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PREFACE 7

INDEX 93

The Cupbearer " 39

Polychrome Cups " 62

Mr. Veniselos was brought up in Crete. It is not the first time in history that Crete has passed on her products to Greece and to Europe. Four thousand years ago the very foundations of Greek and of European civilization were laid in Crete, which was then mistress of the sea and the dominant factor in the AEgean. Yet we none of us were aware of this until Sir Arthur Evans, a few years ago, began digging in Crete. When Mr. Veniselos was a boy the very existence of a prehistoric Cretan civilization was unknown. Our knowledge of it has been almost entirely revealed since 1900. In this short time the spades of Sir Arthur Evans have revolutionized our whole conception of the early history of Europe. Excavation at Knossos, Phaestos and other sites in Crete has disclosed the existence of a people whose form of civilization, the earliest in Europe, flourished long before recorded history begins. It has told us about their daily life, games, amusements, art, religion, writing ; their physical type, dress, the homes they lived in. The fashion of the women's dresses, as revealed on ornaments and other art relics, with an open neck and flounced skirts, made a French scholar exclaim: "Mais ce sont des Parisiennes!"

A big palace, as big as Buckingham Palace, has been unearthed at Knossos. It has a drainage system which an eminent Italian archaeologist, Dr. Halbherr, has described as "absolutely English," and which certainly forestalls the hydraulic engineering of the nineteenth century. This four thousand years ago.

The digging in Crete has created all the excitement of exploration. When the painted panel was discovered giving a sensational bull-baiting scene from a Minoan circus-show, or the Phaestos disc covered with picture writing, or the fresco painting of the Cupbearer at Knossos, the excitement reached its height. It was not confined to the excavators. An old workman who was on night duty watching the Cupbearer fresco during the delicate operation of its removal, was woke up by disturbing dreams and declared after that "The whole place was full of ghosts."

Up to the last half-century the whole story of classical Greece, as taught in the schools and in the Universities, was regarded as something original, as the beginning of things springing suddenly, like the mythical Athene, into life. The sculpture, architecture, philosophy, oratory, and drama of the fifth century B.C., were accepted unquestioningly and with awe as the spontaneous first-fruits of Greek genius. The history of Greece, as then understood, went back only to the eighth century B.C., beyond which were the Dark Ages and nothing. Before the time of AEschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides it is true there had been a problematic poet, half mythical, half real, elusive and shadowy, known as Homer. The fact that he was represented as having been born in nine separate places was an illustration of the vagueness in which the poet's identity was enveloped. He had sung of deeds and of men who seemed to echo from those Dark Ages. Whatever speculation there was as to Homer himself and his identity, no one ever doubted that if he was a real person he certainly was the first real person that European history could establish. During the last twenty years he has been shown to have been not the beginning but the end of an enormous phase of Greek and European history.

Now that the real beginnings of Greek civilization are beginning to be known, it strikes one as remarkable that up to now they should have been so completely buried in two senses. It is the more remarkable because a good deal was known about other corresponding origins in the Near East. In Egypt and Babylonia the old traditions had been passed on by later generations to Greek writers, who preserved, imperfectly it is true, the necessary connecting links. In the case of Greek civilization not only were there no stepping-stones back to the corresponding phase; it did not even seem to occur to anybody that there had been such a phase. The unquestioning and complacent acceptance as myths of the epic stories which centred round Agamemnon and the Homeric heroes was never challenged up to the middle of the last century. The historian Grote, for instance, declared that "to analyse the fables and to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts" would be "a fruitless attempt" .

Such was the outlook of Grote's contemporaries. Then an important thing happened. A poor boy named Schliemann had been told these Greek fables by his father, and to his child's mind the stories appeared as literally true. One day a drunken miller came into the grocer's shop where he worked, and began to recite some lines of Homer. Schliemann was fascinated, and, so the story goes, spent all his spare cash in whisky wherewith to encourage the miller to repeat the lines again and again; and then prayed God that he might some day have the happiness of learning Greek himself. His literal faith in the "myths" remained with him, and he made up his mind to find the walls of Troy. Being poor he had to spend a lifetime of hard saving before he was in a position to put his faith to the test. Late in life, however, he had saved enough money for the purpose and went to Hissarlik, the spot in Asia Minor where the town of Troy was said to have stood. He began digging into the earth, and to his joy discovered the buried walls of a town. It was proved later that the walls he discovered belonged not to the Homeric city, as Schliemann naturally assumed, but to another city which had existed on the same site a thousand years earlier. He had dug within and throu to call me that, eh?omeric walls without discovering them. From Troy he went to Mycenae and Tiryns on the Greek mainland, and there discovered the visible relics of the Homeric stories centering on the Greek mainland. Schliemann's achievement was to establish the historical existence of the "Mycenaean civilization." We now know that this civilization flourished from about 1400 B.C. to 1100 B.C. It is a romantic story of the way in which Schliemann justified his simple faith in the historic background of the Homeric poems. Schliemann deserved the explorer's satisfaction which he enjoyed, and which manifested itself on one occasion when he sent a telegram to the King of the Hellenes announcing that he had found the tomb of Agamemnon at Mycenae. One wishes that it had been literally true, as Schliemann thought it was. In any case it was he who laid the foundations for the whole structure of modern prehistoric research in the Eastern Mediterranean.

The most exciting and the most important part of that research has been the opening up of Crete. The Cretan discoveries of Sir Arthur Evans and other excavators, British, American and Italian, have proved that the Mycenaean culture revealed by Schliemann was itself a late and even decadent phase of a great Mediterranean civilization which had its centre in Crete.

The primitive AEgean people played a great part in the activities of the Near East. They existed for several thousand years, and there are traces of their activity on every shore of the Eastern Mediterranean. Crete, as Homer says, was the land "in the midst of the wine-dark ocean, fair and rich, with the waters all around" . It was the natural centre towards which the mainlands of Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt converged, especially as its irregular coast afforded good harbours for the small ships of that time.

The first settlement of man in Crete took place at Knossos, in the later or "Neolithic" Stone Age. This fact is established by the nature of the relics found at the lowest level in the excavations, the level which represents the earliest period in time. Phaestos, on the south side of the island, received its first inhabitants at a later date, as is made clear by the pottery that has been discovered there. This is a typical instance of the value of pottery as archaeological evidence. The earliest ware found at Knossos is unornamented; the next is improved by "incised lines"--that is, lines cut in the clay with a pointed instrument and often filled in, for greater effect, with a white substance. At Phaestos, on the other hand, the pottery found lowest down is already in this second stage in its artistic evolution, the inference being that the men who settled there took the art with them at the point to which it had been developed by the Knossians.

With the fall of Knossos, which took place shortly before 1400 B.C.--I adopt Dr. Burrows's dating--the centre of influence in the AEgean passed over from Crete to the mainland of Greece, and the true "Mycenaean" period started. Thereafter followed the Dark Ages, which themselves immediately preceded "historical" Greece. Recorded Greek history begins about 800 B.C.

If the nine Minoan periods into which Sir Arthur Evans has divided the Bronze Age in Crete are primarily a fanciful play upon the "nine seasons" of King Minos's reign in Knossos, the system of dating itself is by no means fanciful. It rests on a solid basis. It has been made possible mainly by the fact that the ancient Cretans were sea-farers. Cretan products were exported to Egypt, and have been found there alongside Egyptian deposits of more or less known date. Hence a system of sequence-dating can be established. It is obvious that a Cretan vase found side by side with an Egyptian vase of 2500 B.C. belongs to an earlier period than one found with deposits of 1500 B.C. This fixing of landmarks is the first step. The second is to assign to them absolute dates in the terms of our own chronology. Owing to the fact that Egyptian dates are known in terms of our own, and that Egyptian ware has been found in Crete as well as Cretan in Egypt, equation is possible. The chief difficulty is that Egyptian chronology is itself variously interpreted, and one particular version has had to be fixed on for comparison. Three convenient and easily-remembered landmarks have been established:

Early Minoan II corresponds to Dynasty VI in the early Dynastic Period of Egypt, circa 2500 B.C. As the evidence for this equation is slight compared with that for the other two, it must be accepted with reserve at present as a good working hypothesis.

It is pottery again that has been the basis of this chronological reconstruction. The beautiful Cretan many-coloured ware of the Middle Minoan period, exported to Egypt during the Middle Kingdom and found with objects of the Twelfth Dynasty, forms the chief equating factor between those two periods, and the other equations are based on similar facts. Pottery can be made in some cases to fix approximate dates without the help of equations. Buildings, for instance, cannot have stood later than the date of the particular kind of pottery found in their ruins. It may be remarked in passing that the Egyptian trade thus indicated by the remains of Cretan pottery was responsible for a great improvement in that pottery. Towards the end of the early Minoan period the two great inventions of the firing furnace and the potter's wheel were brought to Crete from Egypt. Before that time the vases had been roughly shaped by hand and hardened in the sun. They now were "thrown" with such a mastery of technique as to attain egg-shell thinness.

Traces of commercial intercourse overseas can be found as far back as the Neolithic Age. Among the deposits of stone implements in Crete are great quantities of obsidian knives, and the only source of obsidian in the AEgean was the island of Melos. Obsidian is a kind of volcanic glass which flakes off into layers, giving a natural edge. Excavators, who are as childish as most people, have shaved, and have had near shaves, with obsidian knives.

It is probable that the Minoan Empire had a navy as well as a merchant marine. Minos was commonly represented as "Ruler of the Waves," and the Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, refer to him as a mythical character celebrated as the first possessor of a fleet. The extent of the Minoan Empire can be gauged by the survival of many trading stations and naval outposts on all the shores of the AEgean, from Sicily in the East to Gaza in the West, which bore the name "Minoa." There was a bad chapter, according to tradition, in the Empire's history. When the King's son Androgeos went to Athens to compete in the games, he won everything, and was killed in jealousy; and the powerful Minos therefore decreed that seven Athenian boys and seven girls should be sent every nine years to be eaten by the Minotaur, a monster half man, half bull, which lived in the maze called the Labyrinth. That happened twice; but on the third occasion the hero Theseus volunteered to go as one of the victims; and with the aid of Ariadne, the King's daughter, who fell in love with him, he killed the monster. She gave him a sword and some string, which he fastened to the entrance of the maze as he went inside. He was thus able to find his way out again. Theseus had promised his father, the old King AEgeus, that if he returned alive, his ship would show white sails in place of the usual black, so that the news of his safety could be read in the distance. Whether in his elation or in his hurry to leave Naxos, where he had deserted Ariadne, Theseus forgot his promise, and AEgeus, watching from the cliffs, and seeing that the sails were black, threw himself in despair into the sea. Hence the "AEgean" Sea. The discovery of Ariadne by the god Bacchus is the subject of a famous picture, now in the National Gallery, by Rubens.

Minos meanwhile reaped what he sowed. Daedalus, the architect of the Labyrinth, also fell a victim to the King's displeasure, and, making himself wings, fled to Sicily. His son Icarus, who went with him, flew too near to the sun; the wax which fastened his wings melted, and he fell into the sea. Minos pursued Daedalus to Sicily, and was killed by treachery. His subjects went on a punitive expedition to the island, but never returned, and Crete was overrun by strangers.

That is legend. It is a fact, however, that the Minoan Empire did come to a sudden and violent end. Remnants of it--"the men from Keftiu" , as the Egyptians called them--landed on the shores of Asia Minor, and finally settled in Palestine as the Philistines of the Bible. The mists of legend are clearing. The huge palace at Knossos is one of the solidest sights revealed. In its bewildering corridors, staircases, and rooms one recognizes the Labyrinth itself--a recognition which is confirmed by evidence disclosed within the palace.

In further excavation carried out in the early part of this year Sir Arthur Evans discovered what he describes as "the opening of an artificial cave, with three roughly-cut steps leading down to what can only be described as a lair adapted for some great beast." Lest fact should overleap itself into fable again, Sir Arthur adds:--"But here it is better for imagination to draw rein."

The stories of Minos and the Minotaur came to be regarded by classical Greece with something like awe. A ship, supposed to have been the one that took Theseus to Knossos, was preserved and was sent every year with special sacrifices to Delos. During its absence Athens was in a state of solemnity, and no acts were performed which were thought to involve a public stain. The execution of Socrates, for instance, was postponed thirty days till its return.

"And in Crete is Knossos, a great city, and in it Minos ruled for nine seasons, the bosom friend of mighty Zeus" . Those "nine seasons" were long periods of varied activity. Ancient Crete was the home of an artistic, commercial and imperial people--there was a Minoan Empire--and Knossos, the capital of Crete, held the palace of Minos.

The Palace at Knossos was built on the slope of a low hill--the hill now known as "tou tselebe he kephala" or the Gentleman's Head--which overlooks a secluded valley, three and a half miles from the north coast of the island. It thus escaped the roving eye of passing pirates, and at the same time commanded a view, from a neighbouring hill, of the Minoan ships which lay beached in the harbour. That fleet was practically its only defence. Knossos had no wall of fortification. Like pre-war London she depended on her island security and on her command of the seas. She was not exposed, as were the mainland cities of Mycenae and Tiryns, and as modern Paris, to the danger of invasion by land. The lack of fortification was one of the first points that struck the excavator. In his report of the first season's work , Sir Arthur Evans says: "The extent and character of the outer walls are not yet apparent, but it is clear that while the compact castles of the Argolid were built for defence, this Cretan palace with its spacious courts and broad corridors was designed mainly with an eye to comfort and luxury" .

There were minor fortifications, chiefly near the north gate, consisting of a guard-house and bastions, but strategic considerations did not contribute to the main architecture at all.

It is the last magnificent palace, built on the ruins of 1600 B.C., that predominates in to-day's ruins; in it the Cretans reached the height of their culture. This period, to which belongs what is known as the "Palace Style" in art, was as short-lived as it was brilliant. Within fifty years the palace was raided and burnt, and that was the end of Ancient Crete; for the same invaders who sacked Knossos also destroyed the palace at Phaestos.

It is lucky, however, that Minoan libraries were made not of paper, but of clay tablets. They were preserved, not destroyed, by the fire. The baking they then underwent enabled them to survive the dampness of the soil, and they remain to this day, a potentI know your tricks well enough. I have striven to live peaceably with all men, but you have sorely tried me on various occasions. Whatever good I have done in this parish, you have endeavoured to undo it by your scoffs and actions. I often wonder why you do such things to oppose me."

Into the captain's face came an expression of surprise mingled with anger. He had never heard the clergyman speak to him so plainly before, and he resented it.

"You have had your say, parson, and I have the cow," he retorted, "so we are quits. Come and take her out of my yard if ye dare."

"I don't intend to try, captain. If you wish to injure your own soul by stealing Brindle you may do so. I can get another, only it will be hard on the little chap not to get his milk. I see it is no use for us to continue this conversation any further," and the clergyman turned to go.

"Hold on, parson," the captain cried, as he took a quick step forward. "D'ye mean the wee lad which was left at yer door t'other night?"

"Why, yes," the clergyman replied, in surprise, as he turned around. "How did you hear about him?"

"H'm, ye can't keep anything in this place a secret fer twenty-four hours. Trust the women to find out, especially about a baby, ha, ha!"

"Well, what of it?" and the parson looked keenly into the captain's eyes.

"Ob, nothin', except that if the wee chap has to go without his milk because I have Brindle,ely broader than the strip of buildings on the north and south. The bulk of the building was, in fact, divided up between these two wings, the one on the west standing higher up the hillside and having fewer storeys than the one on the east, whose foundations sloped down to the valley. Beyond the west wing there was another court--the meeting-place for the people of the town and the people of the palace; and out to the north-west a smaller building--the Little Palace--connected with the palace proper by what Sir Arthur Evans has called "the oldest paved road in Europe," while a little to the north-east was the Royal Villa.

If you follow the course of this paved road as it approaches the Palace, you will see a small open space, forty feet by thirty, enclosed on two sides by rising tiers of steps with a raised platform in the corner between them. This was the theatre. Some scholars identify it with the dancing-place which, so tradition tells us, "Daedalus wrought in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne" ; although Sir Arthur Evans thinks the choros was in a Palace Court. It would hold about 500 spectators, who made part or all of the "great throng that surrounded the lovely dancing-place, full of glee" . No doubt the boxing contests and other forms of sport were held there. The Cretans, to judge by the pictures which have been discovered, were given to strenuous and exciting, possibly cruel, forms of sport. A painted panel depicts a bull-fighting scene. In it are two girls and a boy, the girls distinguished from the boy by their white skin, although all three wear the same sort of "cowboy" dress. A bull, head down, is charging one of the girls, who grips its horns in the attempt, apparently, to turn a somersault over its back, a feat which the boy is represented as in the process of accomplishing. He is half-way over, and the second girl stands ready to catch him.

Fifty yards to the east of the theatre is the northern entrance of the palace, which leads directly into the central court. Round this court are grouped the various rooms of the palace.

The plan of the palace of Knossos is at first sight rather confusing, especially when one reflects that it represents only the ground floor of the original building and that one has to imagine, in some places two, and in others perhaps three storeys of rooms above it. If this is the old labyrinth of legend, no wonder, you think, that Theseus needed his Ariadne to show him a way out of it; and that Daedalus, who built it, could himself find no other means of escape but by flying straight up into the air!

But it is the nature of legend to exaggerate; and one can easily understand how, years after the destruction of the palace, the deserted ruins with their ghostly corridors and chambers would create the impression of an "inextricable maze" which was crystallized by tradition and became the setting for so many of the Cretan stories. As it stood in the days of Minos, the palace would not, of course, be anything so fantastic. The arrangement of the rooms and corridors, though on a great and elaborate scale, was based on a simple plan. The mass of buildings in the west wing of the palace is divided into two halves by a long corridor running north and south, those in the east wing by one running east and west, and the four divisions thus made fall into a regular scheme.

On the other side of the central corridor of the west wing are the rooms in which State and religious functions were held. In the Throne Room, which is almost intact, the magnificent throne of Minos is still standing, carved out of solid stone, and along the wall on each side of it are the stone benches on which his counsellors sat. This would be the chief room of the Minoan Government, in which foreign ambassadors were received and the affairs of State generally administered; important cases of justice would also be settled there, and Minos would be Supreme Judge. It will be remembered that Minos was not only the legislative head of a great sea empire. Being of divine origin himself, he is represented as a great Law-giver and Priest of Zeus, holding converse with the god every nine years in the Dictaean cave and receiving from him, like the Moses of the Old Testament, a famous code of laws which held good throughout the period of the Minoan Empire.

At his death, in accordance with the belief that men in the Lower World carried on the duties of their lifetime, he became a Judge of the Dead. Recounting his visit to the nether regions, Odysseus says: "Then I saw Minos, the famed son of Zeus, with his golden sceptre, dealing out justice to the dead, as he sat there; and around him, their King, the dead asked concerning their rights, sitting and standing, in the wide-gated house of Hades" .

Leaving the west wing of the palace and crossing the central court, you descend into the east wing by the Great Staircase which, even when found, was in a surprising state of preservation, and which by the end of 1910 had had the remains of no fewer than five flights restored to their original position. This staircase was traversed, as its discoverer said, "some three and a half millenniums back by kings and queens of Minos' stock, on their way from the scenes of their public and sacerdotal functions in the west wing of the palace to the more private quarters of the royal household." These quarters occupy the south-east corner of the palace, built on the slope of the hill and overlooking the valley. Approaching them from the central corridor which runs due east from the central court, you pass first through the men's halls--the Hall of the Colonnades and the Hall of the Double Axes--and thence by a dark crooked corridor, called from its shape the Dog's Leg Corridor, the effect of which was "to enhance the privacy of the rooms beyond," you come to the Queen's Megaron, and the ladies' apartments. A megaron was a sort of hall with columns across it, open at one end to let in the light. In other parts of the building, light was admitted by means of shafts sunk from the roof to the ground floor.

The queen's megaron is especially luxurious; it is decorated on a principle which, as Sir Arthur Evans says, was used later by the Romans of the Empire. The wall paintings, done in perspective, included a scene of the sea with fishes playing, another of forest life, and a dado of dancing girls.

It was in this part of the building, too, that the drainage and water supply put the engineers on their mettle. This was the lowest part of the sloping hillside on which the palace stood, and the water supply, which came from the neighbourhood of the North Gate, had to be so organized as to prevent flooding--a stiff enough problem for engineers of 4,000 years ago. They solved it by a system of parabolic curves which subjected the flow to friction. Sinks, lavatories, underground pipes suggest modern drainage. They, nevertheless, were in use at Knossos.

The rooms of the building in this south-east part were arranged in terraces at different levels on the hillside. The fact of the grand staircase having five flights does not mean that there were five storeys one on top of the other. As a result of the final restoration of this staircase by Sir Arthur Evans and Dr. Mackenzie in 1910, it appears that "the upper landing of the fifth flight does not lead on to the ground floor of the central court, but answers in height to what must have been the first floor of the rooms on the other or western side. It must itself, therefore, have led on to some raised building, probably a terrace, that ran along the eastern side of the court" .

There remains the north-east section. This was occupied by the artists and workmen of the palace. In one room olives were pressed, the oil being carried away by a conduit which turns twice at right angles till it reaches a spout set in the wall lower down the hill, more than fifty feet away. There the oil-jars were filled, and oil-jars are still standing in an adjoining room. Another room has been identified by the imagination of Sir Arthur Evans as the schoolroom. In other rooms pots were "thrown" and painted; stone vases carved; gold, silver, and bronze work moulded; sculptures were chiselled; seal stones and gems cut; and the favourite miniatures in ivory were carved which, in a compass of ten or eleven inches, reproduced a human form to the minutest detail of veins and finger-nails.

It will be seen, then, that the palace of Knossos was something more than the seat of King Minos. It contained a community completely organized within its walls, and independent of any outside connexion, after the manner of a mediaeval castle.

On the other side of the island, at Phaestos, there was another great palace, which has been excavated by the Italian Archaeological Mission. In many ways this palace was as magnificent as that of Knossos. Like Knossos, it was built on a hill on a foundation formed by levelling the buildings that had existed on the site from the Neolithic Age; and, like Knossos, though on a smaller scale, it consisted roughly of a system of buildings grouped round a central court. Some of the remains are in a better state of preservation than those of Knossos and are, therefore, useful in supplementing our knowledge of the Golden Age of ancient Crete, which we chiefly derive from Knossos. It must be remembered, however, that owing to the architectural device of levelling the old buildings as foundations for the great palaces, both Knossos and Phaestos are of less value than the other sites in Crete, as illustrating the Early Minoan Age--the period, that is, which preceded these great palaces.

There were, then, two great palaces flourishing in Crete during the same period. One naturally wonders what were the relations between them.

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