Part 2 (2/2)
The lips are somewhat full, but the physiognomy has certainly no Semitic cast.... There was something very impressive in this vision of brilliant youth and of male beauty, recalled after so long an interval to our upper air from what had been, till yesterday, a forgotten world. Even our untutored Cretan workmen felt the spell and fascination. They, indeed, regarded the discovery of such a painting in the bosom of the earth as nothing less than miraculous, and saw in it the icon of a Saint! The removal of the fresco required a delicate and laborious piece of under-plastering, which necessitated its being watched at night, and old Manolis, one of the most trustworthy of our gang, was told off for the purpose. Somehow or other he fell asleep, but the wrathful saint appeared to him in a dream.
Waking with a start, he was conscious of a mysterious presence; the animals round began to low and neigh, and ”there were visions about”; ”[Greek: phautazei],” he said, in summing up his experiences next morning, ”the whole place spooks!”'[*]
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, pp. 124, 125.]
[Ill.u.s.tration IX: MAGAZINE WITH JARS AND KASELLES
GREAT JAR WITH TRICKLE ORNAMENT]
The Southern Portico gave access to a large court which turned out, from later investigation, to have been really the Central Court of the palace, the focus of the life of the whole huge building.
The block of building between the West and the Central Courts was divided into two by a long gallery (Plate VII.), 3.40 metres in breadth, running almost the whole length of the structure, and paved with gypsum blocks. Between this gallery and the western wall of the palace lay a long range of what had evidently been magazines for the storage of oil, and perhaps of corn. They were occupied by rows of huge earthenware jars, or _pithoi_, sufficiently large to have held the Forty Thieves, or to have accommodated the soldiers of Tahuti in their venture on Joppa (Plates VIII. and IX.). In one of the magazines no fewer than twenty of these jars were found. They were all ornamented, some of them very elaborately, with spiral and rope-work patterns; one of them, found, not in a magazine, but in a small room near the Central Court, was particularly elaborate in its adornment, and stood almost five feet in height (Plate X. 2). Down the centre line of each magazine ran a row of small square openings in the floor--'kaselles,' as they came to be called--which at one time had evidently been receptacles, some of them, perhaps, for oil, but some of them certainly for valuables.
They were carefully lined with lead, and in some cases the slabs of stone covering them could not be removed without lifting the whole pavement. In spite of such precautions, however, they had been well rifled in ancient days, and little was left to tell of what their contents may once have been. The magazines were well fitted to convey a strong impression, not only of the size, but also of the splendour of the palace which needed such storerooms.
There was no meanness or squalor about the domestic offices of the House of Minos. The doorways leading into the magazines from the Long Corridor were of fine stone-work, and the side-walls, both of the gallery and the magazines, had been covered with painted plaster, presenting a white ground on which ran a dado of horizontal bands of red and blue, further bands of the same colours forming a frieze below the ceiling level. This, of course, had been merely the bas.e.m.e.nt of the palace, and had been surmounted by another storey or storeys, of which nothing was left except fragments of the painted plaster which had once decorated the walls.
To the rooms composing the block of building between the Long Gallery and the Central Court, access had been given from the latter area; and it was in these rooms that, as the excavations progressed, some of the most remarkable features of the palace began to disclose themselves. About halfway along the court were found two small rooms, connected with one another, in the centre of each of which stood a single column composed of four gypsum blocks, each block marked with the sign of the Double Axe; and these pillars suggested a connection with ancient traditions about Minos and his works (Plate XI.). They were apparently sacred emblems connected with the wors.h.i.+p of a divinity, and the Double Axe markings pointed to the divinity in question. For the special emblem of the Cretan Zeus (and also apparently of the female divinity of whom Zeus was the successor) was the Double Axe, a weapon of which numerous votive specimens in bronze have been found in the cave-sanctuary of Dicte, the fabled birthplace of the G.o.d. And the name of the Double Axe is Labrys--a word found also in the t.i.tle of the Carian Zeus, Zeus of Labraunda. But tradition linked the names of Minos and Knossos with a great and wonderful structure of Daedalus which went by the name of the Labyrinth; and the coincidence between that name and the Labrys marks on the sacred pillars and on many of the blocks in the palace at once suggested that here was the source of the old tradition, and here the actual building, the Labyrinth, which Daedalus reared for his great master. 'There can be little remaining doubt,' says Dr. Evans, 'that this vast edifice, which in a broad historic sense we are justified in calling the ”Palace of Minos,”
is one and the same as the traditional ”Labyrinth.” A great part of the ground-plan itself, with its long corridors and repeated successions of blind galleries, its tortuous pa.s.sages and s.p.a.cious underground conduit, its bewildering system of small chambers, does, in fact, present many of the characteristics of a maze.'[*]
The connection thus suggested even by the first year's excavations has grown more and more probable with the work of each successive season.
[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, p. 131.]
Pa.s.sing farther north along the line of the Central Court, access was given by a row of four steps to an ante-chamber, which opened upon another room, of no great size in itself, but of surpa.s.sing interest from the character of its appointments. 'Already, a few inches below the surface, freshly preserved fres...o...b..gan to appear.
Walls were shortly uncovered, decorated with flowering plants and running water, while on each side of the doorway of a small inner room, stood guardian griffins with peac.o.c.k's plumes in the same flowery landscape. Round the walls ran low stone benches, and between these, on the north side, separated by a small interval, and raised on a stone base, rose a gypsum throne with a high back, and originally covered with decorative designs. Its lower part was adorned with a curiously carved arch, with crocketed mouldings, showing an extraordinary antic.i.p.ation of some most characteristic features of Gothic architecture. Opposite the throne was a finely wrought tank of gypsum slabs--a feature borrowed perhaps from an Egyptian palace--approached by a descending flight of steps, and originally surmounted by cypress-wood columns, supporting a kind of _impluvium_.
Here truly was the council chamber of a Mycenaean King or Sovereign Lady.'[*] The discovery of the very throne of Minos, for such we may fairly term it, was surely the most dramatic and fitting recompense for the explorer's patience and persistence. No more ancient throne exists in Europe, or probably in the world, and none whose a.s.sociations are anything like so full of interest (Plate I.).
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, pp. 123, 124.]
The Throne Room still preserved among its debris many relics of former splendour. Fragments of blue and green porcelain, of gold-foil, and lapis lazuli and crystal, were scattered on the floor, and several crystal plaques with painting on the back, among them an exceedingly fine miniature of a galloping bull on an azure ground; while an agate plaque, bearing a relief of a dagger laid upon a folded belt, almost equalled cameo-work in the style and delicacy of its execution. In a small room on the north side of the Central Court was found a curiously quaint and delicate specimen of early fresco painting--the figure of a Little Boy Blue--more thoroughly deserving of the t.i.tle than Gainsborough's famous picture, for, strangely enough, he is blue in his flesh-tints, picking and placing in a vase the white crocuses that still dapple the Cretan meadows.
The northern side of the palace was finished with another portico, and in this part of the building there came to light a series of miniature frescoes, valuable, not only as works of art, but as contemporary doc.u.ments for the appearance, dress, and surroundings of the mysterious people to whom this great building was once home.
Here were groups of ladies with the conventional white complexion given by the Minoan artists to their womankind, wonderfully bedizened with costumes resembling far more closely the evening dress of our own day than the stately robes of cla.s.sic Greece with their severe lines.
In their very low-necked dresses, with puffed sleeves, excessively slender waists, and flounced skirts, and their hair elaborately dressed and curled, they were as far as possible removed from our ideas of Ariadne and her maids of honour, and might almost have stepped out of a modern fas.h.i.+on-plate. 'Mais,' exclaimed a French savant, on his first view of them, 'Mais ce sont des Parisiennes.'
These fine Court ladies were seated, or perhaps rather squatted, according to the curious Minoan custom, in groups, conversing in the courts and gardens, and on the balconies of a splendid building.
In the s.p.a.ces beyond were groups of men, of the same reddish-brown complexion as the Cup-bearer, wearing loin-cloths and footgear with puttees halfway up the leg, their long black hair done up into a crest on the crown of the head. In one group alone thirty men appear close to a fortified post; in another, youths are hurling javelins against a besieged city. 'The alternating succession of subjects in these miniature frescoes suggests the contrasted episodes of Achilles' s.h.i.+eld. It may be that we have here parts of a continuous historic piece; in any case these unique ill.u.s.trations of great crowds of men and women within the walls of towns and palaces supply a new and striking commentary on the familiar pa.s.sage of Homer describing the ancient populousness of the Cretan cities.'[*] Only the wonderful tomb paintings of ancient Egypt can excel these vivid miniatures in bringing before us the life of a bygone civilization; nothing else to approach them has come down from antiquity.
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, p. 126.]
The main entrance of the palace seemingly lay on the north side, where the road from the harbour, three and a half miles distant, ran up to the gates. Here was the one and only trace of fortification discovered in all the excavations. The entrance pa.s.sage was a stone gangway, on the north-west side of which stood a great bastion, with a guard room and sally-port--a slender apology for defence in the case of a prize so vast and tempting as the Palace of Knossos.
Obviously the bastion, with its trifling accommodation for an insignificant guard, was never meant to defend the palace against numerous a.s.sailants, or a set siege; it could only have been sufficient to protect it against the sudden raid of a handful of pirates sweeping up from the port (Plate XII. 2). How was it that so great and rich a structure came to be left thus practically defenceless? The mainland palaces of the Mycenaean Age at Tiryns and Mycenae are, so to speak, buried in fortifications. Their vast walls, 57 feet thick in some parts at Tiryns, 46 feet at Mycenae, towering still after so many centuries of ruin to a height of 24-1/2 feet in the case of the smaller citadel, and of 56 feet at the great stronghold of Agamemnon; their ma.s.sive gateways, and the ingenious devices by which the a.s.sailant was obliged to subject himself in his approach to a destructive fire on his uns.h.i.+elded side--everything about them points to a land and a time in which life and property were continually exposed to the dangers of war, and the only security was to be found within the gates of an impregnable stronghold. But Knossos, far richer, far more splendid, than either Tiryns or Mycenae, lies virtually unguarded, its s.p.a.cious courts and pillared porticoes open on every side. Plainly, the Minoan Kings lived in a land where peace was the rule, and where no enemy was expected to break rudely in upon their luxurious calm. And the reason for their confidence and security is not far to seek, if we remember the statements of Thucydides and Herodotus.
[Ill.u.s.tration X: PART OF DOLPHIN FRESCO
A GREAT JAR, KNOSSOS]
'The first King known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos,' says the great Athenian historian. The Minoan Empire, like our own, rested upon sea-power; its great Kings were the Sea-Kings of the ancient world--the first Sea-Kings known to history, over-lords of the aegean long before 'the grave Tyrian trader' had learned 'the way of a s.h.i.+p in the sea,' or the land-loving Egyptian had ventured his timid squadrons at the command of a great Queen so far as Punt. And so the fortifications of their capital and palace were not of the huge gypsum blocks which they knew so well how to handle and work. They were the wooden walls, the long low black galleys with the vermilion bows, and the square sail, and the creeping rows of oars, that lay moored or beached at the mouth of the Kairatos River, or cruised around the island coast, keeping the Minoan peace of the aegean. So long as the war-fleet of Minos was in being, Knossos needed no fortifications. No expedition of any size could force a landing on the island. If the crew of a chance pirate-galley, desperate with hunger, or tempted by reports of the wealth of the great palace, succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the Minoan cruisers, and made a swift rush up from the coast, there was the bastion with its armed guard, enough to deal with the handful of men who could be detached for such a dare-devil enterprise. But in the fleet of Knossos was her fate; and if once the fleet failed, she had no second line of defence on which to rely against any serious attack. There is every evidence that the fleet did fail at last. The manifest marks of a vast conflagration, perhaps repeated more than once during the long history of the palace, and the significant fact that vessels of metal are next to unknown upon the site, while of gold there is scarcely a trace, with the exception of scattered pieces of gold-foil, appear to indicate either that the Minoan Sovereigns failed to maintain the weapon which had made and guarded their Empire, or that the Minoan sailors met at last with a stronger fleet, or more skilful mariners.
Sea-power was lost, and with it everything.
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