+AEgeus, 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 Dictaean 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 Dictaean 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 Achaeans, 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; Mycenaean, 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 Mycenae, 46-48, 56; at Orchomenos, 48, 56; at Phaestos, 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
+Buegelkanne=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 Daedalus 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
+
+Daedalus, 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
+Dictaean Cave, 7, 8, 64, 70, 136, 137, 247, 254
+Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 136
+Dionysos, 252
+Disc, hieroglyphic, of Phaestos, 121, 241, 242
+Dolphin Fresco, 224
+Dor, 187
+Dorian (Dorians): conquest, 2, 4, 33, 62; invasion of Crete, 178, 210
+Doerpfeld, 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 Dictaean 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; faience, 105, 106, 156; banjo, 193
+Flute on Hagia Triada sarcophagus, 127, 128
+Fortifications: of Knossos, 74, 75, 76; of Tiryns and Mycenae, 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
+Gillieron, 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 Phaestos, 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
+Hephaestos 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 Mycenaean civilization, 51, 52; on
+  bull's head _rhyton_, 113; excavations at Zakro, 133, 224; at Dictaean
+  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 Daedalus, 14
+Ida, Mount, 92; Kamares cave on, 197
+Idaean 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
+Kalochaerinos, 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 Dictaean 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 Phaestos, 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 Mycenaean, 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 Daedalus, 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
+Mycenae, 1, 5; in Homeric poems, 22; Lion Gate of, 42, 43; Treasuries of,
+  42, 43, 46-48; Shaft-Graves, 43-46
+Mycenaean 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
+Nimrud, 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 Daedalus, 14
+Periphetes slain by Hector, 61
+Pernier, Dr., stele at Gortyna, 182; work at Phrestos, 118
+Perrot, M., Minoan writing, 233
+Petrie, Professor: discovers AEgean 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
+Phaestos, 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
+Phoenicians: 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
+Praesians, account of Greek settlement in Crete, 180
+Praesos, 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
+Rhiphaean 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 Mycenaean 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
+Scaean Gate, 39
+Schliemann, 1, 2, 5; youth of, 34-36; excavates ancient Troy, 38-41, 227;
+  Mycenae, 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 Phaestos, 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; Phaestos, 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
+Timaeus, 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 a Etrier=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 AEgean area, 80, 81; Phoenician, 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 Dictaean 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 Propylaeum.
+             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.)]
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Sea-Kings of Crete, by James Baikie
+
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