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

The established facts are few. It has been already shown, on the evidence of their respective pottery, that the original settlers at Phaestos came later than those of Knossos and took over the latter's ceramic innovations. The great palaces of the two cities were built about the same time, possibly by the same architects. Both palaces were destroyed more than once, and at approximately known dates. These are the bare facts revealed by archaeology, and the ice is thin for speculation on the internal politics of the island.

Mr. H. R. Hall has a different impression. He says : "At the same time that the king of Knossos built his new palace in his capital ... he also built himself a southern palace in the Messar?.... As from the near neighbourhood of Knossos a fine view of the sea, the haven, and the ships of the thalassocrats could be obtained, with Dia beyond and perhaps Melos far away on the horizon, so from Phaistos itself an equally fine, but different, prospect greeted the royal eyes; from this hilltop he could contemplate on one side the snowy tops of Ida and on the other the rich lands of the Messar?." He thinks that before the palace of Phaestos was built, the island, or at least the central portion of it, had been unified under the rule of Knossos. Legend makes Phaestos a colony of Knossos.

Perhaps the most vivid traces of the ancient civilization of Crete are the remains of the buildings which have been found in the soil. Here you have the rooms that were lived in, and the appeal to the imagination is direct. The relics of buildings are more extensive than those of any other kind, and they were the first discovered by the excavator, just as they are the first points of interest to the visitors who nowadays go to the island.

The buildings of the Stone Age have left hardly a trace of themselves, because they were made of such perishable materials as mud, reed, and wickerwork. Dr. L. Pernier has discovered, under the Minoan palace at Phaestos, a bit of the floor of one of these mud huts. It consists of red clay about four inches thick. Some houses, it is true, have been found near the modern Palaikastro, built of unhewn stone, and dating from the Neolithic Age, but they are exceptional. It was only when metal tools were invented that stone could be used generally for building. At the beginning of the Bronze Age the lower walls used to be made of stone, and the upper of sunburnt brick, the latter being further strengthened by wooden stays. Lime plaster was used even then to protect the walls against the weather. Later in the Bronze Age, when the great palaces were built, it became the practice to build foundations and lower walls to a height of about two yards of strong limestone blocks, some of them three yards long and one yard wide, and of gypsum. A protective covering of plaster was then applied. The upper storeys were generally of wood. Wood was extensively used. Professor Mosso, in reference to a wall of the vestibule at the top of the great staircase at Phaestos, says that "a base of alabaster having been made, holes were made in it to fix slabs of wood all round. These were bound together, and the hollow was filled with a mixture of lime and rubble" . Whole tree-trunks were sometimes used as beams, and one can still see the holes in the stone into which they were fixed.

There are many features of these palaces which are worth minute study. In the building of the great palaces it was the practice to prepare the ground with a thick mixture of lime and clay and pebbles. This mixture set so hard that it has now to be broken up with explosives before objects below can be removed. The staircase at Knossos measures nearly fifteen yards from side to side, and the steps are two and a half feet wide and hardly five inches deep. The most famous steps in Rome were not more than five and a half yards from side to side. The doors of the palace, of which there were many, were made to fit into the walls when open, so as not to interfere with corridor space. At Hagia Triada the drains of 4,000 years ago may still be seen working in wet weather. At Knossos the main drain, which had its sides coated with cement, was more than three feet high and nearly two feet broad, large enough for a man to move along it; and the smaller stone shafts that discharged into it are still in position.

The water supply entered the palace from the north. In 1904 Sir Arthur Evans discovered some pipes in position to the north-west of the palace, running alongside the paved road which leads to the Theatral Area and the Little Palace. The necks of these pipes point eastward towards the palace and they lead from the very hills on the west from which the Venetian and Turkish aqueduct still supplies Candia. They must, therefore, have been aqueducts and not drains, and probably form part of the same system as the terra-cotta pipes discovered in the earlier excavations further east, and at the time considered to be connexions in the drainage system. They are thus described by Dr. Burrows: "Each of them was about two and a half feet long, with a diameter that was about six inches at the broad end, and narrowed to less than four inches at the mouth, where it fitted into the broad end of the next pipe. 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" .

There were also baths at Knossos. At any rate, a good many people think they were baths. Professor Mosso thinks they were chapels--a good instance of the excitement which attaches to archaeological research. There is no arrangement, says Professor Mosso, for the supply or discharge of water, a provision which, he argues, is necessary for a bath; moreover, the basin is lined with gypsum, which is soluble in water; one of them was placed in the Throne Room; and, finally, they were not private. Professor Mosso's subtle eye even detects an enclosure, which he maintains was not put there for spectators of the bath, but for a chapel choir. These are attractive arguments, but Dr. Burrows answers quite simply that the gypsum argument is ruled out because it would be covered with plaster; terra-cotta tubs have been found close at hand, and the Knossians might quite well have been content with tubbing instead of plunging into a large tank that needed elaborate pipes; the bath in the Throne Room was used for ceremonial ablutions, for which little water would be needed; and no objects suggesting any cult have been found to show that these places were chapels.

Or take the lighting arrangements. There was a system of shafts used at Knossos, at Tylissos , at Phaestos, and at Hagia Triada. The light came down vertically at the back of the room, where the roof had been left uncovered for the purpose, and the floor specially cemented to stand exposure to the weather. While Sir Arthur Evans speaks of the light "pouring in between the columns" in one place, and in another of its "stealing in in cooler tones," Dr. Burrows was of opinion that in the latter case the cooler tones were so cool that lamps had to be used. Many lamps have, in fact, been found there. Big marble-standard lamps have also been found, which probably held two or even four wicks; one of them was found in a niche on a staircase at Tylissos.

The use of lime plaster on the outer walls gave an opportunity to the Minoan artists, who not only painted frescoes on them, but fashioned the plaster into relief. "Fresco" paintings are made as soon as the initial setting of the plaster takes place, and while it is still wet. Brilliant colours were used--red ochre in the Early Minoan period , then yellow and black; then blue, progressing from a pale greenish tint in Middle Minoan to a dark blue in Late Minoan. The cupbearer is an example of fresco painting, and the bull's head of high relief; the fresco painters merely attempted an outline and wash of colour in two dimensions, not indicating shades or folds of drapery. The main difference between Cretan painting on wet plaster and Egyptian painting on fine white limestone is that the Cretan gives a more vivid impression of movement, and the Egyptian more detail. This is partly accounted for by the fact that Minoan painting was often done when the plaster was still wet.

There are many other sites in Crete which cannot be dealt with here--Gournia on the north coast, Palaikastro and others in the east, and Vrokastro. Their main importance lies in their bearing upon Minoan town-planning. Vrokastro has been explored by Miss E. H. Hall, who published her results in 1914 . It has a special interest because it belongs to the Iron Age, and shows the inferiority of this age to its predecessor, the Bronze Age. In general, the houses in these towns were huddled together with the object of leaving as much ground as possible free for agriculture. They are poor specimens of houses,--small two-storeyed cottages with windows on each side of the door. Several rooms have been discovered in which upright faces of rock served as walls--a device still used in Crete. An interesting point about them is that they were built on rocky eminences or spurs of mountains--a significant sidelight on the fall of Knossos and the disappearance of her fleet.

"Exceeding lightly, as when some potter sits and tries the wheel, well fitting in his hands, to see if it will run."--HOMER.

Crete is the only land of the "prehistoric" Near East which has left no record of itself besides that revealed by excavation. And even the writing on the clay tablets cannot yet be read. We none the less get a vivid impression of Cretan life on its artistic side, and for this the main credit is due to the unique value of pottery in archaeology. Pottery is almost indestructible. While it may decompose in soil that is damp enough, and the design may be obliterated when fire plays on it directly and when there is enough air for oxidization, yet the actual fabric, being made originally of clay baked hard by extreme heat, can never be destroyed by fire. It cannot rust. It cannot be pounded into dust, because a small sherd has a tremendous power of resistance. While the stone ruins at Knossos will one day vanish from exposure to the weather, the pottery will remain. The defects of pottery are as valuable to the archaeologist as its qualities. Its brittleness led to a constant deposit of breakages. The replacing of breakages in what was a household necessity led to continuous production. Its cheapness made it valueless to looters. When palaces were raided and burnt, metal objects were "lifted" either for their actual value or their potential value in the melting-pot. The pots remained. Thousands of sherds have been found on every site in Crete. Even when fragments cannot be pieced together, they reveal the kind of clay, decoration and thickness of the original vase, and complete examples are often found in tombs, where they were placed as tributes to the dead, in accordance with an almost universal custom in early Greek civilization.

The evidence thus obtained has many uses. It shows the consecutive development of pottery as a form of art, in itself interesting, and the corresponding changes in the taste of the people. As the art progresses, we find vases, for instance, with scenes painted on them illustrating contemporary customs, methods of burial, religious rites, styles of dress and buildings. The prehistoric pottery of Crete never reached this stage, but even so, it supplies the bulk of the evidence on which the Minoan civilization is being reconstructed.

Pots, then, are found at the lowest levels, just above virgin soil, for the earliest people used them and broke them. The slowness of development in that long-drawn-out period is clearly indicated. There are some seven yards of deposit belonging to it at Knossos, and the latest ware shows little or no improvement on the first. The pottery is hand-made, the clay coarse, generally of a sooty-greyish colour and more or less burnished. The relics consist of the rims and handles of pots, rims of basins, bowls, and plates and similar fragments, too incomplete to suggest original shapes. Two interesting points, however, can be seen. The pots were hand-polished both inside and out, and incised lines, or lines simply scratched on the surface, were used as ornamentation. This primitive manifestation of an artistic impulse was later extended by the filling of the incised lines with a white substance for greater effect. Similar ware has been found at Troy and in Egypt, and Dr. Mackenzie has thought that these were an importation from the AEgean .

The irresistible impulse manifested even in primitive people to decorate their ordinary vessels is further illustrated by the fact that the polishing was gradually heightened, and the glitter thrown into relief by ripples, made with a blunt instrument, probably bone, and suggestive of the ripples on the surface of water. Among the latest Neolithic ware found at Knossos are two remarkable specimens of incised ware, the design being that of a twig with leaves. On each side of the stem is a row of small oblong punctuated points, filled in with white chalk. This, it must be remembered, in a period which ended about 3000 B.C.

The Bronze Age, which followed, and which brought with it the Minoan period at Knossos, is remarkable for the first use of paint. The transition was gradual and slow, and indeed, at the beginning of the Bronze Age, there is a falling off in the quality of the pottery. This was due to an interesting result of the discovery of metal, which turned the attention of skilled artists to the new medium, and left the fashioning of stone and clay to inferior hands. On the manufacturing side, however, it is probable that a great step forward was taken at that time. The fact that the clay is now of a terra-cotta or brick colour, as opposed to the former peaty grey of Neolithic times, has led to the surmise that the potter's kiln was now used for baking.

The first paint invented was an almost lustreless black, which was developed gradually into a lustrous black. Even this development was at first used as a mere imitation of the Neolithic black hand-polished vases. The paint was applied all over the vase, inside as well as outside, whenever the neck was wide enough. Neolithic incisions again were imitated by white geometric patterns painted over the black background. This style was not usual till the end of the Early Minoan period .

It was not till the beginning of the Middle Minoan period that any serious development took place. Then, however, it came in leaps. The potter's wheel had been introduced, probably from Egypt, at the end of Early Minoan I, and henceforth pots were "thrown" precisely as they are to-day. One can imagine the keenness with which this great if simple invention was exploited. The fashioning of clay with thumb and fingers on a rotating wheel led so easily and inevitably to fineness of technique that the potter was soon imitating the thinness of metal, and by the end of Middle Minoan II was producing "egg-shell" vases. In design the angular geometric patterns had been displaced by the end of the Early Minoan period by curves and spirals, the logical outcome of the use of a brush. Colour meanwhile became lavish and brilliant. There were two styles: either the whole pot was first painted black to provide a background for a light design, or a dark design was painted on the original light-coloured clay. It was the first of these styles that naturally lent itself to colour display, and the name "polychrome" has been given to it. The other style relied for its effect on a simple black-and-white contrast. In the latter case the light natural background was improved by a fine buff clay "slip" or wash. Quite naturally it was the polychrome style that mostly exercised the artists at first. Bright orange, lustreless white, yellow, red, crimson on a black background were exploited to a sometimes fantastic extent as long as the novelty of colour lasted.

The next development took place in the second Middle Minoan period . Relief was then introduced, which created an effect of light and shade on the black varnish. Mere blobs of colour, which constituted the original form of relief, soon developed into raised lumps and horns . Middle Minoan "Kamares" , or polychrome pottery, chiefly consisted of cups, "tea-cups," jugs, amphorae , and fruit-stand vases. The three best specimens are here reproduced. In the Middle Minoan II period large storage jars, or "pithoi," made their first appearance. They were as big as a man, and almost exactly like the Cretan storage jars of to-day. Two interesting features in the decoration of these jars are cunningly practical in origin. One was an imitation in relief of the coils of rope which were used in moving the jars, the other a "trickle" ornament produced by allowing splashes of paint to trickle down the side of the jar--a device which made a virtue, in anticipation, of the inevitable trickles which would result from the storage of oil in it.

Towards the end of the Middle Minoan period the exaggerated use of colour which had marked the first introduction of polychrome ware gave way to a concentration upon design. Perhaps the most remarkable specimen of this later phase is the "lily vase" found at Knossos. It stands about two feet high, and for design has a simple row of lilies painted in white on a purple ground. The shape of the vase is artistically made to serve the design by enabling the lilies to bend slightly outward and then curve in a little at the top.

Then came a curious clash in the separate evolution of polychrome and monochrome ware. The latter had been used as an easy decoration for ordinary vessels, but towards the end of the Middle Minoan period the two styles began to coalesce in the form of a simple light design on a dark ground. Then a final resolution took place by a "volte face" into a monochrome dark on light brought about by the experience that the black varnish was a more durable colour than the lustreless colour pigments. The varnish, indeed, possessed a remarkable tenacity. It probably was the forerunner of that used in the later Attic Black Figure vases, whose secret still exercises the ingenuity of modern potters. As yet nothing further has been established than that the varnish was not a "glaze" in the modern sense. A contributing factor to the final triumph of the monochrome over polychrome rested upon simple necessity. When naturalist motives became dominant in the painter's art, the lack of a green pigment left no satisfactory alternative to the general abandonment of variation in colour. In Late Minoan I, when the complete absorption of the polychrome into the monochrome style took place, we find a general use of a brilliantly lustrous brown-to-black "glaze" paint on a buff clay slip, carefully polished by hand on terra-cotta clay. The naturalism of plants and flowers now extends to sea-objects--fish, shells, weeds, rocks--and is marked by careful truth to life. A striking example of this style is a famous "octopus" vase found at Gournia.

There were, of course, other forms of pottery besides vases. Cretan potters, even more than those of to-day, used clay as the material for hardware. Not only bricks, drain-pipes, ornaments, but lamps, kettles, even cupboards and tables, were made of clay.

It was inevitable that the art of writing should be evolved early in the history of man. Even in the most primitive stages of life there would be the elementary necessity, for instance, of identifying one's own property, and for this the most likely means would be some system of marking. Then, again, the development of communal life would entail the duty of keeping appointments, or of doing a particular thing at a particular time. It would, one thinks, have been too much of a strain, even for the mind of a Stone Age man, to keep all the details of his daily, still more of his annual, routine in his head, and the handkerchiefs of those remote days may not have been of such a material as to lend themselves readily to mnemonic knots. It is quite conceivable, as an instance of the sort of necessity that would arise, that at a given time it could be calculated how many days ahead the provisions would last, and when, therefore, the hunter must be ready for the hills. He might prepare a handy reminder with a pictographic representation of some commonplace event that was to take place at the same time, and by hanging the picture up in an obvious spot.

One's range of activity would increase as time went on, and it might conceivably be necessary to deliver a message to a man over on the other side of the valley in circumstances where one could not take it oneself. Such a contingency would produce some form of written message, for the message might be private or unsuitable for oral transmission by a third party. To give a concrete example from later times: Proitus wanted to kill Bellerophon, but did not want to do it himself; he therefore sent the doomed man to the King of Lycia "with letters of introduction written on a folded tablet, containing much ill against the bearer ... that he might be slain" . Not all people are original enough to transmit such a communication orally by the bearer.

Fifty, even forty, years ago it was the general doctrine of Greek scholars that the Homeric poems were never written down till long after they were composed, perhaps even, so some thought, not until 560 B.C. Till then, we used to be taught, they were preserved wholly by memory and by oral transmission. But on the strength of the above passage from Homer--the only passage in either "Iliad" or "Odyssey" where writing is mentioned--Andrew Lang in 1883 argued that the art of writing must have been known to the early Greeks. "It is almost incredible," he said, "that the quick-witted Greeks should have neglected an art which met them everywhere in Egypt and Asia." He argued better than he knew. Not only was the art of writing known to the early Greeks, but it was known to their forerunners a few thousand years earlier, forerunners whose very existence was not suspected when Andrew Lang wrote. Curiously there had been found no trace of writing in the Mycenaean remains, although this fact has since been shown to be due to mere chance.

In 1893 Sir Arthur Evans caused general astonishment by communicating to the Hellenic Society his discovery of the fact that certain seal stones which he had found in Greece, and which had been assumed to be Peloponnesian, were, in fact, Cretan. This startling revelation was clinched during the years that followed by the discovery of further specimens of Cretan writing. Excavation in Crete was started in 1900, and the first year's work yielded up hundreds of clay tablets inscribed with Cretan writing. Was Homer writing fairy stories when he made Proitus send his doomed Bellerophon to Lycia with his "folded tablet"? Or did he know that the Lycians were colonists from Crete?

A tentative sketch of the successive phases through which the art of writing passed may be made, even if it largely depends upon unconfirmed surmise. The temptation to fill in the gaps by what seems reasonable conjecture is hard to resist.

Minoan writing must have started, quite naturally, with simple pictographs, such as have, in fact, been found--simple pictures of a man, a leg, a ship, representing a definite thing that it was desired to indicate. They are called "ideographs" because they signify a single idea. They next developed into "hieroglyphs," that is, pictures which had acquired by association a certain use among the people who employed them, but whose original meaning has been lost, and can now only be inferred. In the parallel case of Egyptian hieroglyphics, guessing at such meanings has been shown to be dangerous work, for in many cases the established interpretation is far other than what one might have supposed.

It was the usual practice to write the inscriptions with a stilus, that is a pointed rod of metal, on a clay tablet, and this is the form of most of the inscriptions that have been preserved. It is possible that wooden tablets covered with a layer of wax were also used; but even if they were, none of them, of course, could have survived the burning of the palaces. More interesting still is the fact that pen and ink must have been used even in those remote times. This fact is established by the discovery of two cups which are inscribed in ink. There can be little doubt, therefore, that long documents and any literature there happened to be were written in ink on papyrus. It is probable that we shall have to make up our minds to the complete loss of all such literature, for Cretan soil lacks the dryness of the Egyptian. If our worst fears prove true, we may experience the final anti-climax of the discovery that the clay tablets, when read, will contain nothing after all but lists and bills.

It is obvious that many of the tablets do consist of bills or inventories. Although we cannot yet understand the language of the script, it has been found possible, by studying the clay tablets, to reconstruct the system of numbers that was used. We have, for instance, what is evidently an inventory of arrows, a record surmounted by a picture of an arrow. From this and other records it is apparent that thousands were expressed by "diamonds," hundreds by slanting lines, tens by circles, units by straight lines, quarters by a small "v." The highest number recorded is 19,000.

Although it is true that scholars still wait a clear starting-point for transcribing the Cretan script, there is one interesting and important point already established by Sir Arthur Evans. He has proved to the general satisfaction of classical scholars that the Phoenician alphabet, which had always been supposed to be the original source of the Greek alphabet, and therefore of the Latin alphabet from which comes our own, was itself derived from Crete. This theory, however, is disputed by Egyptologists.

Cretan religion differed from that of classical Greece in that the chief deity worshipped was a goddess, Mother Nature or Earth-Mother, some at least of whose characteristics we find embodied in the Rhea of Greek mythology. Matriarchal religion seems to have been specially characteristic of very early times; through it primitive man expressed his veneration of womanhood. The Cretan Mother Goddess held an exalted position. She had supreme power over all Nature; was associated with doves, which symbolized her power in the air; was accompanied by lions, the strongest animals of the earth; brandished snakes, that live under the earth. Among the various "cult objects," or ritualistic forms used in worship, that have been found in her shrines are included representations of cows with calves, goats with suckling kids, and the like.

There was a god as well as a goddess in Minoan religion, but he was of relatively little importance. Velchanos, the Cretan Zeus--if we may assume that the Minoan god was the original of this figure of the Greek legends--was represented as both the son and the husband of Mother Nature. He was suckled, so the tradition ran, by Amalthea the goat in the cave of Dikte, and brought up by his mother Rhea on the slopes of Mount Ida. His insignificance in comparison with the goddess appears from the fact that he was drawn on a smaller scale whenever represented in her company. The two deities probably constituted, as Mr. Hogarth has suggested, a "Double Monotheism"--a double godhead, that is, worshipped to the exclusion of all minor deities. If this was the case, the various Cretan prototypes of later Greek divinities must be regarded as variant forms of the Mother Goddess herself. Aphrodite, for instance, the goddess of Love, was worshipped generally in the Levant, being known in Canaan as Ashtaroth-Astarte, and in Egypt as Hathor; her Cretan name is unknown. The Greek Artemis, goddess of the Wild Beasts, was foreshadowed in the Cretan Dictynna.

One great difference between the Cretan and the Hellenic Zeus was that the Cretan Zeus was mortal, and was said to have died on Mount Juktas. The mortality of their gods was one of the striking conceptions which differentiated the Southern peoples of the Near East from the later Greeks, who came from the North. The Egyptian Osiris, for instance, could die, but not any of the Greek gods. The Cretan Mother Goddess is depicted on seal stones and rings dressed like an earthly queen, while Velchanos is seen descending from the heavens to the earth, a young warrior with a spear and an enormous shield.

Another difference between Cretan and classical Greek religion was that, as far as one can see, Cretan religion did not give rise to any great temples, nor left behind any more substantial traces of its activity than the small figures of the Earth Goddess to whom I have referred. It may be sound to regard the palace of Knossos as itself a temple, and it is true that legend makes of Minos a High Priest as well as a King. There seems, however, to be little room for doubt that the only places set aside specifically for worship were small private shrines used for family worship. All the evidence tends to indicate that it was the family idea that predominated in Cretan worship. Private houses had their shrines, and the Knossian palace-temple itself had its lesser family shrines. These sanctuaries were always distinguished by a sort of sacred pillar, a sign which in Minoan art is often used as the only indication of a sacred place. There is an example of it on a fresco painting found at Knossos. Another emblem associated with the cult is that of sacred trees, which on rings and seal stones usually form the background for the "choros," or dance. The actual dance, no doubt, would be performed in sacred groves.

Many cult-objects have been found in the shrines, the commonest being the mysterious Double Axe. The fact that this emblem was also specially associated with the Carian Zeus at Labraunda has led to a generally accepted theory that the Cretan "Labyrinth" corresponds to the Carian "Labraunda," or place of the "Labrus" or Double Axe; for the Knossian palace must have been, in fact, the chief seat of the cult.

Side by side with the Double Axe one finds the constantly-recurring sign of the Bull, an animal which was sacred not only because of its physical strength, but of its use in sacrifice. A sarcophagus or coffin of terra-cotta, found at Hagia Triada, contains a picture of a sacrificial bull following a procession of women priests. In view of the prominence given to the Bull in Minoan worship, one need not seek far for an explanation of the Cretan legend of the Minotaur, a monster half man, half bull, which lived in the labyrinth and exacted its human victims. Nor is it impossible that the dangerous and cruel sport of bull-fighting formed part of the same cult. Bulls' heads were made in pottery, and sometimes of gold, and used as votive offerings. The horns of the bull--Horns of Consecration--are found in shrines among ritual objects.

There was a specially important element in Cretan religion reserved for the cult of the dead.

It is obvious from the many tombs that have been excavated, that in very early times it was the practice to bury the body of the dead in a doubled-up position, the knees being drawn up to the breast. In later times the body was laid out at full length. It is not clear whether or not there was any particular significance in this choice of position. There were various kinds of tombs and graves, all of which were used contemporaneously, and of which, perhaps, the most interesting were the "Tholoi." The word "tholos" properly means a domed building or rotunda, and the particular kind of tomb to which it is applied is a vaulted chamber to which entrance is effected through an underground tunnel, or "dromos." It is likely that in form these "tholoi" were based upon the huts used--at some period--by the living. There are both round and square "tholoi" found in Crete. The "tholos" of Hagia Triada has a circular ground plan, while the Royal Tomb at Isopata and other elaborate tombs of the great palace-periods are rectangular. The principle of the tholos-tomb was most in use in Mycenaean times, on the mainland of Greece, where the "beehive tombs" almost all retained in the original round formation. The hilly character of Crete led the people to cut out their "tholoi" in the side of the rocky hills, the "dromos," or tunnel, in this case being driven into the hillside almost horizontally.

Another style of grave was the shaft or pit-grave, which consisted of a pit sunk into the ground, at the bottom of which was the grave itself, closed over with slabs of stone. Still another kind was a combination of the first two, and is known as the "pit-cave." This was made by first sinking a pit and then cutting out the tomb in the form of a side-recess from the bottom of the pit. A simpler form of burial, known as the "pot-burial," was effected by trussing up the body, placing it under an inverted jar, and then burying it in the earth. A sixth form was that of the simple grave, like our own. Cremation was not practised in Minoan times, although it was introduced into Crete from Greece in the Iron Age. Clay coffins were first used in the Middle Minoan period, being made in the form of deep boxes with sloping tops resembling the roofs of houses.

Such were the physical conditions of burial. We knew practically nothing of the cult of the dead until 1913-1914, when Sir Arthur Evans published some important disclosures . It was known before that the dead in their spacious tombs were honoured with gift-offerings, which included weapons, jewellery, and objects closely associated with them in their life; that food and drink offerings were made and coal fires lighted, possibly with the na?ve or symbolic object of cheering the traveller on his mysterious way. Now, however, a new series of tombs has been found at Isopata, one of which, called by Sir Arthur Evans "the Tomb of the Double Axes," is proved to be not only a tomb, but a shrine of the Minoan Great Mother. In this tomb were found libation vessels, including a "rhyton" in the shape of a bull's head made of steatite, and a pair of double axes; the grave which received the body is cut out in the form of a double axe. "The cult of the dead," says Sir Arthur Evans, "is thus brought into direct relation with the divinity or divinities of the Double Axes, and we may infer that in the present tomb the mortal remains had been placed in some ceremonial manner under divine guardianship."

When Knossos fell, Crete ceased to be the pre-eminent power in the Near East. The island itself was overrun by military or naval adventurers, and the centre of Mediterranean life shifted over to the mainland of Greece, whence, indeed, those adventurers came. The interesting thing, however, was that Cretan culture went with it, and neither for the last, nor probably for the first, time "the captive led captive her savage conqueror," as Horace wrote centuries afterwards. Crete stooped to conquer Greece, just as Greece in her turn stooped to conquer Rome.

The Cretans as a race were quite distinct from the contemporary inhabitants of Greece, physical types being sharply divided by the shores of the mainland. It may be asked: Is it worth while speculating about the physical characteristics of a people which flourished 4,000 years ago, whose very existence was obscured by the Dark Age that comes before Greek history, and whose existence was not rediscovered until the other day? Yet archaeology works wonders. It is true that in this particular field, in which archaeology is chiefly dependent upon portrait-paintings and bones, there is more controversy and less certitude than in the others; and that craniology, or the study of skulls, with their much-disputed classification into "brachycephalic" or broad-headed, "dolichocephalic" or long-headed, and "mesocephalic," midway between the two, is a fruitful source of confusion; that the "cephalic" index--that is, the breadth of the skull above the ears expressed in a percentage which gives the proportion of this breadth-measurement to the measurement of the length of the same skull from the forehead to the occiput--is a poor index of anything at all. Still, there is ground for assuming that from the later Stone Age onwards the islands of the AEgean were mainly peopled by members of the "Mediterranean" race, small of stature, with oval faces, with what craniologists might call rather "long" heads, with small hands and feet, a dark complexion, dark eyes and black curly hair.

The establishment of the existence of the Mediterranean race has had, among other results, that of making it no longer possible, as was invariably the practice before Crete was excavated, of ascribing all obscure factors in the beginnings of Greece to a Phoenician origin. We now know, for instance, that the art of writing came from Crete, Phoenicia being the medium; and that Phoenicia itself was merely a late centre of the general AEgean civilization, and got its name merely because it was the best-known branch of the "red-skinned" race; for "Phoenikes" literally means "Red-skins," and in Homer Phoenix himself is a King of Crete and grandfather of Minos.

The Minoan people, then, formed part of the Mediterranean race. Their dress was much simpler than that of the classical Greeks. The men wore a short pair of drawers or a loin-cloth, the upper part of the body being bare, as in the cupbearer picture, a style emanating, as did the men themselves, from the warm lands south of the Mediterranean. Egyptian fresco-paintings reveal an almost exact analogy of type in the clothing and appearance of the Egyptians. Those who have a keen eye for the persistence of type may compare some of the forms of loin-cloth, as depicted on seal stones, with the "brakais," or baggy breeches, still worn in Crete. Elders and officials apparently wore flowing cloaks for their greater dignity. High-topped boots--again suggestive of those worn to-day--were in general use. Men wore their hair long as did the women, plaited and coiled up on the top of the head, thereby forming the only headdress that was used.

Minoan war-equipment was limited. Their only weapons were a long sword and a dagger, the latter of which is shown by pictures of clay figurines to have been carried inside the belt at the front. Their only defensive armour was a big shield of leather and a leather conical helmet. The shield was framed in a metal band, but had no handle or central boss; it was big enough to cover the body from head to foot, and it could be bent so as to protect both sides. It is represented in certain pictures in a curious 8-shape, pinched-in in the middle. The origin of this may have been that it was the practice to sling it over the left shoulder suspended by a strap, and for this purpose the figure-of-eight shape may have been convenient.

The women are readily distinguishable from the men in Cretan pictures by reason of their white skin, suggestive of a more secluded indoor life. They wore large shady hats, close-fitting, puffed-sleeved blouses, cut very low in front, and projecting upwards into a sort of peak at the back of the neck. They wore wide-flounced, richly-embroidered skirts like crinolines, and had belts like the men's. It was on first seeing some of the pictures of them that a French scholar compared the women of Knossos with those of Paris.

Minoan women enjoyed a far more "advanced" status than did other primitive women. In the art of their day they are represented as appearing in public and unveiled; they took part in the bull-fighting at Knossos, and their apartments in the palace were marked out by their special luxury. The greatest glory for an Athenian woman of a later age was to be "as little mentioned as possible among men." Not so for the women of Crete. There may be some special significance in the fact that the Lycians of Asia Minor, who were colonists from Crete, made a practice of calling children by the mother's, not the father's, name . If this was the case also in Minoan Crete itself, it may afford a possible explanation of the freedom enjoyed by Cretan women, for the practice of naming children after their mother instead of after their father is connected with states of society which have not yet evolved any definite ideas of marriage, and in which, as Herbert Spencer says, "The connection between mother and child is always certain, whereas the connection between father and child would sometimes be only inferable."

Towards the end of the Minoan Age Cretan culture began to spread generally over the AEgean, and extended to the mainland. Cretan vases are found as far north as Boeotia, and the many Cretan relics discovered in Mycenaean tombs were not all war-souvenirs; some of them, belonging to times before the fall of Knossos, were the peaceful product of Cretan workmen who had been induced by the Lords of Mycenae to emigrate.

The men from the North who finally overthrew what we call the Minoan civilization, became to some extent the repositories of Cretan tradition. They carried on a less splendid phase of Cretan civilization, a phase which was distinguished by the name "Mycenaean." They had come to Greece from lands still further north, whence they had themselves been driven to seek new homes. They came down in successive waves of invasion, the men who formed the first wave being known as the "Achaeans," the "yellow-haired Achaeans" of Homer. It was they--so at least some authorities hold--who sacked Knossos, and who afterwards, during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., wandering about in search of adventure, became the terror of the whole AEgean. An Egyptian inscription of those times says: "The Isles were restless: disturbed among themselves."

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