Part 5 (1/2)
WALL WITH DRAIN (_p_. 98)]
More important, however, is the suggestion of Egyptian influence in the grouping of the figures. No one familiar with the details of the ceremony of 'opening the mouth' of the deceased, so continually represented in Egyptian funerary scenes, can fail to recognize the original inspiration of the scene on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus.
The tomb in the background, the stiff swathed figure propped like a log in front of it, the leafy branch before the dead man, taking the place of the bunches of lotus-blooms, the offerings of meat, and the sacrifice of the bull--this is an Egyptian funeral with the mourners dressed in Cretan clothes. We have already seen a priest from the banks of the Nile brandis.h.i.+ng his sistrum in the Harvest Procession; and the sarcophagus suggests that Egyptian religious influence was telling, if not on the actual views of the Cretans as to the state of man after death, at all events upon the ceremonial by means of which these views were expressed. Phaestos and Hagia Triada, we must remember, owing to their position, would be more exposed to Egyptian influence than even Knossos, where traces of it are not lacking.
The villa at Hagia Triada showed the same attentive care for sanitary arrangements which has been already noticed at Knossos. Mosso has noted an ill.u.s.tration of the honesty with which the work had been executed. 'One day, after a heavy downpour of rain, I was interested to find that all the drains acted perfectly, and I saw the water flow from sewers through which a man could walk upright. I doubt if there is any other instance of a drainage system acting after 4,000 years.'
The excavations at Knossos, Phaestos, and Hagia Triada have yielded, in the main, evidence of the splendour of the Minoan Kings; but other sites in the island, while presenting perhaps nothing so striking, have added largely to our knowledge of the common life of the Minoan race. At Gournia an American lady, Miss Harriet Boyd (now Mrs. Hawes), made the remarkable discovery of a whole town, mainly dating from the close of the Middle Minoan period, though the site had been occupied from the beginning of the Bronze Age.
Gournia had had its modest palace, occupying an area of about half an acre, with its adaptation, on a diminutive scale, of the Knossian Theatral Area, its magazines, and its West Court, where palace and town met, as at Knossos, for business purposes. But the main interest of the little town centred in its shrine and in the houses of the burghers, with their evidences of a wonderfully even standard of comfortable and peaceful life, by no means untinged with artistic elegance.
The shrine, discovered in 1901, stood in the very heart of the town, and was reached by a much-worn paved way. The sacred enclosure was only some 12 feet square, and Mrs. Hawes is inclined to believe that its rough walls never stood more than 18 inches high, forming merely a little _temenos_, in which stood a sacred tree, and the small group of cult objects which were still huddled together in a corner of the shrine. 'It is true that they are very crude, made in coa.r.s.e terra-cotta, with no artistic skill; nevertheless, they are eloquent, for they tell us that the Great G.o.ddess was wors.h.i.+pped in the town-shrine of Gournia, as in the Palace of Knossos. Here were her images twined with snakes, her doves, the ”horns of consecration,” the low, three-legged altar-table, and cultus vases.
To complete the list, a potsherd was found with the Double Axe moulded upon it, an indication, perhaps, that some who claimed kin with the masters of Crete paid their devotions at this unpretentious shrine.'[*] The smallness of the shrine at Gournia may be compared with the smallness of the sacred rooms at Knossos, and seems to have been characteristic of the Minoan wors.h.i.+p.
[Footnote *: 'Crete the Forerunner of Greece,' p. 98.]
The 5-feet-broad roadways of the town, neatly paved, are conclusive evidence of the infrequent use of wheeled vehicles. Flush with their borders stand the fronts of the houses. Two-storey houses were common, some of them with a bas.e.m.e.nt storey beneath the ground-floor when the slope of the hill admitted of such an arrangement. In all likelihood the general appearance of the homes was much like that of the comfortable-looking houses depicted on the faence plaques of Knossos, already referred to. Even ordinary craftsmen's houses have six to eight rooms, while those of the wealthier burghers have perhaps twice as many. Here and there evidences of the former occupations of the inhabitants came to light--a complete set of carpenter's tools in one house, a set of loom weights in another, the block-mould in which a smith had cast his tools in a third.
That the citizens of the little town were not entirely ignorant of letters was evidenced by the presence of a tablet bearing an inscription in the linear script of Knossos, Cla.s.s A, and the beauty of their painted pottery shows that they were by no means lacking in refinement and artistic feeling. The town was sacked and burned about 1500 B.C., as its discoverer thinks, perhaps a century before the fall of the great palace at Knossos. Partially reoccupied, like other Cretan sites, during the Third Late Minoan period, it has since then lain tenantless, waiting the day when its ruined houses should be revealed again to testify to the quiet and peaceful prosperity that reigned under the aegis of the great sea-power of the House of Minos.
At Palaikastro another town of closely-packed houses, covering a s.p.a.ce of more than 400 by 350 feet, has been revealed. Its existing remains are of somewhat later date than those of Gournia, and the houses are, on the whole, rather larger, but their general style is much the same. Near the town, at Petsofa, Professor J. L. Myres has unearthed, among a wealth of other votive offerings, a number of curious clay figurines, interesting as being among the earliest examples of polychrome decoration (they belong to Middle Minoan I., and are painted in a scheme of black and white, red and orange), but still more interesting--'with their open corsage, wide-standing collars, high shoe-horn hats, elaborate crinolines, and their general impression of an inaccurate attempt at representing Queen Elizabeth'--as evidence of how utterly unlike was the costume of prehistoric woman in the aegean area to the stately and simple lines of the cla.s.sic Greek dress.
The Cretan discoveries have tended as much as any work of recent years to reduce the extravagant claims which used to be put forward on behalf of the Ph?nicians as originators of many of the elements of ancient civilization, and evidence is now forthcoming to show that originality in even their most famous and characteristic industry, the dyeing of robes with the renowned 'Tyrian purple,' must be denied to them and claimed for the Minoans. In 1903, Messrs. Bosanquet and Currelly found on the island of Kouphonisi (Leuke), off the south-east coast of Crete, a bank of the pounded sh.e.l.l of the murex from which the purple dye was obtained, a.s.sociated with pottery of the Middle Minoan period; and in 1904 they discovered at Palaikastro two similar purple sh.e.l.l deposits, in either case a.s.sociated with pottery of the same date.
[Ill.u.s.tration XVII: (1) HALL OF THE DOUBLE AXES (_p_. 86)
(2) GREAT STAIRCASE, KNOSSOS (_p_. 86)]
At Zakro, on the eastern coast of the island, Mr. Hogarth has excavated the remains of what must have been an important trading-station.
In one single house of one of its merchants he came upon 500 clay seal-impressions, with specimens of almost every type of Cretan seal design, which had evidently been used for sealing bales of goods. Some of the Zakro pottery also was of extreme beauty, one specimen in particular, conspicuous from the fact that its delicate decoration had been laid on subsequent to the firing of the vessel, and could be removed by the slightest touch of the finger, showing evident traces of Egyptian influence in its adaptation of the familiar lotus design of Nilotic decorative art (Plate XXIX. 2).
On the tiny island of Mokhlos, only some 200 yards off the northern coast of Crete, to which it was probably united in ancient days, Mr.
Seager has excavated, in 1907 and 1908, an Early Minoan necropolis, from which have come some remarkable specimens of the skill with which the ancient Cretan workmen could handle both stone and the precious metals. Scores of beautiful vases of alabaster, breccia, marble, and soapstone, wrought in some cases to the thinness of a modern china cup, suggest at once the protodynastic Egyptian bowls of diorite and syenite, and show that if the Cretan took the idea from Egyptian models, he was not behind his master in the skill with which he carried it out. Not less surprising is the work in gold, which includes 'fine chains--as beautifully wrought as the best Alexandrian fabrics of the beginning of our era--artificial leaves and flowers, and (the distant antic.i.p.ation, surely, of the gold masks of the Mycenae graves) gold bands with engraved and _repousse_ eyes for the protective blinding of the dead.'[*][**]
[Footnote *: A. J. Evans, the _Times_, August 27, 1908.]
[Footnote **: For Mr. Seager's work on the Island of Pseira, see 'Excavations on the Island of Pseira, Crete,' by R. B. Seager.
Philadelphia, 1910.]
Excavating outside the area of the palace at Knossos, Dr. Evans opened, on a hill known as Zafer Papoura, about half a mile north of the palace, a large number of Minoan tombs dating from the Third Middle Minoan period onwards. They revealed a civilization still high, though giving evidence of gradual decline in its later stages. The earlier tombs provided, what had been singularly lacking at Knossos, a number of fine specimens of the 'stirrup-' or 'false-necked' vase.
There was also a number of bronze vessels and weapons, including swords, some of which were nearly a metre in length. In one tomb, which had evidently belonged to a chieftain, there was found a short sword of elaborate workmans.h.i.+p, with a pommel of translucent agate, and a gold-plated hilt, on which was engraved a scene of a lion chasing and capturing one of the Cretan wild-goats. The occurrence in some of the tombs of a long rapier and a shorter sword or dagger is unexpected, as there are no representations of the two weapons being worn together in Minoan warfare. Mr. Andrew Lang has made the picturesque suggestion that we may have here an antic.i.p.ation of the duelling custom of the Elizabethan age, in which the dagger was held in the left hand, and used for parrying thrusts, or for work at close quarters, as in the savage encounter between Sir Hatton Cheek and Sir Thomas Dutton at Calais in 1610.
On the hill of Isopata, between Knossos and the sea, Dr. Evans also discovered a stately sepulchre, whose occupant had evidently been some Minoan King of the Third Middle period. The tomb consisted of a rectangular chamber measuring about 8 by 6 metres, and built of courses of limestone blocks, which projected one beyond the other until they met in a high gable, forming a false arch similar to those of the beehive tombs at Mycenae. The back wall of the chamber had a central cell opposite to its blocked entrance, and the portal, also false-arched, led into a lofty entrance-hall, in the side walls of which, facing one another, were two cells, which had been used for interments. The whole was approached by an imposing avenue cut in the solid rock. The tomb had been rifled in ancient days, but there still remained a golden hair-pin, parts of two silver vessels, and a large bronze mirror; while among the stone vessels found a diorite bowl again recalled the hard stone vessels of the Early Egyptian dynasties.
The Dictaean Cave has already been mentioned as being peculiarly a.s.sociated with the legends about the birth of Zeus and his relations.h.i.+p with Minos. Hesiod states that Rhea carried the new-born Zeus to Lyttos, and thence to a cavern in Mount Aigaios, the north-west peak of Dicte. Lucretius, Virgil, and Dionysius of Halicarna.s.sus all knew of a story in which the whole childhood of Zeus had been pa.s.sed in a cave on Dicte, and Dionysius a.s.signs to the Dictaean Cave that finding of the law by Minos which presents so curious a parallel to the giving of the tables of the law to Moses on Mount Sinai. Minos, he says, went down into the Sacred Cave, and reappeared with the law, saying that it was from Zeus himself. And the last legend, related by Lucian, places in the same cave that union of Zeus with Europa from which Minos sprang. The Dictaean Cave, then, is of special interest in connection with the origins of the Minoan civilization, or, rather, with the fancies which later minds wove around some of the sacred conceptions of the Minoan civilization.
It is a large double cavern, south-west of Psychro, and some 500 feet above the latter place. Its exploration by Mr. Hogarth revealed ample evidence of its early connection with the cult of that divinity upon whom the Greeks foisted their own ideas of Zeus.
A scarped terrace overlooking the slope of the hill gives access to the shallow upper grotto, in which were found the remains of an altar, and close by a table of offerings, while the ground beneath the floor of the cave yielded, in regular stratification, Kamares ware, immediately above the virgin soil; then glazed ware, with cloudy brown stripes on a creamy slip; then regular Mycenaean ware, with the familiar marine and plant designs; and, uppermost, bronze.
The lower grotto has at first a sheer fall from the upper one, then slopes away for some 200 feet to an icy pool surrounded with a forest of stalagmites; and in this gloomy cavern the evidence was manifest of an ancient cult of a divinity to whom the Double Axe was sacred.