Part 6 (1/2)
Into the question of which system of dating should be adopted it is impossible to enter, though it may be said that if 1,666 years seems a huge allowance for the five Dynasties, 208 years seems almost incredibly small. The result is what concerns us here, and we are faced with the fact that, while the traditional dating places the First Egyptian Dynasty at about 4000 B.C., the German school would bring it down to 3400 B.C., and Professor Petrie thrusts it back to 5510 B.C. Dr. Evans, in provisionally a.s.signing dates to the periods of Minoan history, formerly drew nearer to the traditional than to either the German dating or that of Professor Petrie; but he has gradually modified this position, and now dates his Middle Minoan II., which synchronizes with the Twelfth Egyptian Dynasty, at 2000 B.C., thus practically accepting the chronology of the German school. This would place Early Minoan I., which must be equated with the First Dynasty, about 3400 B.C. Practically, all that can be said with a moderate amount of certainty is that the earliest civilization of Crete, like that of Egypt, was in existence at a period not much later than 3500 B.C., while it is not impossible that it may be 1,500 years older. Even accepting the lower figure, the antiquity of man's first settlements on the hill of Kephala becomes absolutely staggering to the mind. If the growth of deposit on the hill was at the rate of something like 3 feet in a millennium--a reasonable supposition--it follows that we must place the earliest habitations of Neolithic man at Knossos not later than 10000, perhaps as early as 12000 B.C.
It is not till many centuries after the Sixth Egyptian Dynasty had pa.s.sed away that we come upon fresh evidence of the connection between the two countries. The earlier palaces at Knossos and Phaestos had been built, and the first period of Middle Minoan, with its beginnings of polychrome decoration and its Queen Elizabeth figurines from Petsofa, had come and gone in Crete, while in Egypt the corresponding period had been marked by the troublous times between the Seventh and the Eleventh Dynasties. But the rise of the Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt marked the beginning of a more stable state of affairs in the Nile Valley, and in this period, which corresponds with Dr.
Evans's Middle Minoan II., there are again evidences of touch between the two kingdoms. With regard to absolute dating, we are of course as much in the dark as ever, and may choose between 2000, 2500, and 3459 B.C. In any case, at this point, put it provisionally at 2000 B.C., the Egypt of the Senuserts and Amenemhats and the Crete of Middle Minoan II. are manifestly contemporaneous, and in well-established connection. In Crete this was the period when the beautiful polychrome Kamares ware was at the height of its popularity, and at Kahun, close to the pyramid of Senusert II., Professor Petrie some years ago discovered some unquestionable specimens of this fine ware, which had certainly been imported from Crete, as the fabric is one quite unknown to native Egyptian ceramic art. Even more conclusive was Professor Garstang's discovery, in an untouched tomb at Abydos, of a polychrome vessel in the latest style of the period, in company with glazed steat.i.te cylinders, which bear the names of Senusert III. and Amenemhat III., the last great Kings of the Twelfth Dynasty.
But the most interesting link between the two countries is found in the fact that in this period there was erected in Egypt the building which came to be looked on as the parallel to the Cretan Labyrinth, and which, with a curious inversion of the actual facts, was long supposed to be the original from which the Cretan Labyrinth was derived. The pyramid of Amenemhat III., the greatest King of the great Twelfth Dynasty, and indeed one of the greatest men who ever held the Egyptian sceptre, stood at Hawara, near the mouth of the Fayum. Not far from it Amenemhat erected a huge temple, such as had never been built before, and never was built again, even in that land of gigantic structures. The great building was erected, in a taste eminently characteristic of the Middle Kingdom, of great blocks of fine limestone and crystalline quartzite. It has long since disappeared, having been used as a quarry for thousands of years; but the size of the site, which can still be traced, shows that in actual area the temple covered a s.p.a.ce of ground within which Karnak, Luqsor, and the Ramesseum, huge as they all are, could quite well have stood together.
Even in the time of Herodotus enough was still remaining of this vast building to excite his profound wonder and admiration, and it seemed to him a more remarkable structure than even the Pyramids. 'It has,' he says, 'twelve courts enclosed with walls, with doors opposite each other, six facing the north, and six the south, contiguous to one another, and the same exterior wall encloses them. It contains two kinds of rooms, some under ground, and some above ground over them, to the number of 3,000, 1,500 of each.' He was not allowed to inspect the underground chambers. 'But the upper ones, which surpa.s.s all human works, I myself saw; for the pa.s.sages through the corridors, and the windings through the courts, from their great variety, presented a thousand occasions of wonder as I pa.s.sed from a court to the rooms, and from the rooms to halls, and to other corridors from the halls, and to other courts from the rooms.
The roofs of all these are of stone, as also are the walls; but the walls are full of sculptured figures. Each court is surrounded with a colonnade of white stone, closely fitted.'[*] Herodotus believed that the building belonged to the time of Psamtek I., in which, of course, he was ludicrously far astray, but otherwise there seems no reason to question that his description actually represents what he saw, though no doubt his lively mind somewhat multiplied the number of the rooms.
[Footnote *: Herodotus II. 148.]
Pliny the elder, judging from his description, evidently saw much the same thing at Hawara as Herodotus had seen, though time must have somewhat diminished the splendour of the building. Now, to this temple there was already applied in the time of Herodotus the name Labyrinth. It used to be believed that the Hawara Labyrinth gave its name to the Cretan one, and an Egyptian etymology was arranged for the word 'labyrinth,' according to which it would have meant 'the temple at the mouth of the ca.n.a.l.' The Egyptian form of the t.i.tle, however, is 'a mere figment of the philological imagination.' Probably originality lies in the other direction.
The first palace at Knossos dates from a period certainly as early as, probably somewhat earlier than, the Hawara temple; and since the derivation of the word 'labyrinth' from the Labrys or Double Axe, making the palace the House or Place of the Double Axe, seems quite satisfactory, the Egyptian Labyrinth in all likelihood derived its name from the House of Minos at Knossos. Apart, however, from any mere question of names, there appears the interesting parallel that the two most famous Labyrinths, the first palace at Knossos, and the great Hawara temple, actually belong to the same period--a period when, as we know from the other evidence, there was certainly active intercourse between the two nations.
Mr. Hall has pointed out[*] the resemblance between the actual building at Knossos and the descriptions left to us of its Egyptian contemporary. The literary tradition of the Labyrinth of Minos is that it was a place of mazy pa.s.sages and windings, difficult to traverse without a guide or clue, and the actual remains at Knossos show that the palace must have answered very well to such a description, while the feature of the Hawara temple which struck both Herodotus and Pliny was precisely the same. 'The pa.s.sages through the corridors and the windings through the courts, from their great variety, presented a thousand occasions of wonder.'
The resemblance extended to the material of which the buildings were erected. The fine white limestone of Hawara must have closely resembled the s.h.i.+ning white gypsum of Knossos, and though the Egyptian Labyrinth has pa.s.sed away too completely for us to be able to judge of its masonry, yet the splendid building work of the Eleventh Dynasty temple of Mentuhotep Neb-hapet-Ra at Deir-el-Bahri, with its great blocks of limestone beautifully fitted and laid, affords a good Middle Kingdom parallel to the great gypsum blocks of the Knossian palace. Of course we cannot attribute to Cretan influence the style of the Egyptian building in this respect. For hundreds of years the Egyptians had been past masters in the art of great construction with huge blocks of stone, so that, if there is to be any derivation on this point, it may rather have been Crete which followed the example of Egypt. But it may not be altogether a mere coincidence that, in a period of Egyptian history which we know to have been linked with an important epoch of Cretan development, there should have been erected in Egypt a building absolutely unparalleled, so far as we know, among the architectural triumphs of that nation, but bearing no distant resemblance, if the descriptions are to be trusted, to the great palace which the Minoan Sovereigns had newly reared, or were, perhaps, still rearing, for themselves at Knossos. Is it permissible to fancy that the envoys of Amenemhat III. may have brought back to Egypt reports and descriptions of the great Cretan palace which may have fired that King with the desire to leave behind him a memorial, unique among Egyptian buildings, but inspired by the actual achievements of his brother monarchs in Crete? Whether the idea of this relation between the two buildings be merely fanciful or not, their resemblances add another ill.u.s.tration to the proofs of the close connection between the Minoan and the Egyptian cultures in the third millennium B.C.
[Footnote *: _Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, 1905, part ii.]
With the succeeding Cretan epoch, Middle Minoan III., we come into touch with the dark age of Egyptian history, the great gap covering Dynasties XIII.-XVII., towards the close of which is to be placed the Hyksos domination. As the age was so troubled in Egypt, it is scarcely probable that we shall find much evidence there of any connection between the two lands; but the evidence found on Cretan soil, though slight, is conclusive as to the fact that communication was maintained. For the earlier part of the period we have the statuette, already mentioned as having been found at Knossos, bearing the name of 'Ab-nub's child, Sebek-user, deceased, born of the lady Sat-Hathor.' 'Who Sebek-user was,' as Mr. Hall remarks, 'and how his statuette got to Crete, we have no means of knowing.' But the 'deceased' in the inscription shows that the statuette was a funerary or memorial one, and it is hardly likely that such an object was imported merely for its own sake or for its artistic value, which is slight enough. May it not be that either Ab-nub, the father, or Sebek-user, the son, or both, may have been Egyptians resident at the Court of Knossos, either as representatives of Egyptian interests or as skilled artificers, and that the statuette is the memorial of one who died far from his native land, but not without friends to see that he did not lack the funerary attentions which would have been his at home? No doubt there was interchange of persons as well as of commodities between the two lands; some of the artists and craftsmen of both countries would naturally go to where there was a demand arising for their work, or where instructors were being sought to teach the new arts; and Ab-nub and his son Sebek-user may have drifted to Knossos in this manner, and found at last their graves there.
Were they conceivably responsible for the 'imported alabaster vases dating from the Middle Kingdom of Egypt,' which were found in the royal tomb at Isopata?
Towards the close of this epoch the ceramic art of Knossos shows features which are directly attributable to Egyptian influence.
The art of glazing pottery was not a native Cretan, but an Egyptian art; it is in full use in Egypt from the very beginnings of the First Dynasty. But now we find it appearing in a high state of development in Crete in the beautiful faence reliefs of the wild-goat and kids, the vases with the wild-rose in relief on the lip, and the figurines of the Snake G.o.ddess and her votaresses. The Cretan artists, however, though they borrowed the process, adapted it to their own tastes. In Egypt the native faence of the time is of strictly conventional type, with black design on blue; but the Cretan emanc.i.p.ated himself from these limits, and made his faence reliefs in the polychrome style, which still persisted, though now no longer so prevalent as it had once been.
The disastrous period of the Hyksos domination in Egypt has left but one trace at Knossos, but that is of peculiar interest, for it is the lid of an alabastron bearing the name of the Hyksos King Khyan. It cannot be said that we know any of the Hyksos Kings, but Khyan is the one whose relics are the most widely distributed and have the most interest. The finding of the lid at Knossos, his farthest west, is balanced by the lion, bearing his cartouche, found many years ago at Baghdad, his farthest east, while in his inscriptions he calls himself 'Embracer of territories.' So it has been suggested that the Knossos lid and the Baghdad lion are the scanty relics of a great Hyksos empire which once extended from the Euphrates to the First Cataract of the Nile, and possibly also held Crete in subjection. In all likelihood, however, the idea is merely a dream; certainly so far as regards Crete it is most improbable. In the palmiest days of the Egyptian navy the Pharaohs never held any dominion over Crete, and even Cyprus was never really under their rule. It is much less likely still that a King of the Hyksos race, whose whole tradition is of the land and the desert, should have succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng any suzerainty over a race whose whole tradition is of the sea, and which was then in the full pride of its strength.
Another era of history has pa.s.sed away before we again find Crete and Egypt in close touch with one another. In Crete the last period of Middle Minoan had been succeeded by the first of Late Minoan, in which the great palace of the Middle period was being gradually transformed into a still larger and more magnificent structure, which was not to be completed until the succeeding period. In Egypt the Seventeenth Dynasty had at last, after long hesitation, picked up the gauntlet thrown down by the Hyksos conquerors, and the War of Independence had resulted in the expulsion of the Desert Princes and their race. The conquering Dynasty had been succeeded by the Eighteenth, the Dynasty of Queen Hatshepsut, Tahutmes III., and Amenhotep III., and Egypt was in the full tide of a great revival, alike in world-influence, in trade, and in art. Queen Hatshepsut, who states in one of her inscriptions that 'her spirits inclined towards foreign peoples,' had sent out her squadron to Somaliland, and Tahutmes III. had organized a war-fleet on the Mediterranean coast-line. The ancient Empire of the Nile was opening its arms in every direction to outside influences, and was drawing into the ports of the great river the commercial and artistic products of every known people.
Among the races who are most prominent in the Egyptian records of the period are the Keftiu, who are frequently represented in the paintings of the time, and always with the same characteristic features, the same dress and bearing, the same products of commerce and art. Who, then, were the Keftiu? The word means the people or the country 'at the back of'--in other words, at the back of 'the Very Green,' as the Egyptians called the Mediterranean. So that the Keftians with whom the merchants and courtiers of Egypt grew familiar in the times of Hatshepsut and Tahutmes III. Were to them the men 'from the back of beyond'--the farthest distant people with whom they had any dealings. But what race could correspond to these 'back of beyond' men? In Ptolemaic times the word 'Keftiu'
was unquestionably applied to the Ph?nicians, who had for long been the great seafarers and carriers of the Mediterranean; and till recent years it was generally believed that the Keftiu of the Eighteenth Dynasty were Ph?nicians also, though their faces, as depicted on the Egyptian wall-paintings, did not bear the slightest trace of Semitic cast. But the discoveries of the last few years have demolished that idea for ever, along with many other beliefs as to the influence of the overrated Ph?nicians upon the culture of the Mediterranean area, and the pictures of the Minoans of Knossos have made it certain that the Keftiu of the Eighteenth Dynasty were none others than the amba.s.sadors, sailors, and merchants of the Sea-Kings of Crete. Fortunately, the tomb-painting which has preserved so many interesting details of Egyptian life, was never more a.s.siduously practised or more happily inspired than at this period. In all the chief tombs there are pictured processions of Northerners, Westerners, Easterners, and Southerners, the North being represented by Semites, the East by the men of Punt, the South by negroes, and the West by the Keftiu; and we can compare the men of the Knossos frescoes with their fellow-countrymen as depicted on the tomb-walls of the Theban grandees, and be certain that, allowing for the differences in the style of art, they are essentially the same people. The tombs which preserve best the figures of the Keftiu are those of Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra. That of Sen-mut is the earlier, though only by a generation, or perhaps rather less. He was the architect of Queen Hatshepsut, the man who planned and executed the great colonnaded temple at Deir-el-Bahri, and who set up Hatshepsut's gigantic obelisks. His tomb at Thebes overlooks the temple which he built at his Queen's command to be 'a paradise for Amen,' and on its walls we can see 'the men from the back of beyond' walking in procession, each with his offering to present to the Pharaoh. There can be no question as to who they are. The half-boots and puttees, the decorated girdle compressing the waist, not quite so tightly as in the Minoan representations, the gaily adorned loin-cloth, which is the only article of attire, all are practically identical with the type of such a fresco as that of the Cupbearer at Knossos. The conscientious Egyptian artists have carefully represented also the elaborate coiffure which was characteristic of the Minoans, who allowed their hair to fall in long tails down their shoulders, doing part of it up in a knot or curl on the top of the head. The tribute-bearers carry in their hands or upon their shoulders great vessels of gold and silver, some of them exactly resembling in shape the Vaphio cups, though much larger than these, some of them of the type of the bronze ewer found in the north-west house at Knossos.
[Ill.u.s.tration XX: (1) MAIN DRAIN, KNOSSOS (_p_. 98)
(2) TERRA-COTTA DRAIN PIPES (_p_. 98)]
Rekh-ma-ra, in whose tomb are the other notable pictures of the Keftiu, was also a great figure in Egyptian history in the next reign. He was Vizier to Tahutmes III., the conquering Pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. The pictures on the walls of his tomb are, at least in some cases, evidently more than mere racial studies; they are careful portraits. 'The first man, ”The Great Chief of the Kefti, and the Isles of the Green Sea,” is young, and has a remarkably small mouth with an amiable expression. His complexion is fair rather than dark, but his hair is dark brown. His lieutenant, the next in order, is of a different type--elderly, with a most forbidding visage, Roman nose, and nut-cracker jaws. Most of the others are very much alike--young, dark in complexion, and with long black hair hanging below their waists and twisted up into fantastic knots and curls on the tops of their heads.'[*]
[Footnote *: H. R. Hall, 'Egypt and Western Asia,' p. 362.]
These Keftiu, then, were the Minoans of the Great Palace period of Crete, the pre-h.e.l.lenic Greeks, the Pelasgi of old Greek tradition, in whose time the great civilization of the Minoan Empire reached its culminating point, and was within a little of its final disaster.
It is a fortunate circ.u.mstance that Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra should have caused them to be portrayed when they did, for in two or three generations more the glory of Knossos had pa.s.sed away, never to be revived. Greece gave to Egyptian scholars the key to the translation of the hieroglyphics in the Greek version of the Egyptian text on the Rosetta Stone; the paintings of the Theban tombs have paid back an instalment of that debt in showing us the likenesses of those 'Greeks before the Greeks' who dwelt in Crete. Perhaps some day the debt will be fully repaid by the discovery of a bilingual text in Egyptian and Minoan, giving us in hieroglyphics a version of some pa.s.sage of that Minoan script which now exists only to tantalize us with records of an ancient history which we cannot read.
Such a discovery is by no means beyond the bounds of possibility.
It is not so long since Boghaz-Keui supplied us with a cuneiform version of the famous treaty between the Egyptians and the Hitt.i.tes in the time of Ramses II.; perhaps some site in Crete or Egypt may yet provide us with a bilingual treaty between Tahutmes III.
and the Minoan Sovereign of his time.
After the time of Tahutmes, the evidences of connection between the two lands grow scanty once more. The fact that the faence of the time of Amenhotep III. has discarded the old Egyptian tradition of black upon blue, and now rejoices in splendid chocolates, purples, violets, reds, and apple-greens, shows that Cretan influence was still strong. Fragments of Late Minoan pottery found in abundance on the site of Akhenaten's new capital at Tell-el-Amarna show that even in the reign of this King, the heretic son and successor of Amenhotep III., Crete was still trading with Egypt. But before Akhenaten came to the throne, about 1380 B.C.--possibly twenty years before that event--the great catastrophe which brought the Minoan Empire of Knossos to a close had already happened. The Cretan wares which filtered into Egypt after 1400 B.C. were the products of the Minoan decadence, when the survivors of the Empire of the Sea-Kings--a broken and dwindling race--were still trying to maintain a slowly failing tradition of art under the new masters, perhaps the Mycenaeans of the mainland, who, driven forth themselves by the pressure of Northern invaders, had crushed in their turn the gentler sister civilization of Crete.
The Mycenaean 'stirrup-vases' pictured in the tomb of Ramses III.