The Sea-Kings of Crete Part 6

Into the question of which system of dating should be adopted it is impossible to enter, though it may be said that if 1,666 years seems a huge allowance for the five Dynasties, 208 years seems almost incredibly small. The result is what concerns us here, and we are faced with the fact that, while the traditional dating places the First Egyptian Dynasty at about 4000 B.C., the German school would bring it down to 3400 B.C., and Professor Petrie thrusts it back to 5510 B.C. Dr. Evans, in provisionally a.s.signing dates to the periods of Minoan history, formerly drew nearer to the traditional than to either the German dating or that of Professor Petrie; but he has gradually modified this position, and now dates his Middle Minoan II., which synchronizes with the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty, at 2000 B.C., thus practically accepting the chronology of the German school. This would place Early Minoan I., which must be equated with the First Dynasty, about 3400 B.C. Practically, all that can be said with a moderate amount of certainty is that the earliest civilization of Crete, like that of Egypt, was in existence at a period not much later than 3500 B.C., while it is not impossible that it may be 1,500 years older. Even accepting the lower figure, the antiquity of man's first settlements on the hill of Kephala becomes absolutely staggering to the mind. If the growth of deposit on the hill was at the rate of something like 3 feet in a millennium--a reasonable supposition--it follows that we must place the earliest habitations of Neolithic man at Knossos not later than 10000, perhaps as early as 12000 B.C.

It is not till many centuries after the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty had pa.s.sed away that we come upon fresh evidence of the connection between the two countries. The earlier palaces at Knossos and Phaestos had been built, and the first period of Middle Minoan, with its beginnings of polychrome decoration and its Queen Elizabeth figurines from Petsofa, had come and gone in Crete, while in Egypt the corresponding period had been marked by the troublous times between the Seventh and the Eleventh Dynasties. But the rise of the Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt marked the beginning of a more stable state of affairs in the Nile Valley, and in this period, which corresponds with Dr.

Evans's Middle Minoan II., there are again evidences of touch between the two kingdoms. With regard to absolute dating, we are of course as much in the dark as ever, and may choose between 2000, 2500, and 3459 B.C. In any case, at this point, put it provisionally at 2000 B.C., the Egypt of the Senuserts and Amenemhats and the Crete of Middle Minoan II. are manifestly contemporaneous, and in well-established connection. In Crete this was the period when the beautiful polychrome Kamares ware was at the height of its popularity, and at Kahun, close to the pyramid of Senusert II., Professor Petrie some years ago discovered some unquestionable specimens of this fine ware, which had certainly been imported from Crete, as the fabric is one quite unknown to native Egyptian ceramic art. Even more conclusive was Professor Garstang's discovery, in an untouched tomb at Abydos, of a polychrome vessel in the latest style of the period, in company with glazed steat.i.te cylinders, which bear the names of Senusert III. and Amenemhat III., the last great Kings of the Twelfth Dynasty.

But the most interesting link between the two countries is found in the fact that in this period there was erected in Egypt the building which came to be looked on as the parallel to the Cretan Labyrinth, and which, with a curious inversion of the actual facts, was long supposed to be the original from which the Cretan Labyrinth was derived. The pyramid of Amenemhat III., the greatest King of the great Twelfth Dynasty, and indeed one of the greatest men who ever held the Egyptian sceptre, stood at Hawara, near the mouth of the Fayum. Not far from it Amenemhat erected a huge temple, such as had never been built before, and never was built again, even in that land of gigantic structures. The great building was erected, in a taste eminently characteristic of the Middle Kingdom, of great blocks of fine limestone and crystalline quartzite. It has long since disappeared, having been used as a quarry for thousands of years; but the size of the site, which can still be traced, shows that in actual area the temple covered a s.p.a.ce of ground within which Karnak, Luqsor, and the Ramesseum, huge as they all are, could quite well have stood together.

Even in the time of Herodotus enough was still remaining of this vast building to excite his profound wonder and admiration, and it seemed to him a more remarkable structure than even the Pyramids. 'It has,' he says, 'twelve courts enclosed with walls, with doors opposite each other, six facing the north, and six the south, contiguous to one another, and the same exterior wall encloses them. It contains two kinds of rooms, some under ground, and some above ground over them, to the number of 3,000, 1,500 of each.' He was not allowed to inspect the underground chambers. 'But the upper ones, which surpa.s.s all human works, I myself saw; for the pa.s.sages through the corridors, and the windings through the courts, from their great variety, presented a thousand occasions of wonder as I pa.s.sed from a court to the rooms, and from the rooms to halls, and to other corridors from the halls, and to other courts from the rooms.

The roofs of all these are of stone, as also are the walls; but the walls are full of sculptured figures. Each court is surrounded with a colonnade of white stone, closely fitted.'[*] Herodotus believed that the building belonged to the time of Psamtek I., in which, of course, he was ludicrously far astray, but otherwise there seems no reason to question that his description actually represents what he saw, though no doubt his lively mind somewhat multiplied the number of the rooms.

[Footnote *: Herodotus II. 148.]

Pliny the elder, judging from his description, evidently saw much the same thing at Hawara as Herodotus had seen, though time must have somewhat diminished the splendour of the building. Now, to this temple there was already applied in the time of Herodotus the name Labyrinth. It used to be believed that the Hawara Labyrinth gave its name to the Cretan one, and an Egyptian etymology was arranged for the word 'labyrinth,' according to which it would have meant 'the temple at the mouth of the ca.n.a.l.' The Egyptian form of the t.i.tle, however, is 'a mere figment of the philological imagination.' Probably originality lies in the other direction.

The first palace at Knossos dates from a period certainly as early as, probably somewhat earlier than, the Hawara temple; and since the derivation of the word 'labyrinth' from the Labrys or Double Axe, making the palace the House or Place of the Double Axe, seems quite satisfactory, the Egyptian Labyrinth in all likelihood derived its name from the House of Minos at Knossos. Apart, however, from any mere question of names, there appears the interesting parallel that the two most famous Labyrinths, the first palace at Knossos, and the great Hawara temple, actually belong to the same period--a period when, as we know from the other evidence, there was certainly active intercourse between the two nations.

Mr. Hall has pointed out[*] the resemblance between the actual building at Knossos and the descriptions left to us of its Egyptian contemporary. The literary tradition of the Labyrinth of Minos is that it was a place of mazy pa.s.sages and windings, difficult to traverse without a guide or clue, and the actual remains at Knossos show that the palace must have answered very well to such a description, while the feature of the Hawara temple which struck both Herodotus and Pliny was precisely the same. 'The pa.s.sages through the corridors and the windings through the courts, from their great variety, presented a thousand occasions of wonder.'

The resemblance extended to the material of which the buildings were erected. The fine white limestone of Hawara must have closely resembled the shining white gypsum of Knossos, and though the Egyptian Labyrinth has pa.s.sed away too completely for us to be able to judge of its masonry, yet the splendid building work of the Eleventh Dynasty temple of Mentuhotep Neb-hapet-Ra at Deir-el-Bahri, with its great blocks of limestone beautifully fitted and laid, affords a good Middle Kingdom parallel to the great gypsum blocks of the Knossian palace. Of course we cannot attribute to Cretan influence the style of the Egyptian building in this respect. For hundreds of years the Egyptians had been past masters in the art of great construction with huge blocks of stone, so that, if there is to be any derivation on this point, it may rather have been Crete which followed the example of Egypt. But it may not be altogether a mere coincidence that, in a period of Egyptian history which we know to have been linked with an important epoch of Cretan development, there should have been erected in Egypt a building absolutely unparalleled, so far as we know, among the architectural triumphs of that nation, but bearing no distant resemblance, if the descriptions are to be trusted, to the great palace which the Minoan Sovereigns had newly reared, or were, perhaps, still rearing, for themselves at Knossos. Is it permissible to fancy that the envoys of Amenemhat III. may have brought back to Egypt reports and descriptions of the great Cretan palace which may have fired that King with the desire to leave behind him a memorial, unique among Egyptian buildings, but inspired by the actual achievements of his brother monarchs in Crete? Whether the idea of this relation between the two buildings be merely fanciful or not, their resemblances add another ill.u.s.tration to the proofs of the close connection between the Minoan and the Egyptian cultures in the third millennium B.C.

[Footnote *: _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, 1905, part ii.]

With the succeeding Cretan epoch, Middle Minoan III., we come into touch with the dark age of Egyptian history, the great gap covering Dynasties XIII.-XVII., towards the close of which is to be placed the Hyksos domination. As the age was so troubled in Egypt, it is scarcely probable that we shall find much evidence there of any connection between the two lands; but the evidence found on Cretan soil, though slight, is conclusive as to the fact that communication was maintained. For the earlier part of the period we have the statuette, already mentioned as having been found at Knossos, bearing the name of 'Ab-nub's child, Sebek-user, deceased, born of the lady Sat-Hathor.' 'Who Sebek-user was,' as Mr. Hall remarks, 'and how his statuette got to Crete, we have no means of knowing.' But the 'deceased' in the inscription shows that the statuette was a funerary or memorial one, and it is hardly likely that such an object was imported merely for its own sake or for its artistic value, which is slight enough. May it not be that either Ab-nub, the father, or Sebek-user, the son, or both, may have been Egyptians resident at the Court of Knossos, either as representatives of Egyptian interests or as skilled artificers, and that the statuette is the memorial of one who died far from his native land, but not without friends to see that he did not lack the funerary attentions which would have been his at home? No doubt there was interchange of persons as well as of commodities between the two lands; some of the artists and craftsmen of both countries would naturally go to where there was a demand arising for their work, or where instructors were being sought to teach the new arts; and Ab-nub and his son Sebek-user may have drifted to Knossos in this manner, and found at last their graves there.

Were they conceivably responsible for the 'imported alabaster vases dating from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt,' which were found in the royal tomb at Isopata?

Towards the close of this epoch the ceramic art of Knossos shows features which are directly attributable to Egyptian influence.

The art of glazing pottery was not a native Cretan, but an Egyptian art; it is in full use in Egypt from the very beginnings of the First Dynasty. But now we find it appearing in a high state of development in Crete in the beautiful faence reliefs of the wild-goat and kids, the vases with the wild-rose in relief on the lip, and the figurines of the Snake G.o.ddess and her votaresses. The Cretan artists, however, though they borrowed the process, adapted it to their own tastes. In Egypt the native faence of the time is of strictly conventional type, with black design on blue; but the Cretan emanc.i.p.ated himself from these limits, and made his faence reliefs in the polychrome style, which still persisted, though now no longer so prevalent as it had once been.

The disastrous period of the Hyksos domination in Egypt has left but one trace at Knossos, but that is of peculiar interest, for it is the lid of an alabastron bearing the name of the Hyksos King Khyan. It cannot be said that we know any of the Hyksos Kings, but Khyan is the one whose relics are the most widely distributed and have the most interest. The finding of the lid at Knossos, his farthest west, is balanced by the lion, bearing his cartouche, found many years ago at Baghdad, his farthest east, while in his inscriptions he calls himself 'Embracer of territories.' So it has been suggested that the Knossos lid and the Baghdad lion are the scanty relics of a great Hyksos empire which once extended from the Euphrates to the First Cataract of the Nile, and possibly also held Crete in subjection. In all likelihood, however, the idea is merely a dream; certainly so far as regards Crete it is most improbable. In the palmiest days of the Egyptian navy the Pharaohs never held any dominion over Crete, and even Cyprus was never really under their rule. It is much less likely still that a King of the Hyksos race, whose whole tradition is of the land and the desert, should have succeeded in establishing any suzerainty over a race whose whole tradition is of the sea, and which was then in the full pride of its strength.

Another era of history has pa.s.sed away before we again find Crete and Egypt in close touch with one another. In Crete the last period of Middle Minoan had been succeeded by the first of Late Minoan, in which the great palace of the Middle period was being gradually transformed into a still larger and more magnificent structure, which was not to be completed until the succeeding period. In Egypt the Seventeenth Dynasty had at last, after long hesitation, picked up the gauntlet thrown down by the Hyksos conquerors, and the War of Independence had resulted in the expulsion of the Desert Princes and their race. The conquering Dynasty had been succeeded by the Eighteenth, the Dynasty of Queen Hatshepsut, Tahutmes III., and Amenhotep III., and Egypt was in the full tide of a great revival, alike in world-influence, in trade, and in art. Queen Hatshepsut, who states in one of her inscriptions that 'her spirits inclined towards foreign peoples,' had sent out her squadron to Somaliland, and Tahutmes III. had organized a war-fleet on the Mediterranean coast-line. The ancient Empire of the Nile was opening its arms in every direction to outside influences, and was drawing into the ports of the great river the commercial and artistic products of every known people.

Among the races who are most prominent in the Egyptian records of the period are the Keftiu, who are frequently represented in the paintings of the time, and always with the same characteristic features, the same dress and bearing, the same products of commerce and art. Who, then, were the Keftiu? The word means the people or the country 'at the back of'--in other words, at the back of 'the Very Green,' as the Egyptians called the Mediterranean. So that the Keftians with whom the merchants and courtiers of Egypt grew familiar in the times of Hatshepsut and Tahutmes III. Were to them the men 'from the back of beyond'--the farthest distant people with whom they had any dealings. But what race could correspond to these 'back of beyond' men? In Ptolemaic times the word 'Keftiu'

was unquestionably applied to the Ph?nicians, who had for long been the great seafarers and carriers of the Mediterranean; and till recent years it was generally believed that the Keftiu of the Eighteenth Dynasty were Ph?nicians also, though their faces, as depicted on the Egyptian wall-paintings, did not bear the slightest trace of Semitic cast. But the discoveries of the last few years have demolished that idea for ever, along with many other beliefs as to the influence of the overrated Ph?nicians upon the culture of the Mediterranean area, and the pictures of the Minoans of Knossos have made it certain that the Keftiu of the Eighteenth Dynasty were none others than the amba.s.sadors, sailors, and merchants of the Sea-Kings of Crete. Fortunately, the tomb-painting which has preserved so many interesting details of Egyptian life, was never more a.s.siduously practised or more happily inspired than at this period. In all the chief tombs there are pictured processions of Northerners, Westerners, Easterners, and Southerners, the North being represented by Semites, the East by the men of Punt, the South by negroes, and the West by the Keftiu; and we can compare the men of the Knossos frescoes with their fellow-countrymen as depicted on the tomb-walls of the Theban grandees, and be certain that, allowing for the differences in the style of art, they are essentially the same people. The tombs which preserve best the figures of the Keftiu are those of Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra. That of Sen-mut is the earlier, though only by a generation, or perhaps rather less. He was the architect of Queen Hatshepsut, the man who planned and executed the great colonnaded temple at Deir-el-Bahri, and who set up Hatshepsut's gigantic obelisks. His tomb at Thebes overlooks the temple which he built at his Queen's command to be 'a paradise for Amen,' and on its walls we can see 'the men from the back of beyond' walking in procession, each with his offering to present to the Pharaoh. There can be no question as to who they are. The half-boots and puttees, the decorated girdle compressing the waist, not quite so tightly as in the Minoan representations, the gaily adorned loin-cloth, which is the only article of attire, all are practically identical with the type of such a fresco as that of the Cupbearer at Knossos. The conscientious Egyptian artists have carefully represented also the elaborate coiffure which was characteristic of the Minoans, who allowed their hair to fall in long tails down their shoulders, doing part of it up in a knot or curl on the top of the head. The tribute-bearers carry in their hands or upon their shoulders great vessels of gold and silver, some of them exactly resembling in shape the Vaphio cups, though much larger than these, some of them of the type of the bronze ewer found in the north-west house at Knossos.

[Ill.u.s.tration XX: (1) MAIN DRAIN, KNOSSOS (_p_. 98)

(2) TERRA-COTTA DRAIN PIPES (_p_. 98)]

Rekh-ma-ra, in whose tomb are the other notable pictures of the Keftiu, was also a great figure in Egyptian history in the next reign. He was Vizier to Tahutmes III., the conquering Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The pictures on the walls of his tomb are, at least in some cases, evidently more than mere racial studies; they are careful portraits. 'The first man, "The Great Chief of the Kefti, and the Isles of the Green Sea," is young, and has a remarkably small mouth with an amiable expression. His complexion is fair rather than dark, but his hair is dark brown. His lieutenant, the next in order, is of a different type--elderly, with a most forbidding visage, Roman nose, and nut-cracker jaws. Most of the others are very much alike--young, dark in complexion, and with long black hair hanging below their waists and twisted up into fantastic knots and curls on the tops of their heads.'[*]

[Footnote *: H. R. Hall, 'Egypt and Western Asia,' p. 362.]

These Keftiu, then, were the Minoans of the Great Palace period of Crete, the pre-h.e.l.lenic Greeks, the Pelasgi of old Greek tradition, in whose time the great civilization of the Minoan Empire reached its culminating point, and was within a little of its final disaster.

It is a fortunate circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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 Hitt.i.tes 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 faence of the time of Amenhotep III. has discarded the old Egyptian tradition of black upon blue, and now rejoices in splendid chocolates, purples, violets, reds, and apple-greens, shows that Cretan influence was still strong. Fragments of Late Minoan pottery found in abundance on the site of Akhenaten's new capital at Tell-el-Amarna show that even in the reign of this King, the heretic son and successor of Amenhotep III., Crete was still trading with Egypt. But before Akhenaten came to the throne, about 1380 B.C.--possibly twenty years before that event--the great catastrophe which brought the Minoan Empire of Knossos to a close had already happened. The Cretan wares which filtered into Egypt after 1400 B.C. were the products of the Minoan decadence, when the survivors of the Empire of the Sea-Kings--a broken and dwindling race--were still trying to maintain a slowly failing tradition of art under the new masters, perhaps the Mycenaeans of the mainland, who, driven forth themselves by the pressure of Northern invaders, had crushed in their turn the gentler sister civilization of Crete.

The Mycenaean 'stirrup-vases' pictured in the tomb of Ramses III.

(1202-1170 B.C.), and the representations in the tomb of Imadua of gold cups of the Vaphio type, carry the connection down to the last dregs of the dying' race; but by the time of Ramses III. the Minoan kingdom had probably been dead and buried for about two centuries.

In fact, with the rise of the Nineteenth Dynasty in Egypt (1350 B.C.), the name of the Keftiu disappears from the Egyptian records, and in the place of the men from the back of beyond there appears a confused jumble of warring sea-tribes, some of them possibly the men who had overthrown the Minoan Empire, some of them probably representing the broken fragments of that Empire itself, who unite in attacks upon Egypt, but are foiled and overthrown. In the record of the earlier of these invasions, that which took place in the reign of Merenptah (1234-1214 B.C.), the successor of Ramses II., it is difficult to trace any names that have Cretan connections.

The Aqayuasha may conceivably have been Achaeans; but that is another story.

But when we come to deal with the great invasion in the reign of Ramses III., about 1200 B.C., we get into touch with tribes which bear almost beyond question the marks of Cretan origin, and one of which is particularly interesting to us on other grounds. In the eighth year of Ramses III. The eastern coasts of the Mediterranean were swept by a great invasion of the 'Peoples of the Sea.' 'The isles were restless, disturbed among themselves,' says Ramses in his inscription at Medinet Habu. Very probably the incursion was the result of the southward movement of the invading northern tribes, whose pressure was forcing the ancient aegean peoples to migrate and seek new homes for themselves. Landing in Northern Syria, the sea-peoples quickly made themselves masters of the fragments of the once formidable Hitt.i.te confederacy, and, absorbing in their alliance the Hitt.i.tes, who may indeed have been of their own kin, they moved southwards along the sea-coast, their fleet of war-galleys keeping pace with the advance of the land army. They established a central camp and place of arms in the land of Amor, or of the Amorites, and their southward movement speedily became a menace to the Egyptian Empire. Ramses III., the last great soldier of the true Egyptian stock, made effective preparations to meet them.

Gathering at the Nile mouths a numerous fleet, which carried large numbers of the dreaded Egyptian archers, he advanced with the land army to meet the invaders, his fleet also accompanying the march of the army. The locality of the encounter between the two forces is doubtful, some placing it in Ph?nicia, and others much nearer to the Egyptian frontier. In any case, a great battle was fought, both by land and sea, and the Egyptian army and fleet were entirely successful in the double encounter. The reliefs of Ramses at Medinet Habu show the details of the battle, the Egyptian fleet penetrating and overthrowing that of the sea-peoples, while the Pharaoh from the sh.o.r.e a.s.sists 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration XXI: THEATRAL AREA, KNOSSOS: BEFORE RESTORATION (_p_.

100)]

The tribes which are mentioned in the inscriptions of Ramses as having been leagued together in this attempt are the Danauna, the Uashasha, the Zakkaru, the Shakalsha, and the Pulosathu, in alliance with the North Syrian tribes. The Danauna are evidently the Danaoi, or Argives, the same race which, under Achaean overlords, composed the ma.s.s 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 quant.i.ty, having been variously identified with the Sikels of ancient Sicily and with the Sagala.s.sians 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 a.s.sociated by Mr. H. R. Hall with the town of Axos, in Crete. There remain the Pulosathu, who are, almost beyond question, the Philistines, so well known to us from their connection with the rise of the Hebrew monarchy. The Hebrew tradition brought the Philistines from Kaphtor, and Kaphtor is plainly nothing else than the Egyptian Kefti, or Keftiu. In the Philistines, then, we have the last organized remnant of the old Minoan sea-power. Thrown back from the frontier of Egypt by the victory of Ramses III., they established themselves on the maritime plain of Palestine, where perhaps the Minoans had already occupied trading-settlements, and there formed a community consisting of five cities, governed by five confederate tyrants. No doubt they brought under and held in subjection the ancient Canaanite population of the district, whom they would rule as the Normans ruled the inhabitants of Sicily.

In the district which they governed, and especially at Tell-es-Safi (Gath), Messrs. Bliss and Macalister have discovered many specimens of pottery which is obviously Cretan of the Third Late Minoan period, together with ware which is local in the sense of having been manufactured on the spot, but is quite certainly Late Minoan also in its design and decoration.

So, then, the nation with which we have all been familiar from the earliest days of childhood as the hated rival of the young Hebrew state, whose wars with the Hebrews are the subject of so many of the heroic stories of Israel's Iron Age, was the last survival of the great race of Minos. Samson made sport for his Cretan captors in a Minoan Theatral Area by the portico of some degenerate House of Minos, half palace, half shrine, with Cretan ladies in their strangely modern garb of frills and flounces looking down from the balconies to see his feats of strength, as their ancestresses had looked down at Knossos on the boxing and bull-grappling of the palmy days when Knossos ruled the aegean. The great champion whom David met and slew in the vale of Elah was a Cretan, a Pelasgian, one of the Greeks before the Greeks, wearing the bronze panoply with the feather-crested helmet which his people had adopted in their later days in place of the old leathern cap and huge figure-eight shield. Ittai of Gath, David's faithful captain of the bodyguard, and David's body-guards themselves, the Cherethites and Pelethites (Cretans and Philistines), were all of the same race.

Though these last supporters of the great Minoan tradition had fallen upon evil times, it is evident that they were not altogether degenerate. The references to their cities in Scripture show that they still retained the national taste for splendid buildings; and no doubt their culture, though belonging to the last and most debased period of Minoan art, was far in advance of that of the rude Hebrew tribes. The golden mice and tumours which they sent to the Hebrews along with the ark of Jehovah recall on the one hand the skill of the Minoan goldsmiths, and on the other the votive images of animals and diseased human organs placed in the old shrine at Petsofa. The respect which was excited by their warlike prowess can easily be read between the lines of the Hebrew story. A race that to its opponents appears to breed giants is a race that has proved itself thoroughly respectable on the field of war; and the fact that a small league of five towns maintained itself so long as it did, and was able to make itself so dreaded, points to bravery and skill in arms altogether out of proportion to its actual strength in mere numbers. Evidently the last Minoans succeeded in creating an atmosphere for themselves in Palestine, and in impressing the surrounding peoples with a wholesome terror of them. We may imagine the men from Crete, lithe and agile, as we see them on the Boxer Vase of Hagia Triada, swaggering in their bronze armour among the weaker Orientals, much as the later Greek hoplite of the times of Psamtek I. or Haa-ab-ra domineered over the native Egyptians.

But all the same the Philistine was an anachronism, a survival from an older world. The day of the Minoan, like that of his early friend the Egyptian, had pa.s.sed 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 G.o.d, if haply he might feel after Him and find Him.

CHAPTER VIII

THE DESTROYERS

The Empire of the Sea-Kings had not been immune from disaster and defeat any more than any other great Empire of the ancient world.

The times of conquest and triumph, when Knossos exacted its human tribute from the vanquished states, Megara or Athens, or from its own far-spread dependencies, had occasionally been broken by periods when victory left its banners, and when the indignities it had inflicted on other states were retaliated on itself. Once at least in the long history of the palace at Knossos, if not twice, there had come a disastrous day when the Minoan fleet had either been defeated or eluded, when some invading force had landed and swept up the valley, had overcome what resistance could be made by the guard of the unfortified palace, and had ebbed back again to its ships, leaving death and fire-blackened walls behind it. The Second Middle Minoan period closes with the evidence of such a general catastrophe, in which the palace was sacked and fired, and there are also traces which suggest that the end of the preceding period was marked by a similar disaster.

But these catastrophes, whether the agents of them were mere sea-rovers, making a daring raid upon the eyrie of the great sea-power, or the warriors of rival mainland states, eager to avenge upon their enemy what they themselves had suffered at her hands, or, as Dr.

Evans and other explorers incline rather to believe, Cretans from Phaestos, whose purpose was merely to overthrow the ruling dynasty, scarcely interrupted the current of Minoan development. If the enemy came from without, he came only to destroy and plunder, not to occupy, and, having done his work, departed; if from within the Empire, his triumph made no breach in the continuity of the Minoan tradition. The palace rose again from its ashes, greater and more glorious than before, and men of the same stock carried on the work that had been checked for a while by the rough hand of war. The men of the Third Middle Minoan period reared the beginnings of the second palace on the site where the first had stood, and in the relics of their arts and crafts the same spirit which informed the earlier period still prevails, with no greater modifications than such as come naturally to the art of any nation by the mere lapse of time.

From the beginning of Middle Minoan III. to the end of Late Minoan II.--a period, that is to say, of either some 500 or almost 2,000 years, according to the scheme of Egyptian chronology which we may adopt--the civilization of Crete apparently followed a course of even and peaceful development. At Knossos, Phaestos, and Hagia Triada the great palaces slowly grew to their final glory. The art that had produced the beautiful polychrome Kamares ware pa.s.sed away, and was succeeded by the naturalism which has left us the Blue Boy who gathers the white crocuses, and the faence 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 steat.i.te vases of Hagia Triada, Boxer, Harvester, and Chieftain. On the mainland the kindred culture of Mycenae was rising to its culmination, and the art represented in the Circle-Graves was almost in the fulness of its bloom. Naturalism declines in its turn, and is succeeded by the Later Palace style, more grandiose, more mannered, and less free than that which had preceded it. It was in the Later Palace period (Late Minoan II.) that the miniature frescoes were painted, to preserve for us the strangely modern style of the Minoan Court, with its flounced and furbelowed dames. Naturalism, though failing, was still capable of great things, and its last efforts in the palace at Knossos gave us the magnificent reliefs of painted stucco, such as the bull's head and the King with the peac.o.c.k plumes. Over the seas, the Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty were setting down on their tomb walls those likenesses of the Keftiu which have helped us to the date of this last development of Minoan greatness.

[Ill.u.s.tration XXII: THEATRAL AREA, KNOSSOS: RESTORED (_p_. 100)

_G. Maraghiannis_]

Probably the power and grandeur of the Empire was never more imposing than during the hundred years before 1400 B.C. The House of Minos at Knossos had reached its full development, and stood in all its splendour, an imposing ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.cious porticoes and corridors the walls glowed with the brilliant colours of innumerable frescoes and reliefs in coloured plaster. The Cup-Bearer, the Queen's Procession, the Miniature Frescoes of the Palace Sports, stood out in all their freshness. Magnificent urns in painted pottery, with reliefs like those of the great papyrus vase (Plate XXIII.), decorated the halls and courts, and were rivalled by huge stone amphorae, exquisitely carved. The King and his courtiers were served in costly vessels of gold, silver, and bronze _repousse_ work.

The Empire of the Sea-Kings was at its apogee, and on every hand there were the evidences of security and luxury.

But, as in the contemporary Egypt of Amenhotep III. a similar development in all the comforts and luxuries of civilized life was swiftly followed by the downfall under Akhenaten, so in Crete the luxury of Late Minoan II. was only the prelude to its great and final disaster. Exactly when the catastrophe came we cannot tell. The Cretan Empire was certainly still existent in all its glory in 1449 B.C., when Amenhotep II., the son of the great Tahutmes III., came to the throne, for Rekh-ma-ra, the Vizier of Tahutmes, in whose tomb the visit of the Keftian amba.s.sadors 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing away.'

[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' pp. 52, 53.]

That there was a huge disaster, which broke for ever the power of the Sea-Kings, is unmistakable. The Minoan kingdom did not fall from over-ripeness and decay, as was the case with so many other empires. The latest relics of its art before the catastrophe show no signs of decadence; the latest specimens of its linear writing show a marked advance on those of preceding periods. A civilization in full strength and growth was suddenly and fatally arrested.

Everywhere throughout the palace at Knossos there are traces of a vast conflagration. The charred ends of beams and pillars, the very preservation of the clay tablets with their enigmatic records, a preservation due, probably, to the tremendous heat to which they were exposed by the furious blazing of the oil in the store jars of the magazines, the traces of the blackening of fire upon the walls--everything tells of an overwhelming tragedy. Nor was the catastrophe the result of an accident. There is no mistaking the significance of the fact that in the palace scarcely a trace of precious metal, and next to no trace of bronze has been discovered.

Fire at Knossos was accompanied by plunder, and the plundering was thorough. A few sc.r.a.ps 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.