Part 5 (2/2)
There was a great ma.s.s of votive offerings of all sorts--engraved gems, bronze statuettes (including a Twenty-second-Dynasty figure of the Egyptian G.o.d Amen-Ra), and an abundance of common rings, pins, brooches, and knives; but the chief feature of the find was the Double Axe, of which numerous specimens were found embedded in the stalagmites around the dark pool at the foot of the cavern, some of them still retaining their original shafts. It is evident that the cave on Dicte was the seat of a very ancient wors.h.i.+p, connected with that wors.h.i.+p whose emblems were the Double Axe Pillars in the Palace of Knossos, and that this wors.h.i.+p, as revealed by the character of the remains in the grotto, goes back to the early days of the Minoan civilization.
Throughout all these explorations, covering a considerable portion of the island, one common feature presents itself--a feature already noted and commented on in connection with Knossos. Nowhere have we met with anything in the remotest degree resembling the colossal citadel walls which are the most striking feature of Mycenae and Tiryns. Phaestos and Hagia Triada are as devoid of fortification as Knossos. Gournia and Palaikastro are open towns. Everything points to the existence of a strong and peaceful rule, allowing the natural bent of the island race to develop quietly and steadily during long periods in those lines of work, alike useful and artistic, whose remains excite our admiration to-day, and resting for generation after generation on the sea-power which kept all enemies far from the sh.o.r.es of the fortunate island and guarded the trade-routes of the aegean.
CHAPTER VII
CRETE AND EGYPT
The question of the relations.h.i.+p between the Minoan civilization and the other great civilizations of the ancient world, particularly those of Babylonia and Egypt, is not only of great intrinsic interest, but also of very considerable importance to the attempt at a reconstruction of the outlines of Minoan history and chronology.
For it is only by means of synchronisms with the more or less satisfactorily, established chronology of one or other of these kingdoms that even the most approximate system of dating can be arrived at for the various epochs of the great civilization which the Cretan discoveries have revealed. Had it been possible to establish synchronisms with both Babylonian and Egyptian chronology, the result would not only have been satisfactory as regards our knowledge of the Minoan periods, but might have proved to have a secondary outcome of the very greatest importance in the settlement of the acute controversy which at present rages round the chronology of ancient Egypt from the earliest period down to the rise of the New Empire. As it is, this has so far proved to be impossible by reason of the absence from the chain of the Babylonian link.
It may be held as reasonably certain that for many centuries there was no lack of intercourse and interchange of commodities and ideas between Crete and Asia; indeed, it is beginning to be more and more manifest that in that ancient world there was infinitely more intercommunication between the different peoples than had been suspected. Far from the prehistoric age being a time of stagnation, it was rather a time of ceaseless movement. Perhaps the most striking example of the distance across which communication could take place in almost incredibly early times is afforded by the discovery on the site of ancient Troy--the Second City, roughly contemporary with Early Minoan III.--of a piece of white jade, a stone peculiar to China. By what long and devious routes it had reached the coast of Asia Minor who can say? Yet the fact of its occurrence there proves the fact of communication.
[Ill.u.s.tration XVIII: THE KING'S GAMING-BOARD (_p_. 87)
_G. Maraghiannis_]
Up to the present time it cannot be said that any object unquestionably Mesopotamian has been found on any aegean site, nor any object unquestionably aegean on a Mesopotamian one. But it has been suggested that certain carved ivories found by Layard at Nimrud in the Palace of Sennacherib show manifest traces of aegean influence; and in Southern Syria, at all events--at Gezer, Tell-es-Safi, and elsewhere--indisputably aegean pottery and weapons have been discovered in sufficient quant.i.ty to show that there was certainly communication between the Minoan civilization and the sh.o.r.es of Asia. Intercourse is suggested also by the obvious communities of religious conception existing between Crete and Asia. In both places the divine spirit is believed to a.s.sociate itself with sacred pillars, such as the Double Axe pillars at Knossos; in both it is personified as a Woman G.o.ddess, the mother of all life, to whom is added a son, who is also a consort; while the emblems of the ancient cults--the guardian lions of the G.o.ddess on the hill, the Double Axe, and the triple pillars with perching doves--are property common to both Crete and Asia. This may not point, however, to a continued intercourse, but only to community at some early point of the history of both races.
Of actual traces of Mesopotamian influence singularly few are to be found in Crete. Dr. Evans has shown the correspondence of a purple gypsum weight found during the second season's excavations at Knossos, with the light Babylonian talent, while the ingots of bronze from Hagia Triada represent the same standard of weight.
It may be that the drainage system so highly developed at Knossos and Hagia Triada found its first suggestion in the terra-cotta drain-pipes discovered at Niffur by Hilprecht, though it is by no means obvious that copying should be necessary in such a matter.
The clay tablets engraved with hieroglyphic and linear script suggest at once the corresponding and universal use of the clay tablet for the cuneiform script of Babylonia; and that is practically all that can be said of any connection between the cultures of Crete and Mesopotamia.
The case is quite different, however, when we come to the relations between Crete and the great civilization of the Nile Valley. In this case there is, if not abundance, at all events a sufficiency of evidence as to an intercourse which extended through practically the whole duration of the Minoan Empire. For the Early Dynastic period of Egyptian history the evidence is somewhat slight, and the interpretation of it not always certain. When we come to the Middle Kingdom of Egypt--a period contemporaneous with Middle Minoan II. and III.--it becomes both more abundant and more unquestionable in meaning; while with the New Empire (Eighteenth Dynasty) and Late Minoan II. we reach absolutely firm ground, the correspondence of art motives, and the actual proofs of intercourse, especially on the Egyptian side, being indisputable. Our object, then, in this chapter is to exhibit the evidence of the relations.h.i.+p between Crete and Egypt, and to inquire to what conclusion it leads us concerning the dates of the various periods of Minoan history.
For the earliest period we are left with somewhat scanty evidence.
Professor Petrie has found in some of the First Dynasty graves at Abydos vases of black hand-burnished ware, which are very closely allied, both inform and colour, to the primitive 'bucchero' discovered immediately above the Neolithic deposit in the West Court at Knossos; and he has suggested that, as the pottery is not Egyptian in style, it may have been imported from Crete. On various sites in the palace at Knossos there have been found stone vessels of diorite, syenite, and liparite, exquisitely wrought. Now, such work is eminently characteristic of the Early Egyptian Dynastic period, the artists of that time taking a pride in turning out bowls of these intensely hard stones, wrought sometimes to such a degree of fineness as to be translucent. The chances are against these bowls having been imported in later days, as the taste for them gradually died out in Egypt, and 'no ancient nation had antiquarian tastes till the time of the Sates in Egypt and of the Romans still later.' The stone vessels discovered by Mr. Seager at Mokhlos, though wrought out of beautiful native materials, betray, according to Dr. Evans, the strong influence of protodynastic Egyptian models. Coming down a little farther, to Early Minoan III., there is evidence of Egyptian influence in the fact that the ivory seals of this period seem to derive their motives from the so-called 'b.u.t.ton-seals' of the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty. Mr. H. R. Hall believes that the derivation was the other way about. 'It would seem very probable that this decidedly foreign decoration motive was adopted by the Egyptians from the aegeans about the end of the Old Kingdom (=Early Minoan III.), so that the Egyptian seal designs are copied from those of the Cretan seal-stones, rather than the reverse. Egyptian designs were very ancient, and had the spiral been Egyptian, we should have found it in the art of the Old Kingdom. It was a foreign importation, and its place of origin is evident.'[*] Whether in this case the Minoan borrowed from the Egyptian or the Egyptian from the Minoan is, however, immaterial; either way the fact of intercourse is established.
[Footnote *: Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, vol. x.x.xi., part v., p. 222.]
We may a.s.sume, then, that, in all probability, there was intercourse of some kind between Crete and Egypt as early as the time of the First Egyptian Dynasty, and that by the time of the Sixth Dynasty, which marks the close of the great period of the Old Kingdom in Egypt--the period of the Pyramid Builders (Third to Sixth Dynasty)--intercourse was common. In fact, it may be said that, from the origin of both peoples, the likelihood is that they were in contact. It is possible enough that both the Nilotic and the Minoan civilization sprang from a common stock, and that the Neolithic Cretans and the Neolithic Egyptians were alike members of the same widespread Mediterranean race.
[Ill.u.s.tration XIX: IVORY FIGURES AND HEADS FROM KNOSSOS (_p_. 76)
From 'Annual of the British School of Athens,' by permission]
How was the connection between Crete and Egypt maintained at this extremely early period? Professor Petrie believes that it was by the natural and direct sea-route across the Mediterranean. The representations of vessels painted on pre-dynastic Egyptian ware show that the Neolithic Egyptians were familiar, to some extent, with the building and the use of s.h.i.+ps, and Professor Petrie supposes that galleys such as those represented were the s.h.i.+ps by means of which the Egyptians and Cretans maintained their intercourse.
Mr. Hall, on the other hand, maintains that this is impossible, and that the boats of the pre-dynastic ware are merely small river-craft, totally unfitted for seafaring work.[*] In his 'Oldest Civilization of Greece' he roundly a.s.serts 'that these boats were the s.h.i.+ps which plied between Crete and Egypt some 4,000 years B.C. Nothing can ever prove'; and he therefore believes that the communication was kept up by way of Cyprus and the Palestinian coast. But the evidence either way is of so extremely slight a character, and the delineations in question are so rude, that it might as well be said that nothing can ever prove that these boats were _not_ the s.h.i.+ps which plied between Crete and Egypt. It does not seem obvious why the voyage between Crete and Egypt should be impossible to navigators who could accomplish that between Crete and Cyprus; and if communication were maintained by way of Cyprus, it seems strange that that island should show practically no trace of having been influenced by Minoan civilization until a comparatively late date. 'It was not till the Cretan culture had pa.s.sed its zenith and was already decadent that it reached Cyprus.'[**] That the Homeric Greeks were by no means daring navigators does not necessarily imply that an island race, whose whole tradition throughout its history was of sea-power, should have been equally timid. When it is remembered in what type of vessel the Northmen risked the Atlantic pa.s.sage, one would be slow to believe that even in immediately post-Neolithic times the Cretans could not have evolved a type of boat as adequate to the run between Crete and the Nile mouths as the 'long serpents' were to face the Atlantic rollers.
[Footnote *: 'Egypt and Western Asia,' p. 129.]
[Footnote **: H. R. Hall, Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, vol. x.x.xi., part v., p. 227.]
But however the case may stand with regard to the pre-dynastic period, there can be no question that by the end of the Third Dynasty even Egypt had developed a marine not inadequate to the requirements of the Cretan pa.s.sage. We know that Sneferu, the last King of the Third Dynasty, sent a fleet of forty s.h.i.+ps to the Syrian coast for cedar-wood, and that in his reign a vessel was built of the very respectable length of 170 feet. Coming farther down, we know also that Sahura of the Fifth Dynasty sent a fleet down the Red Sea as far as Punt or Somaliland. And if the Egyptians, by no means a great seafaring race, were able to do such things at this period of their history, surely an island race, whose sole pathway to the outer world lay across the sea, would not be behind them. There can scarcely be any question that, by the time of the Pyramid builders at latest, Cretan galleys were making the voyage to the Nile mouths, and unloading at the quays of Memphis, under the shadow of the new Pyramids, their primitive wares, among them the rude, hand-burnished black pottery, in return for which they carried back some of the wonderful fabric of the Egyptian stone-workers.
But supposing that the connection between the primitive Minoan civilization and the earliest Dynasties of Egypt is a thing established, what does this enable us to a.s.sert as to the date to which we are to ascribe the dawn of the earliest culture that can be called European?
Here, unfortunately, we are at once involved in a controversy in which centuries are unconsidered trifles, and a millennium is no more than a respectable, but by no means formidable, quant.i.ty.
Egyptian chronology may be regarded as practically settled from the beginning of the Eighteenth Dynasty downwards. There is a general consent of authority that Aahmes, the founder of that Dynasty, began to reign about 1580 B.C., and the dates a.s.signed by the various schools of chronology to the subsequent Dynasties differ only by quant.i.ties so small as to be practically negligible. But when we attempt to trace the chronology upwards from 1580 B.C., the consent of authorities immediately vanishes, and is replaced by a gulf of divergence which there is no possibility of bridging. The great divergence occurs in the well-known dark period of Egyptian history between the Twelfth and the Eighteenth Dynasties, where monumental evidence is extremely scanty, almost non-existent, and where historians have to grope for facts with no better light to guide them than is afforded by the History of Manetho, and the torn fragments of the Turin Papyrus. The traditional dating used to place the end of the Twelfth Dynasty somewhere around 2500 B.C., allowing thus some 900 odd years for the intervening dynasties before the rise of the Eighteenth. The modern German school, however, represented by Erman, Mahler, Meyer, and the American, Professor Breasted, arguing from the astronomical evidence of the Kahun Papyrus, cuts this allowance short by over 700 years, allowing only 208 years for the great gap, and proposing to pack the five Dynasties and the Hyksos domination into that time. Professor Petrie, finally, accepting, like the German school, the astronomical evidence of the Kahun Papyrus, interprets it differently, and pushes back the dates by a complete cycle of 1,460 years, allowing 1,666 years for the gap between the Twelfth Dynasty and the Eighteenth. Thus, even between the traditional and the German dating there is a gulf of 700 years for all dates of the Twelfth Dynasty, while as between the German dating and that of Professor Petrie the gulf widens to over 1,400 years.
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