The Sea-Kings of Crete Part 7

The evidence from Phaestos and Hagia Triada tallies with that from Knossos. Everywhere there are 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 ash.o.r.e 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 Phaestos 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 its stately 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration XXIII: 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 aegospotami, 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 Peac.o.c.k 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 Achaeans, 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 a.s.sociate with the Greeks of the Cla.s.sical 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 the palace 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 ma.s.s 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 Mycenaean 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 a.s.sured 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 pa.s.sages, the lifelike figures surviving 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 superst.i.tious 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 Praesos, whose story of the Sicilian expedition of Minos has already been mentioned, stated to Herodotus that, after that great disaster, 'to Crete, thus dest.i.tute of inhabitants ... other men, and especially the Grecians, went, and settled there.' As Mr. Hogarth has pointed out, 'the men of Praesos 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. The process which finally resulted in the island of Crete becoming 'the mixed land,' with a heterogeneous population of Pelasgians, Dorians, Achaeans, 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 Phaestos were overthrown, there was nothing to hinder the gradual drifting in of the wandering tribes of the aegean 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 to themselves, who had occupied the lands of the Mycenaean civilization.

We know that long before the Homeric poems took shape the Achaeans had established themselves as the ruling caste in the Argolid, in Laconia, and elsewhere; and that the pressure had begun even while Mycenae was at the height of its power is suggested by the figures on one of the steles of the Circle-Graves, where a Mycenaean chieftain in his chariot is pursuing an enemy whose leaf-shaped sword shows that he was one of the Danubian race. The Mycenaean 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 Mycenae. The Mycenaean stele, where the chief of the ancient stock pursues his Northern a.s.sailant, has its _motif_ reversed 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 Mycenaean, 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 Mycenae.' Pressed upon thus by the warlike Achaeans, perhaps already forced from their homes on the mainland, the Mycenaeans of Tiryns and Mycenae 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 had originally 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 circ.u.mstances 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 Achaeans, and, later still, the Dorians, followed in the wake of the Mycenaean 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 Idaean Cave, the latest of which come down probably to the 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, pa.s.sed 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 aegean, 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 aegean 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 Mycenaean pottery found at Tell-el-Amarna shows that there was still an opening in Egypt for the products of aegean art at least as late as the reign of Akhenaten; and it is more than probable that in Egypt many of the _emigres_ of the Minoan _debacle_ found 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 spontaneously awakened 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 Minoan _emigres_, 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 a.s.sault 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 sh.o.r.es 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 (_circa_ 1100 B.C.), how the Egyptian amba.s.sador 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 aegean.

The ring of Minos was destined to lie for long ages beneath the waves before the descendants of Theseus brought it up again.

CHAPTER IX

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 cla.s.sification 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 acc.u.mulation, 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 time when 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 quant.i.ty, 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 highest degree of l.u.s.tre, 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 a.s.sume 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 cla.s.sification, 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 l.u.s.trous black surface which his Neolithic predecessor produced by hand-burnishing. A l.u.s.trous black glaze medium is spread as a slip over the surface of the clay, so as to produce an effect generally similar to that of the hand-polished ware, and on this l.u.s.trous 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 archaeologists. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration XXIV: THE BASILICA. STONE LAMP. THE ROYAL VILLA, KNOSSOS (_p_. 108)]

_Early Minoan III_.--In this period the proportion of painted vases steadily increases, though for a time there is also a revival of the incised ornament, attributed by Dr. Evans to influence from the Cyclades, which at this time also gave to Crete the idea of the flat, banjo-shaped human figurines which are characteristic of the early deposits of Melos and Amorgos.

The use of the potter's wheel probably now begins, and the clay is carefully sifted and fired, the favourite colour scheme being white on l.u.s.trous brown or black slip, though sometimes the alternative scheme of dark upon light is adopted; and vases are sometimes fashioned out of very thin clay, in antic.i.p.ation of the fine egg-sh.e.l.l Kamares ware of Middle Minoan II. The chief decorative motive is a horizontal band, or more than one, around the upper part of the vase. On these bands the chief ornament is the zig-zag, and curves directly derived therefrom, and the spiral begins to appear as a form of decoration.

It is uncertain whether the credit for the origination of this favourite form of decorative motive is to be attributed to Egypt or to Crete. Miss Hall[*] regards the Early Minoan III. spirals as late-comers in the field, attributing the first development of the spiral to the painters of Egyptian pre-Dynastic vases; but Mr.

H. R. Hall[**] denies the right of the volutes on the pre-Dynastic vases to be regarded as spirals at all, considers that the true spiral appears suddenly in Egypt as 'a new and unprecedented thing'

about the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, and infers that in its use the Cretans were original, and the Egyptians merely borrowers; while Dr. Evans[***] denies originality to both, and holds that the use of the spiral was first developed on the European side of the aegean.

[Footnote *: 'The Decorative Art of Crete in the Bronze Age,' p.

9.]

[Footnote **: Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, vol. x.x.xi., part 5, pp. 221, 222.]

[Footnote ***: 'Scripta Minoa,' p. 126.]

The fact that the seals of this period show motives derived from the Egyptian Sixth Dynasty 'b.u.t.ton-seals' suggests that Early Minoan III. is to be equated with the end of the Old Kingdom in Egypt.

This, however, is but a slight help as to the positive date of the Minoan period, owing to the huge gap between the different systems of Egyptian chronology. All that can be said is that on Petrie's system of dating the Minoan period which is contemporary with the end of the Sixth Dynasty would date about 4000 B.C., and on the Berlin system about 2475 B.C. Though the two cultures are contemporaneous, it is, of course, by no means to be inferred that the art of Early Minoan III. has left us any relics which are worthy of being placed on a level with the wonderful work of the Egyptian Old Kingdom artists. The primitive pictographs on the bead-seals of this period mark the beginnings of this form of Minoan script, which persisted until Late Minoan I., when it was at last superseded by the linear form of writing which had made its appearance in Middle Minoan III.

_Middle Minoan I_.--With this period we have distinct advance in more directions than one. The Minoan artist is beginning to feel his way towards that polychrome style of decoration which reached such a remarkable development in the Kamares vases of the succeeding stage. In the decoration of his ware, which does not exhibit any marked advance in form upon that of Early Minoan III., he has begun to supplement the familiar white on the dark slip by adding yellow, orange, red, and crimson. The Petsofa figurines, already alluded to, which belong to this period, have a colour scheme of black and white, red and orange. Along with this development of the use of colour goes a corresponding advance in design. The motives of the former period are continued, but are much more developed, and more freely handled. Instead of being stiffly disposed in bands round the vessel, they are now frequently grouped with the idea of covering the ground of the vases in a graceful manner without any attempt at formal definition of the limits of each article of the design, the artist's idea being simply to fill, in a manner satisfying to the eye, the s.p.a.ce upon which he had to work. The zonal system still persists side by side with the freer style, and is often very skilfully handled as a means of decoration. One of the characteristic features of Middle Minoan ceramic art--the use of relief to enhance the effect of the polychrome decoration through the addition of contrasts of light and shade--is seen coming into use in the earliest part of the period.

Decoration is still geometric, and was to continue so for long.