Plate XX 1(1) MAIN DRAIN, KNOSSOS (p.98)Plate XX 2(2) TERRA-COTTA DRAIN PIPES (p.98)
Plate XX 1
(1) MAIN DRAIN, KNOSSOS (p.98)
Plate XX 2
(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 littleof 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 theMinoan 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 landarmy. 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.
Plate XXITHEATRAL AREA, KNOSSOS: BEFORE RESTORATION (p.100)
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 Danaunaare 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 offive 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 ofthe 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 imaginethe 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.
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 thatthe 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 followeda 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 usto the date of this last development of Minoan greatness.
Plate XXIITHEATRAL AREA, KNOSSOS: RESTORED (p.100)G. Maraghiannis
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 bronzerepousséwork. 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 1449B.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 thecatastrophe 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 thereare 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 itsstately 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.
Plate XXIIIGREAT JAR WITH PAPYRUS RELIEFS (p.206)
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 thepalace 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 figuressurviving 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. Theprocess 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 tothemselves, 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 itsmotifreversed 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 hadoriginally 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 tothe 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 theémigrésof the Minoandébâclefound 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 spontaneouslyawakened 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 Minoanémigrés, 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 (circa1100 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.
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 timewhen 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 highestdegree 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 thesurface 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.