The Sea-Kings of Crete Part 10

The earliest form of her worship, and one which proved very persistent, was apparently aniconic. The divinity was not embodied in any graven image, but was inherent in such objects as the rude natural concretions found in the House of the Fetish Shrine, or was supposed to dwell in sacred trees, on which sometimes perch the doves which indicate that the G.o.ddess is present as ruler of the air, or which are twined with serpents, showing her presence as G.o.ddess of the earth and underworld. In the place of sacred trees we have often sacred pillars, which seem to have been objects of worship down to Late Minoan II. at least, since in the Royal Villa at Knossos, dating from this period, there is a pillar-room similar to the much earlier pillar-rooms of the Great Palace. The little group of three pillars found at Knossos evidently represents the divinity in her aspect as a heavenly G.o.ddess, for the pillars have doves perching upon their capitals. Sometimes, as in the case of the Lion Gate at Mycenae, and other representations, we have the pillar with the two supporting lions, an antic.i.p.ation of the anthropomorphic figure of the G.o.ddess on the rock. It is possible that in some cases the figures of the Double Axes standing between horns of consecration were also looked upon as embodiments of the divinity. A similar mode of representing deity occurs in the earlier stages of many religions, and the sacred pillar set up by Jacob at Bethel may be instanced as an example of its presence in the beginnings of the Hebrew worship.

In general the Minoan Great Mother appears to have been looked upon as a being of beneficence, and as the giver of 'every good and perfect gift'; but her a.s.sociation with the lion and the snake shows that there was also a more mysterious and awful side to her character. When the later Greeks came into the island and found this deity in possession, she became identified, in the various aspects of her many-sided nature, with various G.o.ddesses of the h.e.l.lenic Pantheon. Foremost and specially she became Rhea, the mother of the G.o.ds, who had fled to Crete to bear her son Zeus.

Otherwise she was Hera, the sister and the spouse of Zeus, and in this case the story of the marriage of the great G.o.ddess and the supreme G.o.d probably represents the fusion of religious ideas on the part of the two races, the conquerors taking over the deity of the conquered race, and uniting her with the Sky G.o.d whom they had brought with them from their Northern home. She also survived as Aphrodite, as Demeter, and, in her capacity as Lady of the Wild Beasts, as Artemis.

The suggestion of the a.s.sociation of Zeus with the Minoan G.o.ddess may have been given to the Northern conquerors by a feature of the Cretan religion which they found already in existence. On certain seal impressions and engraved gems there are indications that the great Nature G.o.ddess was sometimes a.s.sociated with a male divinity.

This being, however, seems to have occupied an obscure and inferior position. In most of the scenes in which he is represented he, is either in the background, or reverentially stands before the seated female divinity. It would appear that the Achaeans appropriated this insignificant G.o.d as the representative of their own Zeus, attributed to him birth from the Great G.o.ddess in her own cave-sanctuary of Dicte, and endowed him with many of the attributes which she had formerly possessed, including the Double Axe emblem of sovereignty, so that in h.e.l.lenic times the supreme deity of the island was always the Cretan Zeus, Zeus of the Double Axe, though in reality he was no Cretan G.o.d at all, or at best a secondary divinity, dressed in borrowed plumes and with greatness thrust upon him.

As to the forms of worship with which the Great Mother of Crete was served, comparatively little is known. The most striking feature is the seemingly total absence of what we should call temples.

In this respect Crete presents a curious contrast to Egypt: in Egypt we have an abundance of vast temples, but practically no surviving palaces; in Crete the case is exactly reversed, and we have huge palaces but no temples. The reason of this appears to be, as Dr. Mackenzie has pointed out,[*] that the Minoan religion was of an entirely domestic character. 'At Knossos all shrines are either house-shrines or palace-shrines. The divinities are household and dynastic divinities having an ancestral character and an ancestral reputation to maintain.' To put it in a word, worship in the Minoan religion was essentially Family Worship. No doubt there were public ceremonials also, in which the King, who seems to have been Priest as well as King (if, indeed, he was not viewed as an incarnation of deity), performed the princ.i.p.al part; but there can have been nothing like the habitual publicity of parts of the worship of the G.o.d which was contemplated in the great peristyle courts of the Egyptian temples and the processional arrangements of part of their service. 'At Knossos,' says Dr. Mackenzie, 'we found, as a matter of fact, that there was a tendency for each house to have a room set apart for family worship. Of such shrines the palace was found to have more than one. Those shrines were found to be in a very private part of the house, and usually to have no thoroughfare through them.'

[Footnote *: _Annual of the British School at Athens_, vol. xiv., p. 366.]

What these shrines were like we may to some extent judge from the fragmentary fresco found at Knossos, representing one of the pillar-shrines where the Great G.o.ddess was worshipped in her emblems of the sacred pillars. The structure consists of a taller central chamber, with a lower wing on either side of it. The material of which it is built is apparently wood, faced and decorated in certain parts with chequer-work in black-and-white plaster. The whole building rests upon large blocks of stone, immediately above which in the central chamber comes a solid piece of building, adorned first with the chequer-work, and then, above this, with two half-rosettes bordered with _kuanos_. Over this rises the open chamber of the shrine, which contains nothing but two pillars of the familiar Minoan-Mycenaean type, tapering downwards from the capitals. These rise from between the sacred horns, which occur in practically every religious scene as emblems of consecration (_cf._ the 'horns of the altar' in the Hebrew temple worship). The lower chambers on either side contain each a single pillar, again rising from between the horns of consecration. A Minoan lady, dressed in a gown of bluish-green, sits with her back to the wall of the right-hand lower chamber, and the scale of the shrine is given by the fact that, her seat being on the same level as the floor of the chamber, her head is in a line with the roof beam which rests on the capital of the sacred pillar. The remains of an actual shrine discovered in 1907 close to the Central Court at Knossos show that the fresco does not exaggerate the smallness of the sacred buildings. The Gournia shrine, situated in the centre of the town, is about twelve feet square, and its discoverer believes that the walls of the sacred enclosure may never have stood more than eighteen inches high. Here, again, were the horns of consecration, the doves, and the snakes twined round the image of the G.o.ddess.

Of what sort were the acts of worship in connection with the Minoan Religion? Sacrifice was certainly prominent, and the bull was probably the chief victim offered to the G.o.ddess. In one of the scenes on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, a bull is being sacrificed, and his blood is dripping into a vessel placed beneath his head. Behind is the figure of a woman, whose hands are stretched out, presumably to hold the cords with which the victim is bound. Two kids crouch on the ground below the bull, perhaps to be offered in their turn.

Libation also formed part of the ceremonial, and on the same sarcophagus there are two scenes in which it occurs. In the one instance (Plate XXVIII.), the vessel into which the offering is being poured stands between two sacred Double Axes with birds perched upon them; in the other the libation-vessel stands upon an altar with a Double Axe behind it. The three receptacles of the Dictaean Libation Table suggest a threefold offering like that of mingled milk and honey, sweet wine, and water, which, in the Homeric period, was made to the Shades of the Dead and to the Nymphs.

As was perhaps natural in the cult of a G.o.ddess, the chief part in the ritual seems to have been taken by priestesses. Men share in the ceremonies also, but not so frequently, and apparently in subordinate roles. Part of the ritual evidently consisted of dancing, and music also had its place, as is evident from the figures of the lyre and flute players on the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada.

The question of whether the Minoans had any worship of ancesters or sacrifice to the dead is raised by several relics. Above the Shaft-Graves at Mycenae stood a circular altar, where offerings must have been made either to the Shades of the Dead or on behalf of them, and the scenes on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, resembling so curiously those of the Egyptian ceremony of 'the Opening of the Mouth,' suggest a belief in the continued existence of the spirit, either as an object to be propitiated by sacrifice, or as a being which needed to be sustained in its disembodied state by offerings of meat and drink.

The relation of the Minoan King to the religion of his country is a point of some interest, though the facts known are scarcely sufficient to afford ground for more than surmise. The very structure of the palace at Knossos gives evidence of the importance of the part which he played in spiritual matters, and of the intimate connection which existed in the Minoan, as in so many other ancient faiths, between Royalty and Religion. There are not only several shrines and altars in the palace, but it is probable, as Dr. Mackenzie has pointed out,[*] that the so-called bathrooms at Knossos and Phaestos are not bathrooms at all, but small chapels or oratories, so that altogether religion bulks very largely in the arrangements of the Royal dwelling. In fact, the Kings and Queens of Knossos were Priest-Kings and Priest-Queens, the heads of the spiritual as well as of the material life of their people; and it is not at all unlikely, from what is known of the religious views of other ancient peoples, that the Priest-King was looked upon as an incarnation of divinity. If so, of what divinity? It is here that, in all likelihood, we get near the heart of the Minotaur legend. 'The characteristic mythical monster of Crete,' says Miss Jane Harrison,[**]

'was the bull-headed Minotaur. Behind the legend of Pasiphae, made monstrous by the misunderstanding of immigrant conquerors, it can scarcely be doubted that there lurks some sacred mystical ceremony of ritual wedlock ([Greek: ieros gamos]) with a primitive bull-headed divinity.... The bull-Dionysos of Thrace, when he came to Crete, found a monstrous G.o.d, own cousin to himself.... Of the ritual of the bull-G.o.d in Crete, we know that it consisted in part of the tearing and eating of a bull, and behind is the dreadful suspicion of human sacrifice.' The actual evidence found on Minoan sites for the existence of such a bull-headed divinity is somewhat slight, the clearest instance being a seal-impression from Knossos, representing a monster who bears an animal head, possibly a bull's, upon a human body, and who is evidently regarded as divine, since he is seated and reverently approached by a human worshipper; but, taken in connection with the universal currency of the Minotaur legend, it is probably sufficient. What relation this monstrous divinity held to the other objects of Minoan worship is not apparent.

[Footnote *: _Annual of the British School at Athens_, xiv., p.

366. The suggestion is also made by Mosso, 'The Palaces of Crete,'

pp. 64-66.]

[Footnote **: 'Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,' pp.

482, 483.]

It may be, then, that this deity was the one of whom the King was supposed to be the representative and incarnation, and in that case the bull-grappling, which was so constant a feature of the palace sports, had a deeper significance, and was in reality part of the ceremonial a.s.sociated with the worship of the Cretan bull-G.o.d.

In this connection Professor Murray has emphasized[*] certain facts in connection with the legendary history of Minos, which would seem to link the Cretan monarchy with a custom not infrequently observed in connection with other ancient monarchies and faiths.

It will be remembered that the legend of Minos states variously that he 'ruled for nine years, the gossip of Great Zeus,' and that every nine years he went into the cave of Zeus or of the bull-G.o.d, to converse with Zeus, to receive new commandments, and to give account of his stewardship. The nine-year period recurs in the account of the b.l.o.o.d.y tribute of seven youths and seven maidens who were offered to the Minotaur every ninth year. May we not, therefore, have in these statements a distorted recollection of the fact that the Royal Incarnation of the Bull-G.o.d originally held his office only for a term of nine years, and that at the end of that period he went into the Dictaean Cave, the sanctuary of his divinity, and was there slain in sacrifice, while from the cave his successor came forth, and was hailed as the rejuvenated incarnation of divinity, to reign in his turn, and then to perish as his predecessor had done? In this case the seven youths and seven maidens who were offered to the Minotaur at the end of the nine-year period may have been slain with him to be his companions and servants in the underworld, or, as is perhaps more likely, they may, in a later stage of the custom, have been accepted as his subst.i.tutes, so that the death of the King was merely a ritual one.

[Footnote *: 'The Rise of the Greek Epic,' pp. 127, 128.]

Of course, this explanation of the Minos legend and the story of the human tribute is in the meantime only a supposition, and not susceptible of absolute proof; but the constant recurrence of the nine-year period is, at least, very striking, and it is worth remembering that a custom precisely similar to that suggested has existed in connection with several ancient monarchies, and, indeed, survives to the present day. In the ancient Ethiopian kingdom the King was obliged to slay himself when commanded to do so by the priests. A similar custom prevailed in Babylonia and among the ancient Prussians, while several modern African tribes slay their King when the first sign of age or infirmity begins to show itself in him. Professor Flinders Petrie has shown[*] that the greatest of the Egyptian feasts, the 'Sed' Festival, was a ceremonial survival of a time when the Pharaoh, the Priest-King and representative of G.o.d on earth, was slain at fixed intervals. The object in all such cases is manifestly to secure that the incarnation of divinity shall always be in the prime of his vigour, and shall never know decay.

It is impossible, no doubt, to say that such a feature belonged to the Minoan religious polity; the evidence is not such as to admit of certainty, yet it is not unlikely that in a custom similar to this lies the interpretation of the main features of the Minotaur legend.

[Footnote *: 'Researches in Sinai,' pp. 181-185.]

Such, then, was the Empire of the Minoan Sea-Kings as it has been revealed to us by the excavations and researches of the last ten years. Apart from the actual information gained of this great race, which must henceforward be regarded as one of the originating sources of Greek civilization and learning, and therefore, to a great extent, of all European culture, perhaps the most striking and interesting result that has been attained is the remarkable confirmation given to the broad outlines of those traditions about Crete which have survived in the legends and in the narratives of the Greek historians. The fable of the Minotaur is now seen to be no mere wild and monstrous imagining, but a reflection, vague and grotesque as seen through the mist of centuries, of customs which did actually exist in the palace life of Knossos, and were very probably parts of the religious practice of the country. The slaying of the Minotaur by the Athenian Theseus may well be an echo of the conquest of the Minoan Empire by the mainland tribes. The story which makes Theseus bring up from the Palace of Amphitrite the ring which Minos had thrown into the sea, seems almost certainly to be a symbolic expression of the pa.s.sing over of the sea-power of the aegean from the once-omnipotent Minoans to the Achaeans and the other restless tribes who for generations after the fall of Knossos held the dominion of the ocean, and were the terror of all peaceful nations, and a menace to the existence of even so great a power as Egypt. No one now dreams of hesitating to accept the statements of Herodotus and Thucydides as to the great sea-empire of Crete. Whoever the Minos to whom they allude may have been--whether he was actually a single great historical monarch who brought the glory of the kingdom to its culmination, or whether the name was the t.i.tle of a race of Kings, is a matter of small moment. In either case the sea-power of Minoan Crete was a reality which endured, not for one reign, but for many reigns; and it is practically certain that, during a long period of history, the whole sea-borne trade of Europe, Asia, and Africa, was in the hands of these, the earliest lords of the ocean.

[Ill.u.s.tration x.x.xII: GOLDSMITHS' WORK FROM BEEHIVE TOMBS, PHaeSTOS (_p_. 216)

_G. Maraghiannis_]

The recollections of the fallen power that survived in the Greek mind were chiefly those connected with the oppressive aspect of the dominion which the Lord of Knossos exercised over the aegean area; but in Egypt there lingered for centuries a tradition which did more justice to the glories of Minoan Crete. In the Timaeus, Plato tells a story of how Solon went to Egypt, and was told by a priest at Sais that long ago there had been a great island in the western sea, where a wonderful central power held sway, not only over the whole of its own land, but also over other islands and parts of the continent. In an attempt at universal conquest, this island State made war upon Greece and Egypt, but was defeated by the Athenians, and overwhelmed by the sea as a punishment for its sins, leaving only a range of mud-banks, dangerous to navigation, to mark the place where it had been. In the Timaeus and Critias, Plato describes with considerable detail the features of the island State, and the details are such that he might almost have been describing what the Egyptian priest who originally told the story was no doubt endeavouring to describe--the actual port and Palace of Knossos, with the life that went on there. 'The great harbour, for example, with its shipping and its merchants coming from all parts, the elaborate bathrooms, the stadium, and the solemn sacrifice of a bull, are all thoroughly, though not exclusively, Minoan; but when we read how the bull is hunted "in the temple of Poseidon without weapons but with staves and nooses," we have an unmistakable description of the bull-ring at Knossos, the very thing which struck foreigners most, and which gave rise to the legend of the Minotaur.'[*]

[Footnote *: 'The Lost Continent,' _Times_, February 19, 1909. The anonymous writer was the first to identify Crete with the 'Lost Atlantis.']

The boundaries which Plato a.s.signs to the Empire of the lost State are practically identical with those over which Minoan influence is now known to have spread, while the description of the island itself is such as to make it almost certain that Crete was the original from which it was drawn. 'The island was the way to other islands, and from these islands you might pa.s.s to the whole of the opposite continent which surrounded the true ocean.' So Plato describes Atlantis; and when you set beside his sentence a modern description of Crete--'a half-way house between three continents, flanked by the great Libyan promontory, and linked by smaller island stepping-stones to the Peloponnese and the mainland of Anatolia'--there can be little doubt that the two descriptions refer to the same island.

The only difficulty in the way of accepting the identification is that it is stated that the lost Atlantis lay beyond the Pillars of Hercules; but doubtless this statement is due to Solon's misinterpretation of what was said by his Egyptian informant, or to the Saite priest's endeavour to accommodate his ancient tradition to the wider geographical knowledge of his own time. The old Egyptian conception of the universe held that the heavens were supported on four pillars, which were actual mountains; and probably the original story placed the lost island beyond these pillars as a metaphorical way of stating that it was very far distant, as indeed it was to voyagers in those early days. But by Solon's time the limits of navigation were extended far beyond those of the early seafarers. The Ph?nician trader had pushed at least as far west as Spain; Necho's fleet had circ.u.mnavigated Africa; and so 'the island farthest west,' which naturally meant Crete to the Egyptian of the Eighteenth Dynasty who first recorded the catastrophe of the Minoan Empire, had to be thrust out beyond the Straits of Gibraltar to satisfy the wider ideas of the men of Solon's and Necho's time.

Almost certainly then, Plato's story gives the Saite version of the actual Egyptian records of the greatness and the final disaster of that great island state with which Egypt so long maintained intercourse.

Doubtless to the men of the latter part of the Eighteenth Dynasty the sudden blotting out of Minoan trade and influence by the overthrow of Knossos seemed as strange and mysterious as though Crete had actually been swallowed up by the sea. The island never regained its lost supremacy, and gradually sank into the insignificance which is its characteristic throughout the Cla.s.sical period. So, though neither the priest of Sais nor his Greek auditor, and still less Plato, dreamed of the fact, the wonderful island State of which the Egyptian tradition preserved the memory, was indeed Minoan Crete, and the men of the Lost Atlantis whose portraits Produs saw in Egypt were none other than the Keftiu of the tombs of Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra.

CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY

Prior to 1580 B.C. the dates in the summary must be regarded as merely provisional, and the margin of possible error is wide. The tendency on the part of the Cretan explorers has been to accept in the main the Berlin system of Egyptian dating in preference to that advocated by Professor Flinders Petrie ('Researches in Sinai,' pp. 163-185), on the ground that the development of the Minoan culture can scarcely have required so long a period as that given by the Sinai dating. It must be remembered, however, that the question is still unsettled, and that the longer system of Professor Petrie must be regarded as at least possible.

CRETE.

EGYPT (BERLIN).

EGYPT (PETRIE).

B.C.

10000-3000, Neolithic Age.

_c._ 3000-2600, Early Minoan I.

Dynasties I.-V., 3400-2625 B.C.

Dynasties I.-V., 5510-4206 B.C.

_c._ 2600-2400 " " II.

Dynasty VI., 2625-2475 "

Dynasty VI., 4206-4003 "

_c._ 2400-2200 " " III.

Dynasties VII.-X., 2475-2160 "

Dynasties VII.-X., 4003-3502 "

_c._ 2200-2000, Middle Minoan I.

(earlier palaces at Knossos and Phaestos).

Dynasty XI., 2160-2000 "

Dynasty XI., 3502-3459 "

_c._ 2000-1850, Middle Minoan II.

(pottery of Kamares Cave; at end of period destruction of Knossos).

Dynasty XII., 2000-1788 "

Dynasty XII., 3459-3246 "

_c._ 1850-1600, Middle Minoan III. (Later Palace Knossos; first Villa Hagia Triada; early in period, statuette of Sebek-user; late, Alabastron of Khyan).

Dynasties XIII.-XVII., 1788-1580 B.C.

Dynasties XIII.-XVII., 3246-1580 B.C.

(Period of confusion and of Hyksos domination.) 1600-1500, Late Minoan I.

(Later Palace Phaestos begun).

1500-1400, Late Minoan II.

(Later Palace Knossos completed; _c._ 1400, fall of Knossos).

Dynasty XVIII., 1580-1350 B.C.

Dynasty XVIII., 1580-1322 B.C.

(Keftiu on walls of tombs of Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra.) 1400----, Late Minoan III.

(period of partial reoccupation and decline).