THE REALM OF MINOS

The Palace of Minos at Knossos: A Comparative Account of the Successive Stages of the Early Cretan Civilisation as illustrated by the Discoveries at Knossos. By Sir ARTHUR EVANS. Vol. II. Macmillan & Company. 1928.

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N the seven years that have elapsed since Sir Arthur Evans published the first volume of his "Palace of Minos at Knossos," both he and other excavators have been active, and he has had to take account of much new evidence. The second volume which has now appeared, containing 844 pages and a wealth of plates, plans and other illustrations, and divided for the convenience of readers into two parts, carries the author's task far towards completion. The previous volume, reviewed in these pages in July, 1922, traced the growth of Cretan civilisation down to the close of the Middle Minoan Age. That phase ended in a great catastrophe, of which the nature and approximate date have been more clearly defined by the excavations carried out since 1921.

The Greeks of classical times were conscious of some great disaster that had interrupted the progress of human civilisation. They visualised it as a flood which had wiped out established cities and driven the few survivors to take refuge on hill tops; it was long before they ventured to dwell again in the plain. The useful arts were lost and had to be re-discovered. The evidence for such a break, involving the death of an old civilisation and its re-birth after an interval of barbarism, seems to have been most abundant in Crete. Hitherto it has seemed that this tradition, recorded at length in Plato's "Laws," and implicit in the narratives of Diodorus and other authors, must reflect the disaster, whatever its nature, that shattered the realm of Minos and ushered in the pre-classical Dark Ages. Sir Arthur Evans's new volume shows that the early history of Crete was punctuated by successive disasters and periods of recovery, and that they were brought about not by internal revolutions or foreign conquests, but by the irresistible forces of nature. Earthquakes again and again laid palaces and houses low; again and again they rose from their ruins. The works of art, large and small, that have

been recovered from the precincts of Knossos were submerged in these periods of collapse and re-building. The fact that they are less abundant at Phæstos may mean that the southern region, though not immune from such shocks, suffered from them less often.

The author recounts his own experiences in the earthquake that visited Candia in 1926. As has generally been the case, the Candia district suffered more severely than the rest of the island.

According to the medieval and modern records, nine specially destructive earthquakes took place in Crete in six centuries and a half. That space of time almost exactly corresponds with the duration of the great Minoan Palace in its successive phases, and we are almost bound to infer that the same natural forces must largely account for the signs of ruin that here mark successive stages of the building. The most disastrous earthquake of the series befell Knossos towards the close of the Third Middle Minoan Period, between 1575 and 1550 B.C. The palace at this time was a stately pile rising to a height of three storeys and hemmed in by the clustered dwellings of well-to-do courtiers and humbler folk, the latter being tower-like structures with a closed basement containing storerooms and an entrance at first floor level. One had been occupied by a maker of stone lamps and his workshop was found as he left it, wrecked by huge blocks, some more than a ton in weight, which had been hurled from the adjoining palace wall. In two angles of an adjoining house curious sacrificial deposits were found, each consisting of the head and horns of a large ox and a portable terra-cotta altar, similar to the tripod altars found in such numbers in the Mission Warehouse at Niru Khani, to be described presently :

These sacrificial relics, thus ranged on the floor of the basement chamber, could have only one signification. The methodical filling-in of the ruined building, and its final relinquishment as a scene of human habitation, had been preceded by a solemn expiatory offering to the Powers below. Its character recalls the words of the Iliad "in bulls doth the Earth-shaker delight."

The author discusses the part played by repeated experience of earthquakes in shaping Minoan religion. The subterranean "pillar crypts," constantly present in Knossian houses and associated with lustral basins, double axes and other religious emblems, lead him to believe that the Minoan Mother Goddess

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was worshipped in these dark chapels as a protector against earthquakes, a "Stablisher" of these "Pillars of the House." He connects the sacrifice of bulls in this connection and the delight of the Earth-shaker in such victims with the widespread belief that earthquakes are brought about "by some huge beast beneath the Earth," often imagined as a bull.

To one who has experienced the tossing and listened to the muffled roaring from below, this popular explanation of earthquakes seems natural enough, and it may well have affected the primitive religion of Minoan Crete.

The extent of the ruin wrought by this exceptionally violent earthquake has become clear through the intensive work of recent seasons. For all its splendour, the Late Minoan palace was a reconstruction on a somewhat diminished scale, bearing marks of haste and acquiescence in the second-best. Where the substructures had been ruined the new walls were set back and the area curtailed.

An impressive architectural feature of the older palace had been a Stepped Portico, leading to the south-west angle of the building on the hill-top from a bridge in the glen below. Signs cut on the great blocks show that it was planned and constructed at the same time as the palace, to which it was the principal means of access from the south. It seems to have been completely ruined by the earthquake and not re-built. On the other hand the bridge contemporary with it, and a viaduct on the south side of the gorge, remained in use at any rate down to the final abandonment of the palace. The south entrance, to which these elaborate approaches led, was in fact the terminus of a main road which linked Knossos not only with Phæstos, capital of the fertile Mesarà plain, but with ports on the Libyan Sea. The survey of this road-system, carried out in 1923 and later years, was work in which the author long ago proved his skill when he explored the forgotten Roman roads of Bosnia and Albania; he has traced this Bronze Age highway and its branches with the same persistent sagacity. The surviving fragments are twelve to fourteen feet wide, upheld by massive retaining walls of undressed blocks. Sometimes there are two such walls, one above and one below, where the track runs along a shelf on a hill-side. Similar Minoan roads have been noticed both on the north and south sides of the mountainous backbone from the centre to the east

end of the island; about Minoan settlements and lines of communication in western Crete much less is known. On the mainland roads of similar construction extend from the shores of Argolis, past Mycena, to the Gulf of Corinth, whence a short sea passage led to the Baotian port of Dombrena, rich in prehistoric remains. It was doubtless by this route that goods were brought to Mycenæan Thebes, not only from Crete, but from Egypt. Waggons drawn by oxen served for heavy transport, and from the Late Minoan period onwards light two-wheeled carriages drawn by a pair of horses were used by people of rank," chariots" for which fresh uses were soon to be found on the battlefield and the racecourse. The ass reached Crete earlier than the horse, and was used as a beast of burden, but it was long before either was ridden. In older days palanquins carried by servants had been the only means of luxurious travel, and they were retained for ceremonial purposes, as appears from a wall-painting that shows such a chair borne by white-robed priests.

We have descriptions of roadside inns in classical literature, but their actual remains are scanty. Neither the Greek nor Roman world has left us anything comparable with the hostelry built for Minoan travellers on the south side of the Vlychià brook, looking across it to the palace hill. The story of its discovery is itself a romance, too long to relate here. It consists of an outer yard bordering the road, behind it a long range of buildings, stables on the east with cobbled floors and bins containing carbonised corn, rooms for the reception of guests on the west. A broad passage led from the open yard to a paved inner court, and two-thirds of the breadth of this passage was occupied by a shallow tank in which the wayfarer washed his feet before passing in. If he wished to return and watch the traffic on the road, he could sit in a Painted Pavilion, raised five steps above the front yard and connected by a small door with the inner court. Much of the painted stucco from the walls of this loggia survives, and the decoration can be re-constructed. The walls were divided into panels by pilasters painted to represent wood. Six feet above the ground was painted an architrave of the same yellow colour, and above that a frieze, 11ins. broad, representing a subject chosen, the author thinks, to give "an anticipatory assurance of good cheer," like the pictures of game in an old Dutch dining-rooma frieze of partridges, dozens of partridges, with a hoopoe here and

there for variety, set in a conventional landscape strewn in places with brightly banded pebbles and divided up by irregular masses of rock. The style is quite different from that in the House of the Frescoes, described above. Here the birds are everything, the rest mere background. Sad to say, the hoopoe "is still regarded as a special dainty " in Crete.

The stone bath, which the excavator has now restored, measured 6 by 4 feet, and was deep enough to immerse a man's legs to the knee. Jutting slabs formed seats for the bathers. The in-flow and out-flow of the water was skilfully managed; no less than six ducts of various kinds contributed to the water system of this single chamber. It would be hard to find a better example of the Minoan delight in hydraulic devices." The room itself had been painted like the adjoining pavilion. On the other side a doorway from the yard led to a more private room containing clay hip-baths, for which water had been heated seemingly by wood fires. Beyond this point the façade turns at a right angle, and here there was found an underground spring chamber with a central basin, in which water welled up from a layer of pebbles. The margin of the basin at the entrance had been worn away by prolonged dipping of water-jars. A niche in the back wall was evidently intended to hold a lamp or possibly a candlestick, like one of variegated limestone, delicately carved, found not far away.

The earlier type with its expanding receptacle round the socket, recalling an old-fashioned bedroom candlestick, is a derivation of a proto-dynastic Egyptian form, and is evidently designed for guttering wicks like those of tallow candles. But the proportionately taller and more slender form before us recalls rather the silver services of our grandfathers' tables, and was surely intended for a stick of superfine material, such as wax.

This tiny chamber had undergone vicissitudes. At the close of the last palace period it became choked with debris and was disused. Then, after a long interval, later dwellers on the site appropriated it as a shrine. In the upper part of the mud of the basin was a round hut-shaped urn, containing the figure of a goddess with uplifted hands, and quantities of incense vessels and clay bowls containing carbonised grains of olive were found piled within the cell or in front of the entrance. This local cult is assigned to the period 1200-1000 B.C.