Part 9 (2/2)
At Knossos this form of linear writing, Dr. Evans's Cla.s.s A, appears to have had a comparatively short vogue. Doc.u.ments belonging to it are only found in the particular stratum which is connected with Middle Minoan III., and are to be dated, according to Dr. Evans's latest revision of the chronology, not later than 1600 B.C., the period at which Middle Minoan III. closes. In the Late Minoan periods which follow, the linear script of Cla.s.s A is superseded at Knossos by another form, Cla.s.s B. In other parts of the island, however, Cla.s.s A seems to have survived as a general form of writing much longer than at Knossos. At Hagia Triada the very large deposits of linear writing--larger, indeed, than the representation of Cla.s.s A at Knossos--belong to the First Late Minoan period, and are contemporary with the wonderful work of the steat.i.te vases and the fresco of the hunting-cat; while at Phaestos the final catastrophe of the palace took place at a time when the linear writing of Cla.s.s A was still in full use. At Zakro, Palaikastro, Gournia, and elsewhere, examples of this script have been found, showing that it was prevalent, at all events, throughout Central and Eastern Crete; and in all cases it is a.s.sociated with remains which belong to the close of Middle Minoan III. and the beginnings of the Late Minoan period.
But it would appear that this form of writing was not confined to Crete, but was more widely diffused. Traces of it, or of a script very closely allied with it, have been found at Thera, while at Phylakopi in Melos evidence has come to light of a whole series of marks closely corresponding to the Cretan Cla.s.s A. This would seem to suggest what in itself is entirely probable, that the language used in Minoan Crete was predominant, or at all events was understood and largely used, throughout the aegean area. The inscription on the libation table found by Dr. Evans at the Dictaean Cave belongs to this cla.s.s, and also that upon the similar object found by Mr.
Currelly at Palaikastro.
[Ill.u.s.tration x.x.x: LATE MINOAN VASE FROM MYCENae (_p_. 206)
Reproduced from _The Journal of h.e.l.lenic Studies_, by permission of the Council of the h.e.l.lenic Society]
When, at the beginning of the Late Minoan period, the Palace of Knossos was remodelled, another great change accompanied the architectural one. This was the entire supersession of the linear script, Cla.s.s A, by another similar but independent form, which has been named Cla.s.s B. Somewhat remarkably, although the specimens of the script discovered at the Palace of Knossos and its immediate dependencies are far more numerous than those of Cla.s.s A, the use of Cla.s.s B seems, so far as the evidence yet collected goes, to have been entirely confined to Knossos. The beginning of the use of this system may have been in the early part of the fifteenth century B.C., and it was in full service at the great catastrophe of Knossos, at the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century B.C. Its use still continued after the fall of the Minoan power, tablets inscribed with this form of writing being found in the Late Minoan III. House of the Fetish Shrine at Knossos.
According to Dr. Evans, whose 'Scripta Minoa' sums up all that is at present known of these enigmatic Cretan writings, Cla.s.s B is not a mere outgrowth of Cla.s.s A. The scripts are certainly allied, and there are indications that B is the more highly developed of the two, having a smaller selection of characters and a less complicated system of compound signs; but at the same time several of the signs found in B do not occur in A at all, and some of those which belong to both scripts are found in a more primitive form in B. The language expressed in both scripts must, however, have been essentially the same. It is suggested, therefore, that in the supersession of Cla.s.s A by Cla.s.s B we have another indication of the dynastic revolution which is supposed to have caused that ruin of the palace which closed the Middle Minoan period.
The records of Cla.s.s B give evidence of a very considerable advance in the art of writing. 'The characters themselves have a European aspect. They are of upright habit, and of a simple and definite outline, which throws into sharp relief the c.u.mbrous and obscure cuneiform system of Babylonia. Although not so cursive in form as the Hieratic or Demotic types of Egyptian writing, there is here a much more limited selection of types. It would seem that the characters stood for syllables or even letters, though they could in most cases also be used as words.... The s.p.a.ces and lines between the words, the _es.p.a.cement_ into distinct paragraphs, and the variation in the size of the characters on the same tablet, according to the relative importance of the text, show a striving after clearness and method such as can by no means be said to be a characteristic of Cla.s.sical Greek inscriptions.'[*] A decimal system of numbers was in use, the highest single amount referred to being 19,000, and percentages were evidently well understood, as a whole series of tablets is devoted to them.
[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' pp. 39, 40.]
The tablets themselves were originally of unburnt, but sun-dried, clay, and their preservation, as we have seen, is probably due to the excessive heat to which they were exposed during the great fire which destroyed the palace. 'Fire itself, so fatal to other libraries, has thus insured the preservation of the archives of Minoan Knossos.' Great care was plainly bestowed upon the storage of the tablets. They were stored in chests and coffers of various materials, and were evidently carefully separated according to the different departments to which their contents referred. In one deposit near the northern entrance, which was the 'Sea-Gate'
of the palace, the largest of the seatings which had secured the cases in which the tablets were stored bore a representation of a s.h.i.+p, possibly an indication of the fact that these tablets belonged to the Minoan Board of Admiralty. One set of tablets had been stored in a room which presents all the appearance of having been an office, and the frequent occurrence in this deposit of the figures of a horse's head, a chariot, and a cuira.s.s, suggests that the store belonged to the Minoan War Office, and refers to the equipment of the Chariot Brigade of the Knossian army.
Further evidence of the business-like methods of the Minoan officials was given by the fact that many of the seals belonging to the various stores were countermarked on the face, and had their backs countersigned and endorsed, evidently by examining officials, while they appear to have been regularly filed and docketed for reference. Indeed, the Minoan methods have already borne the test of having been accepted as evidence in a modern court of law. 'In 1901,' says Dr. Evans, 'I discovered that certain tablets had been abstracted from the excavations, and had shortly afterwards been purchased by the museum at Athens. It further appeared that one of our workmen--a certain Aristides--had left the excavation about the same time for Greece, and had been seen in Athens offering ”antikas” for sale under suspicious circ.u.mstances. On examining the inscriptions on the stolen tablets I observed a formula that showed that some or all of the pieces belonged to a deposit found in Magazine XV. A reference to our daybooks brought out the fact that the same Aristides had taken part in the excavation of this particular magazine a little before the date of his hasty departure. On his return to Crete, some months later, he was accordingly arrested, and the evidence supplied by the Minoan formula was accepted by the Candia Tribunal as a crowning proof of his guilt. Aristides--”the Unjust”--was thus condemned to three months' imprisonment.' Few criminals attain to the dignity of being convicted on evidence 3,500 years old.
Certain of the tablets contain lists of persons of both s.e.xes, apparently denoted by their personal names, the signs which appear to stand for the name being followed in each case by an ideograph which is the determinative of 'man,' or 'woman,' as the case may be. It is, of course, impossible to say as yet to what rank or cla.s.s the people thus catalogued may have belonged; but the conjecture may be hazarded that these lists may be the major-domo's records of the male and female slaves of the household, or perhaps of the artisans who appear to have dwelt within the precincts of the palace.
Another type of record is given by tablets such as that represented in Plate XIV. The tablet contains eight lines of well-written inscription, and consists apparently of twenty words, divided into three paragraphs. In this case there are no determinatives and no numerals; and it is possible that the doc.u.ment may be a contract, or perhaps an official proclamation.
[Ill.u.s.tration x.x.xI: KAMARES VASES FROM PHaeSTOS AND HAGIA TRIADA (_pp_. 120 & 197)
_G. Maraghiannis_]
That such tablets were not the only form in which the Minoans executed the writing of their various doc.u.ments is evident from the fact already noticed, that inscriptions have been found executed with a reed-pen, and, though those extant are written on clay vessels, it is obvious that the reed-pen was not a very suitable instrument for writing on such materials, and that its existence presupposes some substance more adapted to the cursive writing of a pen--parchment, possibly, or papyrus, which could be readily obtained from Egypt.
Unfortunately, such materials, on which, in all probability, the real literary doc.u.ments of the Minoans, if there were any such doc.u.ments, would be written, can scarcely have survived the fire which destroyed the palace, or, if by any chance they escaped that, the subsequent action of the climate; so that whatever genuinely literary fragments may yet come to light must be looked for on the larger tablets, and at the best can scarcely be more than brief extracts. We cannot expect from Crete a wealth of papyri such as Egypt has preserved for the archaeologist.
Into quite a different category from any of the ordinary Minoan tablets comes the disc found at Phaestos in 1908. Its general character has been already described. The long inscription which covers both of its faces is written in a form of hieroglyphics which, to some extent, resembles the Minoan pictographic system, but is not the same. The crested helmets which occur frequently as signs, the round s.h.i.+elds, the fas.h.i.+on of dress of both men and women, and the style of architecture depicted in the hieroglyphic rendering of a house or paG.o.da, are not Minoan; and, on the whole, the evidence seems to point to the disc being the product of some allied culture, perhaps Lycian, in which a language closely akin to that of Minoan Crete was used. The inscription on the disc is carefully balanced and arranged, and each side contains exactly the same number of sign-groups, with one additional group on face A, which is separated from the preceding part of the inscription by a dash. Certain sets of sign-groups recur in the same order, as though they const.i.tuted some kind of refrain. From these indications it has been suggested that the whole inscription is a metrical composition, a short poem or hymn--perhaps one leaf of an Anatolian Book of Psalms whose other pages have perished. It is agreed that the language and religion of the western coast of Asia Minor were closely allied to those of Crete, and it is possible that when the Minoans developed their own language on somewhat different lines from the mainlanders, they maintained in parts of their religious service the old form of the speech common to themselves and their Anatolian relatives, as a kind of sacred language.[*]
[Footnote *: See Appendix, p. 264.]
Thus, it is abundantly evident that the civilization of Minoan Crete, far from being dumb, had varied and perfectly adequate means of expressing itself. The old Cretan tradition that the Ph?nicians did not invent the letters of the alphabet, but only changed those already existing, is amply justified; for this seems to have been precisely what they did. The Ph?nician mind, if not original, was at all events practical. The great stumbling-block in the way of the ancient scripts was their complexity--a fault which the Minoan users of the Linear Script, Cla.s.s B, had evidently already begun to recognize and endeavour to amend. What the Ph?nicians did was to carry the process of simplification farther still, and to appropriate for their own use out of the elements already existing around them a conveniently short and simple system of signs. The position which they came to occupy, after the Minoan empire of the sea had pa.s.sed away, as the great carriers and middlemen of the Mediterranean, gave their system a spread and a utility possible to no other system of writing; and so the Ph?nician alphabet gradually came to take its place as the basis of all subsequent scripts. Unquestionably it was a great and important service which was thus rendered by them; but, all the same, the beginnings of European writing must be traced not to them, but to their predecessors the Minoans, and the clay tablets of Knossos, Phaestos, and Hagia Triada are the lineal ancestors of all the written literature of Europe.
In attempting to deal with the Minoan religion we are met by the fact that it is as yet quite impossible to present any connected view of the subject. As in the case of their literature we have the actual records but cannot read them, so in the case of their religion a considerable ma.s.s of facts is apparent, but we have no means of co-ordinating them so as to arrive at any definite idea of a religious system. Some of the ritual we can see, and even understand something of the Divinity to whom it was addressed, but the theology is lacking. Accordingly, nothing more can be done than to present the fragmentary facts which are apparent.
The Minoans, it seems fairly clear, were never, like their successors the Greeks, the possessors of a well-peopled Pantheon; nor was the chief object of their adoration a male deity like the Greek Zeus.
There are, indeed, traces of a male divinity, who was adopted by the Greeks when they obtained predominance in the island, as the representative of their own supreme deity, and who became the Cretan Zeus. But in Minoan times this being occupied a very subordinate place, and undoubtedly the chief object of wors.h.i.+p was a G.o.ddess--a Nature G.o.ddess, a Great Mother--[Greek: potnia thaerou], the Lady of the Wild Creatures--who was the source of all life, higher and lower, its guardian during the period of its earthly existence, and its ruler in the underworld.
The functions of this great deity, it has been aptly pointed out, are substantially those claimed for herself by Artemis in Browning's poem, 'Artemis Prologizes':
'Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along; I shed in h.e.l.l o'er my pale people peace; On earth, I, caring for the creatures, guard Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-b.i.t.c.h sleek, And every feathered mother's callow brood, And all that love green haunts and loneliness.'
She was a G.o.ddess alike of the air, the earth, and the underworld, and representations of her have survived in which her various attributes are expressed. As G.o.ddess of the air, she is represented by a female figure crowned with doves; as G.o.ddess of the underworld, her emblems are the snakes, which we see twined round the faence figure at Knossos, or the terra-cotta in the Gournia shrine. Her figure is often seen upon seals and gems, standing on the top of the rock or mountain, with guardian lions in attendance, one on either side, and sometimes with a male votary in the background.
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