CHAPTER II

THE OLDER CIVILIZATION OF GREECE

1.

Aegean Civilization

 

THE great Aegean civilization of the Bronze Age in no way owed its origin to the West, and cannot have been, till near its end, more than but slightly influenced by any possible independent Indo-European culture in the North. Civilization must have come to the Northern land of barren steppes and impenetrable forests by way of the Vardar and Danube-valleys from the Aegean, not in the reverse direction. That the seeds of the Minoan culture of Crete could have been brought from the North would be of itself inconceivable, and as a matter of fact we know that the Minoan culture developed out of its Neolithic origins in the Aegean itself. That the older civilization of Greece was a single culture, which developed out of Neolithic beginnings into the full civilization of the Bronze Age without a break in the same place, is now certain. No cataclysm marks the passage  from the Age of Stone to that of Metal. The Bronze Age culture develops directly from the Neolithic, and the Bronze Age people of Greece may naturally be presumed to be the same as the Neolithic people. The later transition from the Age of Bronze to that of Iron was certainly accompanied by and due to the invasion of the Indo-Europeans from the North. But we have no reason to suppose that there, was any racial difference between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age Greeks.

The Neolithic Aegeans were then the ancestors of the Minoans and Mycenaeans, whose dress of a simple waistcloth (sometimes with additions, and developed strangely in the case of the women) is very good evidence that they were Southerners from Africa rather than Northerners from Europe. This simple waistcloth, the natural dress of men in a hotter country than Greece, can be traced as far back in time as we can go, and there is no doubt that it was worn by the Neolithic Greeks and came from Northern Africa with them. The earlier Greeks came then from Africa while they were still stone-users.

There is, however, as we shall see later, a possibility that there existed from the beginning in Northern Greece a second ethnic element, a people which still used stone when the Aegeans had long passed into the Bronze Age. This element, if it is of Northern origin, we can hardly refuse to recognize as of Indo-European stock, and to call, if we wish to coin a word, proto-Achaian.

The Neolithic stage of the southern Greeks is known to us chiefly from Crete, where, at Knossos, the low hill which was afterwards crowned by the palace of Minos was inhabited for many centuries by a Neolithic population before the knowledge of metal came to Greece. In Asia Minor pottery which must be Neolithic has been found, and on the Asiatic shore of the Aegean, at Troy, evidences of Neolithic culture are visible in the lowest strata of human habitation. In Euboea and in the Peloponnese stone weapons have been found. But in the Cyclades no trace of Neolithic inhabitants has come to light, and in Cyprus only one or two isolated stone weapons have been noted.

This last fact may possibly be due to the easy accessibility of copper in the eastern island. It may well be that Cyprus was the original home of copper-working in the Eastern Mediterranean, and that the knowledge of metal came thence both to the predynastic Northern Egyptians and to the Aegeans. But there is a difference between the cases of Egypt and Greece, in that while the Egyptians used copper alone, and did not become acquainted with bronze till the time of the Middle Kingdom, the Aegeans from the first seem to have been acquainted with bronze as well as copper, and among them the use of the alloy soon superseded that of the pure metal. Probably the knowledge of the art of alloying copper with tin or antimony came from the Middle East, where tin is found, to Greece as well as to Babylonia and, eventually, Egypt.

To the introduction of metal the whole development of the prehistoric Greek culture was due. Its appearance is marked by the stirring of an artistic impulse which, swiftly changing and improving, carried the southern Aegeans in a few centuries from the rude hand-made pottery of the Neolithic period to artistic triumphs which have hardly been equalled since. Similarly, in the first few centuries after the introduction of metal, the Egyptians, whose art had early been fixed by religious convention, had progressed in the science of engineer­ing and architecture, where their energies were untrammelled, from the absolute ignorance of the savage to the knowledge of the Pyramid-builders.

 

2. Minoan Chronology

 

In the absence of intelligible records, the history of this artistic development is practically the only history of early Greek civilization that we possess, and we are now able to follow its course with some accuracy, thanks to the acumen of Sir Arthur Evans, who has constructed a chronological scheme of three successive periods of development, each of which again is divided into three sub-periods. To these periods he gives the name of “Minoan”, after the great Cretan lawgiver and thalassocrat. The name may be fanciful, but the scheme itself is by no means so; it rests upon careful observation and tabulation of ascertained archaeological facts, upon the results of the excavations at Knossos and elsewhere in Crete, and has for the first time given us a solidly based framework upon which we can arrange our facts. The whole of our knowledge of the prehistoric civilization not only of Crete but of Greece generally can with its aid be classified and arranged in chronological sequence. A corresponding scheme of the successive periods of the development of art in the Cyclades, contemporaneously with that of Crete, has been devised; even in the earliest period of the Bronze Age we can bring the culture of Troy into chronological relation with that of the South, while in the latest the Cretan culture has conquered the Greek mainland, and the “Late Minoan” age is as well represented at Mycenae as at Knossos. The scheme agrees very well with the evidence.

The chronological bases of the scheme are given by the various synchronisms with Egyptian history that are known, and have already briefly been mentioned. It is possible that intermittent connexion was maintained by sea between the primitive Northern Egyptians and the primitive Aegeans even in Neolithic times; although the curious resemblances which have been traced between certain religious cults peculiar to the Delta and those of Crete, and the similarities of the funeral rites in both countries, may perhaps be referred rather to an original connexion than to commercial relations. We cannot find a proof of these relations in the supposed vessels which are depicted on the vases of the predynastic Southern Egyptians, as these (if they are boats at all) are obviously mere Nile boats, and the people who depicted them were Nilotes of the south, not seagoing inhabitants of the Delta and the coast. It was not these African ancestors of the dynastic Southern Egyptians that can have been connected with the Aegeans, but a Mediterranean folk in the Delta who perhaps lived there side by side with the Semito-Libyan population which we shall see reason to believe existed in Northern Egypt. Whatever communication there may have been in Neolithic times is not likely to have been increased after the conquest of Northern Egypt by the Southerners, and the foundation of the Egyptian kingdom. The coast population of the Delta, the Haaic or swamp-men, as the Egyptians called them, probably maintained a fitful communication with the Aegeans, and to them as intermediaries we may ascribe the presence in Crete of fragments of Egyptian diorite bowls of the period of the Third Dynasty (if we set on one side temporarily the counter-instance of supposed Cretan vases in the royal tombs of the First Dynasty at Abydos as still doubtful). Direct communication with the true Egyptian nation which had now developed there was probably none. That nation had been unified under the hegemony of the kings and people of Upper Egypt, who had conquered the North by force, and had given a Southern complexion to the new state. The Southerners knew nothing of the sea, and the “Fenmen”, who still preserved, on account of their proximity to the sea and occasional communication with the Northerners, many peculiarities differing from the orthodox Southern traits of official Egypt, were abhorrent to them. They were foreigners, and the Egypt of the Old Kingdom would have nothing to do with foreigners : she was a world in herself, governed by the gods in human form.

Towards the end of the Old Kingdom, however, this attitude of exclusiveness towards the Northerners began to break down : Egyptian stone vases were copied by the Cretans of the Early Minoan period, whose nascent art began in return to attract the attention of the Egyptians, and the spiral design, already characteristic of Aegean art, was adopted from the “seal-stones” of the Northerners to decorate the Egyptian seal-scarab. During the Middle Kingdom the beautiful Cretan polychrome pottery of the Middle Minoan period was exported to Egypt, and from its occurrence with objects of the Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt we see that the Second Middle Minoan period was contemporary with that dynasty. The succeeding Third Middle Minoan period must have been contemporary with the end of the Middle Kingdom, as the First and Second Late Minoan periods were certainly contemporary with the Eighteenth Dynasty. To the Third Middle Minoan period must be assigned the statuette of the Egyptian Abnub, son of Minuser (a name eminently characteristic of the Thirteenth Dynasty), and the alabaster-lid of King Khian, found at Knossos. The evidence of the contemporaneity of the first two “Late Minoan” periods with the Eighteenth Dynasty is very definite. A possible late “First Late Minoan” vase was found in a burial of the time of Thothmes iii by Petrie at Gurob, and the vases carried by Keftian ambassadors to the courts of Hatshepsut and Thothmes iii are of First Late Minoan style. The Third Late Minoan period certainly began before the end of the Eighteenth Dynasty, as the Aegean sherds found in the rams of Akhenaten’s palace at Tell el-Amarna are exclusively of this style. Therefore the Second Late Minoan period must be placed, so far as Knossos is concerned, in the short space between the reigns of Thothmes iii and Akhenaten. The Third Late Minoan period the age which we formerly regarded as the Mycenaean age  par excellence, the period when, as it would seem the hegemony of Aegean civilization passed from Knossos and Crete to Mycenae and the mainland, was much longer It lasted in Greece certainly till the time of the Twentieth Dynasty in Cyprus probably longer. In a tomb at Enkom, in Cyprus has teen found a scarab of Rameses iii (1200 BC), and Mycenaean vases are depicted on the walls of that monarch s tomb. Later traces are doubtful.

Thus Sir Arthur Evans’s scheme of the historical development of Aegean culture possesses a solid chronological basis. Using it as our guide, we can now essay to trace the course of Greek “prehistory” in some detail. The story is, as has been said, that of the development of culture as shown in the evolution of art, and this evolution is traced manly by means of the careful observation of the development of the ceramic art. The age of metal objects can be told by the style of pottery with which they are found or, in the case of metal vases with which they can be compared. Similarly the date of a building can be shown to be not later than the kind of ware which is found in it, and the character of the pottery can sometimes give us clues as to the ethnic character of the people who made it. Invasions and occupations can tentatively be traced and the indications thus provided by archaeological sciene can be combined with the information derived from Egyptian and other Oriental records and the vague hints supplied by the Greek legends to form a probable theory of the course of events.

 

3. The Early and Middle Minoan Periods

The most ancient remains of the Bronze Age yet discovered in Greece are perhaps those of the First Cycladic period in the smaller islands of the Aegean, but it is obvious that the knowledge of bronze must have reached the island of Crete before it was passed on to the Cyclades. From the Cycladic cist-graves and the “Copper Age” necropolis in Cyprus we see how the metal celt was soon supplemented by the short copper or bronze dagger, which was eventually to become a long sword. The spearhead soon followed, and the primitive Aegean was as well armed as the Babylonian, and better than the Egyptian, of his time. The vases of earthenware were now supplemented by vases of the new material and of other and more precious metals, silver, electrum, and gold. Eventually the characteristic forms of the metal vases were imitated in pottery, so that the style of the metal-worker exercised great influence over that of the potter. The development of ceramic art was remarkable. The first Aegean painted ware arose in Crete: in Cyprus an incised red and a similar black ware still carried on during the early Bronze Age the tradition of a Neolithic pottery, akin to that of Crete, of which we have no actual relics. Painted ware came to Cyprus from the Aegean: it was a Cretan invention. The inventors first painted a black ware with dull white pigment in imitation of the incised designs, filled in with white, of the later Neolithic period. The black ground was now produced artificially by means of a “slip” of black glaze-colour, imitating the hand-burnished black surface of the Neolithic ware. This was a notable invention. The converse use of a white “slip” with black decoration was not long in coming. A wide field of artistic possibilities was now thrown open to the Cretan potter, and he was not slow to enter it. The vases of the next period, the Second “Early Minoan” age of Evans, show great developments of the potter’s art. Strange new forms of vases such as the “Schnabelkannen” or beaked jugs, appear and curved lines, soon to develop into regular spirals, are seen in their simple decoration. In the Third Early Minoan period, which succeeds, the spiral decoration has been evolved, and the foundation of all the wonderful designs of the later Minoan pottery has been laid.

In this period we are able to establish a synchronism between the culture of Crete and that of Troy. There is no doubt that “Early Minoan in” is roughly contemporaneous with the Second City of Troy: they mark the same stage of culture. The discoveries of Mr. R. B. Seager in the tombs of the little island of Mochlos, off the north coast of Crete, have shown that the superfluity of the precious metals which is so characteristic of “Troy II” is equally characteristic of “Early Minoan III”. The riches of “Priam’s Treasure” with its golden pins and chains and its gold and silver vases is paralleled by the golden bands, flowers, and pins found in the chieftains graves at Mochlos. In the Second City of Troy we see the sudden development of civilization under the influence of the "Early Minoan" culture of Crete. But the Trojans retained their own style of black pottery, with its peculiar owl-headed vases and incised decoration.

Between Troy and Crete lay the Cyclades, where Cretan influence had developed a culture and an art closely akin to that of Crete, especially in respect of ceramic development But the painted ware of the Cyclades from the first evolved local styles of its own, and, while the processes are the same as the Cretan, the vase-forms and decoration are by no means the same. We know the Cycladic pottery best from the finds in the tombs of Amorgos, Paros, and Syra (Chalandriane), which are of the type known as cist-graves, being composed of flat slabs of stone in the form of a long box. The same type of grave is found in Early Minoan Crete, as, for instance, at Mochlos. In Crete another type of tomb is found, in the Second Early Minoan age, the circular grave or tholos, which later on developed into the beehive tomb, which we know in the “Treasuries” of Mycenae and Orchomenos. In the cist-graves of the Cyclades the dead were buried in the cramped form equally characteristic of the predynastic Egyptians or Babylonians, and the primitive Mediterraneans generally.

We have already mentioned the small idols in human form which were found in these Cretan tholoi as resembling those found in the predynastic Egyptian graves. Similar idols, but of more developed form, are characteristic of the Cycladic cist-graves. In Amorgos and Paros they are sometimes of large size, and are usually made of the local marble.

Characteristic again of the last Early Minoan and Cycladic periods is the development of stone-working. Fine stone vases are now made, of simple yet often beautiful forms, sometimes, in Crete, imitating a flower, sometimes, in the Cyclades, the shape of the sea-urchin. Most of these vases are made of the easily worked steatite found in Crete, but many of those from the Cyclades are of white marble. On some of them a fully developed system of connected spiral decoration appears. The system of spiral decoration now makes its appearance in Greece, and is seen in the goldwork of Troy and the stonework of the Cyclades perhaps before it appears as a decorative motive on pottery. The origin of the Aegean spiral patterns is probably to be sought in metal-working. The “Early Minoan” goldsmith invented it, and we see the first-fruits of his invention in the spiral coils of the gold wire pins of the “Treasure of Priam”. From metal the new pattern passed to stonework in relief and then to pottery, painted on the flat. The Egyptians adopted it and incised it on their seals, an example afterwards followed by the makers of the Cretan “seal-stones”. From the Aegean the beautiful pattern spread northwards to Central Europe, to Scandinavia, and eventually to Celtic Britain.

On Cretan pottery the spiral design does not properly appear till the beginning of the next period of artistic development, the “Middle Minoan”. At the same time that a pattern derived from the coils of metal wire was used to ornament pottery, the forms of earthenware vases became for the first time directly modelled upon those of vases of metal. The pottery of the Middle Minoan period is constantly made in forms which are obviously imitated from those of metal originals. The potter had now obtained such mastery of his material that he could mould his clay in any form he chose. This mastery had been obtained as the result of two inventions of first-rate importance in the history of art: the baking-furnace and the potter's wheel. It is probable that both were originally invented in Egypt somewhere between the time of the First and the Fourth Dynasties. In the age of the Pyramid-builders we find well-baked wheel-made pottery universal, whereas the predynastic ware had all been built up by hand and baked in an open fire, like the Neolithic and First “Early” Minoan or Cycladic pottery of Greece. Both inventions must have reached Greece during the Third Early Minoan (Cycladic) period ( = Troy ii). During the Second period pottery made in the old manner was still used in Greece, as we see from the black and red ware of Vasilikf, and from the primitive pottery of the Cyclades. But in the Third period the new inventions have definitely established themselves, and the result is the remarkable ceramic development of the Middle Minoan age in Crete.

Not only were metal shapes imitated by the Middle Minoan potter, armed with his new mastery of furnace and wheel. For the first time pottery was made of thin and delicate, often of “egg-shell”, ware, and plant forms appear in relief, clustering on the sides and over the lips of his vases. And, above all, the painter aided him to beautify the vases he made by introducing polychrome decoration. The pottery of the Middle Minoan period is characterized by a profuse use of colour—red, blue, and white, usually on a black ground. Spiral coils of red and white combine with the black ground to produce a hitherto unknown richness of decoration. Combined with the metallic forms of the vases the result is often extraordinarily striking.

Characteristic also of this period are the “seal-stones” on which are cut the remarkable signs which Sir Arthur Evans has shown to belong to a hieroglyphic system, which was now giving rise to the regular system of writing which we find, impressed on clay tablets by means of a stilus (much in the Babylonian manner), in the remains of the next age. Of the origin of this system of writing we know nothing, but it is significant that some of the signs on the seal-stones are closely paralleled by, a few even identical with, certain Egyptian hiero­glyphics. We can at least assume a considerable Egyptian influence on the development of the script.

The Middle Minoan period saw a great advance not only in the arts of the potter, metal-worker, and seal-cutter, but also in that of the architect. The roughly built stone houses of the earlier age had now developed into splendid buildings of hewn and squared stone. The earlier palaces at Knossos and Phaistos were now built. Of the former we can only identify fragments here and there in the great palace of the Late Minoan age, but at Phaistos much of the earlier building still remains.

 

4. The Kingdom of Knossos and Phaistos

 

 

We know nothing of the political constitution of prehistoric Crete, and cannot tell whether in the days when Knossos and Phaistos were first built the whole island was under one dominance or was divided into several independent kingdoms. Later on, in the heyday of Minoan civilization, we feel that political unity is probable, and that Knossos was the metropolis of a Cretan state. The legend of the thalassocracy of Minos also indicates that Crete was a state united under the rule of the kings of Knossos, and possessed of wide-reaching power over the neighbouring seas and islands. It may be that at least the central portion of Crete, between Ida and Dikte, was already unified from sea to sea under the rule of Knossos as early as the Middle Minoan period, and that Phaistos and the neighbouring palace of Agia Triada were originally built by a Knossian king. Legend makes Phaistos a colony of Knossos.

With the building of the first palace of Knossos above the heaped-up strata of the Neolithic age the kingdom of Minos first takes form and substance. The Neolithic settlement occupied the sides of a hill that slopes down to the valley of a little river, the Kairatos, which enters the sea four miles away, a short distance to the east of the modern city of Candia, on the north coast of the island. Candia owes its modern importance to its central position. Politically, Canea, at the western extremity of the'island, is now the capital, owing partly to its greater proximity to Europe, and partly to its possession of some sort of a harbour, while Candia has, for modern purposes, none. But the central portion of the island, of which Candia is the capital, is the richest and most important part of Crete, and must always have been so. In Roman days the capital was Gortyna, in the Messani, a city which evidently succeeded to the inheritance of the neighbouring Phaistos. In Early Minoan days the central portion of the land must always have been in advance of the mountainous eastern and western portions in civilization, and it is here that the first unified political power must have been formed. All tradition points to Knossos as the original seat of this power, and we cannot doubt that the tradi­tions are correct, and that Knossos owed its pre-eminence to its central position. And its situation on the northern coast contributed largely to make it the centre of an over-sea dominion. So the Neolithic settlement at Knossos developed into the seat of a powerful dynasty and the centre of the culture which has been revealed to us by the excavations of Sir Arthur Evans and Dr. Mackenzie. These excavations are gradually exposing to view the extensive remains of the palace of the kings, built above the Neolithic settlement. The remains of the town which surround it have hitherto not been investigated to any great extent, though some houses have been excavated by Mr. Hogarth. The cemetery, on a neighbouring hillside called Zafer Papoura, has been explored by Dr. Evans; but all the tombs found contained objects which are much later in date than the time of the first founding of the palace. A great tomb has, however, been found on the hill of Isopata, a mile or so nearer the sea, which was probably originally constructed at the close of the Middle Minoan age.

Like the potters, the architects of the Middle Minoan age had new and great ideas. The sudden development of civilization which differentiates this age from that which preceded it pro­duced men with splendid conceptions, just as the similar but earlier development in Egypt had produced the designs of the Pyramids. The Minoan architects did not design mighty masses like these, but in the grand western entrance and “Stepped Theatral Area” of Phaistos they translated into stone a fine and spacious architectural conception such as. hitherto only-Egypt could have produced.

 

 

In both cases when the palaces were designed, a flat platform was prepared for them by the levelling of a portion of the hill on which each stands. This shows that the architects worked at the bidding of powerful rulers with large ideas, as the levelling must have involved the destruction of a large portion of the old town of the Early Minoan period in which the original king’s house stood. To this designed destruction we owe the fact that our knowledge of the Early Minoan age is derived in small measure from Knossos and Phaistos, but rather from other excavations.

The similarity of the process in both cases points to a practical contemporaneity of execution. At the same time that the king of Knossos built his new palace in his capital, or not long after, he also built himself a southern palace in the Messara. There was probably an earlier town here also. As at Knossos, a low hill, such as was the usual position of a primitive town, was utilized. As from the near neighbourhood of Knossos a fine view of the sea, the haven, and the ships of the thalassocrats could be obtained, with Dia beyond and perhaps Melos far away on the horizon, so from Phaistos itself an equally fine, but different, prospect greeted the royal eyes; from this hill­top he could contemplate on one side the snowy tops of Ida and on the other the rich lands of the Messara; the southern mountain-range shut out the Libyan sea from his view. Later, some king desired to see the southern sea, and built himself a palace, but little inferior to Phaistos in splendour, and not far off, from which the bay of the Messara, with the island now known as Paximadhi (Cake), and the splendid mountain-group of Kentros and Ida together, were visible. This newer palace is now known as Agia Triada, from a little church of the Holy Trinity that stands upon it. Like Phaistos, it has been excavated by the Italian archaeologists, Halbherr, Pernier, and their colleagues.

Here again the site of an older settlement was utilized and levelled for the new royal house : Agia Triada was inhabited in very early days, as we know from the tribal tholos-burlal of the Early Minoan period, already mentioned, which has been discovered there.

Agia Triada is wholly a work of the Late Minoan period, to which we now come. Still tracing the development of Cretan civilization by means of the evolution of its pottery, we find that in the Third Middle Minoan period much of the inspiration of the "Kamaraes" potters was evaporating, and the polychrome decoration was becoming poor in execution and weak in effect. The first stage of the Late Minoan period, which followed, was ushered in by a new course in ceramic decoration. The polychrome principle was abandoned, and a system of plain dark colour upon a light ground was introduced, or rather revived. Contemporaneously with the polychrome ware, the older style of vase-painting had continued to exist, and now came to the front in a perfected form. The Cretan invention of lustrous glaze-paint now finally ousted the older style of matt colour, and with the use of brown colour on the buff-slip of the vase the principle of dark-upon-light decoration finally defeated that of light-upon-dark which had been inherited from Neolithic days. The designs of the vases of the First and Second Late Minoan periods (the “Great Palace style” of Knossos), whether the motives are developments of the spiral, or are derived from plants, and from the rocks and seaweed and marine creatures, cuttle-fish, nautili, and the rest, which were so well known to a seafaring people, or from the wall-paintings of the palace itself, are always good, and fully worthy of the civilization that could produce the architecture of Knossos and Phaistos and the splendid metal-work which the Keftiu bore as “tribute” to Egypt.

 

Pottery from the Archaeological site of Akrotiri, Museum of Prehistoric Thira, Santorini, Greece.

 

EVOLUTION OF THE greek pottery

The Marseile Vase

 

The Knossian palace was wholly remodelled at the end of the Middle Minoan period, and apparently largely altered and enlarged in the Late Minoan period. As it stands today, with its extraordinary complex of halls, staircases, and chambers descending the slope towards the Kairatos, and its outlying buildings such as the “Royal Villa” below it to the north and the “Western House” higher up the hill to the west, it is a monument of the phenomenal growth of Cretan civilization during the few centuries that had elapsed since the beginning of the Middle Minoan period, when the Cretans first emerged from barbarism. This palace is, one would say. a modern-building. It is far more “modern” than any Greek building of the Classical period, or than anything in Italy before the Augustan age. One of its most modern features is the elaborate system of sanitary drainage with which it is provided, a thing unparalleled till Roman days, and since then till the nineteenth century. In comparison with this wonderful building the palaces of Egyptian Pharaohs were but elaborate hovels of painted mud. Only the sculptured corridors of Ashurbanipal's Nineveh probably surpassed it in splendour; but Assyrian splendour was after all as old, cold, and lifeless as that of Egyptian temples, while Knossos seems to be eloquent of the teeming life and energy of a young and beauty-loving people for the first time feeling its creative power and exulting with the pure joie de vivre.

No Byzantine emperor and his consort dwelt here alone within the royal palace fenced off even from the nobles by armed guards. No Assyrian monarch paced, followed by eunuchs, solitary here those corridors ornamented with bas-reliefs depicting nothing but his own triumphs in war and the chase and the meaningless, staring visages of his gods. No inhuman Egyptian Pharaoh or Japanese Mikado received here the worship due to a god from prostrate ministers and retainers. The halls of Knossos were inhabited by a crowd of courtiers and retainers, men and women both, who surrounded the king, and lived with him to enjoy the beauties and good things of life. The Minoan Court must have resembled the joyous surroundings of an European prince of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with a touch here and there of the Tuileries under the Second Empire. From the fragments of the paintings, often bizarre and crude in execution, often weirdly powerful in design and framed in decorative borders of every conceivable form and colour, which covered the walls of the palace-corridors, we see what these people looked like. We see the women depicted as often as, if not more often than, the men, whereas in  Assyria  they  never appear at all.

Probably in Minoan Crete women played a greater part than they did even in Egypt, and it may eventually appear that religious matters, perhaps even the government of the State itself as well, were largely controlled by women. It is certain that they must have lived on a footing of greater equality withthe men than in any other ancient civilization, and we see in the frescoes of Knossos conclusive indications of an open and easy association of men and women, corresponding to our idea of “Society”, at the Minoan Court unparalleled till our own day. The Minoan artists represented the women as white, the men as red in colour, thus following the same convention as the Egyptians. True to their bizarre summary ways, a crowd of men and women is sometimes shewn by the crude method of outlining merely the heads of a number of men on a red background, and those of a number of women on a white one. But for this distinction in the background it would be impossible to say whether the heads are those of men or women, since the Minoan courtiers were clean-shaved and wore their hair as long and as elaborately dressed as did the women. In the scenes of bull-fighting which often occur, and in which women are represented as taking part, one can only distinguish the girls from the boys by their colour: the same flying hair, of the same length, is common to both sexes.

In some frescoes we see the ladies of Minos’ Court depicted sitting at the windows of the palace, openly and unveiled. I Their dress is extraordinarily modern in appearance: it is décolleté, with bare necks and arms, the breasts covered apparently with gold or silver guards reproducing their outline, their waists pinched in, and, below, ample skirts with parallel rows of flounces, resembling nothing so much as the crinolines of the mid-nineteenth century. Anything more unlike our usual conception of “Greek dress” it is impossible to conceive. At an earlier period (Middle Minoan I) we find the women in similar skirts, but with high ruff-like collars and horned head­dresses which may or may not be their hair. The coiffure of the Late Minoan ladies of Knossos, with its knots and side-curls, closely resembles that of the ladies of the Court Of Charles ii. On their heads they wear tiaras or head-bands: a goddess is represented with an extraordinary high hat.

 

KNOSOS

Fresco of a King

 

BULL FIGHT

 

 SNAKE GODDESS

 

The dress of the men was simple, consisting merely of a waist-cloth over which was worn a short kilt, often arranged so as to give the appearance of a pair of bathing-drawers or boating “shorts”. This simple costume was ornamented in the usual way with spiral and other designs in bright colour, thus differing from the related Egyptian waist-cloth, which was always pure white: bright colours in costume were regarded by the Egyptians as barbaric. The significance of this costume as indicating the Southern and specifically African origin of the Minoans has already been pointed out: even the women’s dress is nothing but a developed kilt. As in Egypt, the upper part of the men’s bodies was nude but for a necklace, except when, on occasions of ceremony, and doubtless often by older men, a gala-robe was donned.

Even in war, no body-panoply was put on. This was an invention of the Northerners, in all probability. For the Minoan, his great 8-shaped shield was sufficient protection for his body. A helmet, probably of leather, was, however, often worn in gladiatorial combats as well as in war. This helmet has cheek-pieces and is very Roman in appearance. Sometimes it had a crest, and one appears in a scene of combat on a gold ring found at Mycenae. The most usual weapon was a straight thin sword meant for thrusting: often ornamented with designs in inlaid metals.

Ordinarily, no headgear was worn by the men, but a conical cap is sometimes represented, and a prince or god at Knossos wears a mighty head-dress of feathers.

The characteristic long hair of the men, which has already been mentioned, was apparently sometimes coiled up on the top of the head, but, even when the wearer was engaged or about to engage in active work, it was ordinarily worn hanging down the back to the waist or below it, usually loose, sometimes in plaits or curls. On the head fantastic knots or curls, like those of the women, were often worn—the “horns” of which Paris was so proud. This coiffure was as characteristic of the Bronze Age Cretans as was the waist-cloth, and is represented accurately even to the small detail of the curls on the top of the head by the Egyptian artists of the tomb of Rekhmara.

Characteristic also of the Minoan men’s dress were the high boots which were worn in Crete then as now, and were also faithfully represented by the Egyptian as well as by the Minoan artists. Practically the same boot was worn by the Hittites.

Such was the remarkable outward appearance of the men and women of Knossos, which in the case of the men was accurately reproduced by the Egyptian painters of the Keftiu of the reign of Thothmes III; an appearance as distinctive and as characteristic of racial custom as the shaven heads, wigs, and white garments of the Egyptians, or the oiled locks, beards, and parti-coloured robes of the Semites, their contemporaries.

 

 

the cupbearer, knossos

 

 

From the pictures we see that the Minoans were a brunet race resembling the modern Italians more than any other people, with ruddy skins, dark brown to black hair, and “Caucasian” features. One of the first representations of them that we have is the famous wall-painting of the “Cupbearer”, one of the first Knossian discoveries of Mr. Evans, and one which did more than aught else to direct general attention to the new finds in Crete.

Frescoes of this kind were the regular decoration of the Cretan palace-walls. Relief sculpture in stone, like sculpture of the round, on a large scale was rarely used by the Cretan decorators, though its place was taken to some extent by coloured reliefs in hard stucco.

Inscriptions were not used to decorate the walls in the Egyptian and Assyrian manner. No signs appear by the side of the pictures, and this gives us the idea that the Minoans dissociated their script from their art as the Egyptians never did. It is sometimes difficult in Egypt to know where in­scription ends and pure picture begins: the inscriptions are themselves pictures, the pictures have meanings. But by the Cretans of the Late Minoan period the cursive writing that had developed out of the older signary of the seal-stones was confined to the clay tablets, of which great stores have been found at Knossos, and some at Phaistos and elsewhere. These were, apparently, but lists and accounts of objects preserved in the palace-magazines, with perhaps a letter or two among them: but we cannot read them. Their picture-signs and those on the seals have, however, told us much concerning the culture of the Minoans that we might not otherwise have known. Thus we know that they possessed chariots at this time (the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries BC) and also horses : on a seal-impression we have a picture of a great war-horse, with proudly arched neck, being carried in a ship (which is, by the way, much smaller, proportionally, than the horse). This may represent a scene of actual importation of a horse, probably from Egypt. The shapes of weapons and vases sketched on the tablets, though rough, are useful as an aid to archaeology.

In material civilization the Minoan Cretans were at least as highly developed as the Egyptians or Mesopotamians, in some ways more highly developed, at any rate as regards the amenities of life. Their sense of beauty and mental freedom seem to have been untrammelled by Semitic asceticism or Egyptian religious conventionality. They lived, cruelly perhaps, and possibly (according to our ideas) wickedly, but certainly beautifully.

Of their religious ideas we know but little. In later Greek religion there seems to be a stratum, underlying the Indo-European mythology which the Aryan Greeks brought with them, and more especially represented in Crete, which probably is the remnant of the old Aegean religion: a stratum of minor deities of woods and streams and stones and of the ocean, of huntress-goddesses and sun-warriors, Dryads, Satyrs, and Fauns, Naiads and Nereids and Old Men of the Sea, whom we find on many a Minoan seal-intaglio. The water-demon with the head of an animal is a familiar appearance there. It is to the seals that we must look for representations of the deities, as the Minoans seem to have made no large figures of them. In official religion a pillar with a horned altar before it represented the devotion of the State : individuals pictured the gods on their seals or venerated small and rude household images of them. From the seals we gather a universal worship of a supreme female goddess, the Rhea of later religion, who is accompanied sometimes by a youthful male deity. The parallel with the Anatolian religion of Kybele and Attis is obvious, and argues a not distant ethnic connexion with Asia Minor and the “Hittites”. The goddess appears in many forms; in one of the most peculiar she brandishes serpents. The god was no doubt in later days identified with Zeus; his symbol was the Double Axe which is so constantly found as a votive object.

Of their funerary religion we know least, but have evidence that the ceremonies at the grave were, if not connected in their origin with certain Nilotic beliefs, certainly influenced by Egyptian rites. In the internal arrangements of the tombs we find, on the other hand, remarkable resemblance to Etruscan funerary customs, a fact that is of great interest in view of a possible racial connexion between the Aegeans and the Etruscans. Various forms of tomb were used  in the Late Minoan Age, and the dead were usually placed in pottery coffins or lamakes, sometimes in baths. The tombs are without mural decoration of any kind.

Of the frescoes with which, on the contrary, the houses of the living were adorned, and of the art of the seal-engravers, we have already spoken. The magazines and chambers of the palaces and towns at Knossos, Phaistos, Agia Triada, Gournia, Pseira, Palaikastro, and Zakro, have yielded to us the vases and other objects of metal, stone, and pottery which are to be seen in the Museum of Candia,and give us our knowledgeof the art of this age. The “small art” is often much finer than the “great art” of the frescoes and stucco-reliefs : stone sculpture in relief or in the round we can hardly mention, as it was never developed to any extent. This draws our attention to the limitations of Minoan art. Probably among the finest pieces of small sculpture in the world are the two steatite vases (of the First Late Minoan period) from Agia Triada, on one of which we see a procession of drunken roistering peasants with agricultural implements, and on the other the reception or dismissal of a warrior with his followers by a king or prince. The first is a masterpiece of relief, resembling nothing so much as the best Egyptian reliefs of the reigns of Amenhetep III and Akhenaten, while the second is full of Greek reticence and sense of proportion. But the figures of gladiators on the larger “Boxer” vase of the same period, also from Agia Triada, are clumsy, as also, in comparison, are the famous reliefs on the gold cups of Vaphio, also of the same date. The steatite cups are imitations of gold repousse work, and herein we see why the Cretan sculptors never became sculptors on the great scale, they were the disciples and imitators of the toreutic artists, and never became independent of them. The example of Egypt never moved them to great sculpture, and it is probable that they would have seen no beauty in the cold lifelessness of Egyptian coossi, magnificent though they might have deemed them  To them the little ivory leapers from Knossos were the highest expres­sion of the art of sculpture in the round; size had no charm for them. The love of life and beauty dominated the Cretan artists; they were bound by no trammels of convention, and to this was due the inequality of their work. Side by side, more especially in the domain of wall and vise painting, we see the most childish and the most perfect art. Such inconsistency would have been impossible in rigidly formal Egypt; and even when Akhenaten allowed his artists to break the chain of convention and imitate the freedom of their Cretan brethren, he would never have allowed them to produce such crude works as the Cretan princes often accepted without demur from their subjects. And, indeed, the highly trained hands of the Egyptian crafts­man, an artist rather from education than in spirit, would have been incapable of such unequal work. The Cretan, however, a true artist, did what pleased him.

The wall-paintings exercised considerable influence on the decoration of pottery in the Second Minoan period the Great Palace period, to which we have now come. Architectonic motives, copied from the representations of buildings in frescoes, are characteristic of the ceramic art of this time. This fact betrays a certain degeneration in the ideas of the vase-painter, and in other ways we see that the art of the Great Palace period was somewhat vulgarized, and even rococo. And indeed degeneracy was fast coming. The rococo period, which seems to have been a local peculiarity of Knossos, lasted but a century, the period which in Egypt elapsed between the reigns of Thothmes iii and Amenhetep iii (about 1500-1400 BC). In the reign of Akhenaten (about 1380) the Aegean vase-fragments found at Tell el-Amarna are already exclusively of the Third Late Minoan style, which in Crete, elsewhere than at Knossos, and on the mainland, had developed out of the First. The long age of decadence now begins, in which the great art and culture of Crete slowly declined to their fall.

 

5. Crete and Greece

The reason for this decline is probably to be found in the results of the northward expansion of the Cretan culture which, at first slow, had, during the great age of Minoan power, developed greatly, and was probably accompanied by an assertion of temporal as well as spiritual control, which in the end brought about its own inevitable defeat and the wreck of Cretan civilization. Similar results are not always due to similar causes, but there is enough similarity between the contemporary decadence of both Egypt and Crete for us to predicate much the same cause in Crete as in Egypt, the empire-making spirit, which, in its inception and triumph a sign of national energy, brings with it inevitable national exhaustion. That in the end Egypt survived when Crete died is due to the fact that Egypt, though she was temporarily conquered by the Assyrians, was never overrun in her exhaustion by the virile tribes of the North, who in Greece could settle and survive, while in Egypt, had they ever reached her (as the Cimmerians and Scythians nearly did), they would soon have died out and left even a less lasting mark than did the Hyksos.

Contemporary written evidence of the existence of a Cretan empire in Greece we have none, of course; but the tradition of the thalassocracy of Minos is well borne out by archaeological results.

We have seen that in its earliest days the Aegean culture (reckoning the Cycladic and Cretan civilizations as one) reached the northern ends of the Aegean, and may have penetrated to the Danube valley. By way, too, of the Black Sea its influence may have reached Bessarabia and Southern Russia, and here, in the North, arose a beautiful ceramic art, owing its inspiration to early Aegean models, belonging to a people which never reached the age of metal at all, but seems to have perished out of the land while still stone-using, leaving no heirs. These Mediterraneans, as we believe them to be, had spread too far from their base. They perished of pure inappropriateness to their environment, assisted, perhaps, by the more virile Indo-European tribes, who by this time must have made their way into Europe from Siberia.

In Asia Minor Aegean culture could not make much head­way. The coast-land had its own primitive civilization, akin, no doubt, to that of the Aegean, but distinct from it, with a very different idea of ceramic art, and one which remained uninfluenced by Aegean ideas till near the end of the Bronze Age. The Peloponnese, however, lay open to Aegean influence, and it was here and in Northern Greece that this influence first translated itself, probably, into actual Aegean domination, through the energy of the Cretan thalassocrats. In the Middle Minoan period, the first great age of Knossos and Phaistos, the art of the Cyclades, at first ahead of that of Crete, gradually (approximates more and more to Cretan styles, and actual Cretan works of art begin to be imported. There is no difference, also, between the script of Crete and that of Melos. Cretan domination at this period of the obsidian and marble-yielding islands is probable enough. And thence it spread to the mainland, probably in the Middle Minoan period, when the Cretan civilization suddenly expanded to its full efflorescence.

The antiquities found on the mainland of Greece which, before the Cretan discoveries, we called “Mycenaean”, are the products of the same culture as the “Minoan” antiquities of Crete. Many of them areevidently actual importations from Crete or the Cyclades; most, if they were made in Greece, were made in the Cretan style, while some perhaps show evidence of Cycladic rather than Cretan influence. The most ancient of these objects of Aegean art found in Greece itself are no older than the Third Middle Minoan period. These are sherds found in considerable quantity at Tiryns during the recent German excavations. To “Late Minoan I” belong the contents of the shaft-graves on the Acropolis of Mycenae and of the tholoi or “beehive-tombs” at Kakovatos (Old Pylos) in Messenia; the famous cups of Vaphio also evidently belong to this period. The objects from Kakovatos are of the later period of the First Late Minoan period, when the peculiarly Knossian style which we call the “Second Late Minoan” was just beginning to appear. The newly discovered frescoes of a boar-hunt, from Tiryns, are, again, of the First Late period. It is evident that the foundations of the “Mycenaean” culture which we find in the Peloponnese in the First Late Minoan period must have been laid during the preceding age, and it is to that time, the later Middle Minoan period, that we must ascribe the first Cretan colonies in Greece.

It is probable that at that time the Aegeans had not confined their colonies to the Peloponnese, but had also advanced from the Saronic Gulf and the Euripus into Boeotia, since we find at Orchomenos the famous and splendid “beehive-tomb” called the “Treasury of Minyas”, which is of the same type as the “Treasuries of Atreus and Klytaimnestra” at Mycenae, and the tholoi of Kakovatos. The last are of the First Late Minoan period, and it is to the same age that the Orchomenos tholos may also be assigned, and perhaps those of Mycenae as well. As one goes backwards in the study of Cretan civilization and its beginnings, one finds that architecture, decadent in the “Second Late Minoan” period, improves fast till it reaches its apogee in the Second Middle Minoan period: the better the style of architecture of a building the more it may be held to be older than the Second Late Minoan period, much more may it be held to be older than the Third, the decadent period  of Aegean art. So this criterion, as well as the definite antiquities found at Kakovatos, dates the great beehive-tombs to the First Late Minoan period. And this brings Cretans to Boeotia, as well as to the Peloponnese, in the preceding age; for such a tomb as the “Treasury of Minyas” would not have been built for a prince whose family had not been firmly established in its possession of the land for a considerable period. So splendid a building implies secure possession. Further, ordinary tombs of the Later Minoan period have lately been discovered at Boeotian Thebes.

It may be asked : why should these Cretan monuments and relics not argue, not Cretan invaders and colonizers at all, but merely the peaceful adoption of the creations of the more civilized Cretans by the native Greek prince? Here legend speaks, and tells us with no uncertain voice that the bringers of civilization to Greece came from across the sea. It must be remembered that we know little of any civilization in the Peloponnese before the Aegean culture appeared there in its “First Late Minoan” stage, while in the North, though a native culture existed, it was of low type, and had hardly emerged from the Stone Age. The coming of the Aegeans was in truth the first bringing of civilization to Greece.

Now the chief centres in which the oldest Cretan or Aegean antiquities in Greece have been discovered—Mycenae, Orchomenos, Lakonia, and Pylos—are all connected in legend with the heroic houses who ruled Greece in the days before the Trojan War. And these houses are either descended from foreign immigrants, or owe much of their power to the help of foreigners. These foreigners in one case reach Greece by the Gulf of Nauplia, the most obvious haven for Aegean ships and most obvious place for the earliest landing of Cretan conquerors coming from the Cyclades. Tiryns, the fortress at the head of the Gulf, was built for Proitos by the Kyklopes from Lycia; in them we see the doubles of the wondrous artificers, the Daedalids and Telchines of Crete. To the valley of the Inachos came Io and Epaphos, in whose story we should perhaps, for Egypt, read Crete. On the Saronic Gulf we have a definite tradition of Cretan overlordship, which demanded a yearly tribute of youths and maidens for the bull-demon of Knossos, an overlordship overthrown by the great folk-hero of Athens, Theseus. And when we come to Boeotia, is it not probable that the builders of the great tomb at Orchomenos were the legendary Minyae, who brought civilization to Boeotia, and were the first to drain Lake Kopais by means of the tunnels through the northern hill-wall to the Euripus? The similarity of the name of Minyas, “son of Chryses” the Golden, to the Cretan royal name Minos may, in spite of the difference in quantity, mean a real connexion. Athamas, Phlegyas, and Minyas, the first kings of Orchomenos, may represent the first Cretan princes who settled among the Neolithic Boeotians, and brought Minoan culture into the land. And then the “Phoenician” Cadmeans of Thebes, whose Phoenician origin seems so inexplicable and improbable, may, in spite of the fact that in legend they are often the foes of the Minyae, be in reality Cretans.

In Thessaly we find Minyae at Iolkos, at the head of the Gulf of Volo, another gulf that points southwards towards the Cyclades, and is a probable point for a Minoan landing. The Nelidac of Pylos (Kakovatos) in the Peloponnese, which, as we have seen, was an early centre of Minoan colonization, were said to be Minyae from Iolkos, though they may just as well have come direct from Crete. For in Thessaly the extant Minoan remains are later than at Thebes or Orchomenos. The tholoi of Volo and Dimini seem to be of the Third Late Minoan period, and we have no proof of Minoan connexion before then.

In the Peloponnese, besides Pylos, we find traces of the Minoans in the Eurotas valley in the splendid golden cups from the tomb at Vaphio, which are probably of the First Late Minoan period, judging from their style. And here Leleges (Carians) were said to have lived in early times. The shore of the Gulf of Lakonia is again a probable place for Cretan occupation.

In the Peloponnese the Minoans must have established themselves during the Middle Minoan age ; possibly they reached Boeotia a little later, but as to this we have no evidence. But while in the Peloponnese they probably found an Aegean population akin to themselves, this was by no means the case in Northern Greece. There we have to explain a phenomenon, (recently discovered, which to a great extent bears out the view, (lately published by Prof. Dorpfeld, that there were from the Lfirst two races in Greece, a Southern (the Aegeans or “Karians”, as he calls them), and a Northern, who were the Aryan Achaians of history. Excavations recently carried on in Boeotia and in Thessaly have shewn us that there existed there a race of primitive Neolithic culture, which remained stone-using down to the Third Late Minoan period. Their pottery was peculiar, and in its scheme of ornament quite different from that of the Aegeans. The characteristic curved lines, spirals, and natural forms of the Aegean ceramic decoration are replaced by purely geometric designs unknown at any period to the Aegeans. But at the same time some evidence of Aegean influence is to be seen in them in the shape of clumsy attempts to reproduce spirals, which appear quite out of place and exotic amid their geometric surroundings; and the polychromy which characterises them may be due to imitation of the Cretan polychromy of the Middle Minoan period. In Boeotia there is evidence in a single Cycladic vase, found in a Neolithic grave at Chaironeia, of trade with the Aegeans at the end of the preceding age.

That the Boeotians continued stone-users down to the Third Late Minoan period, as the Thessalians certainly did, seems improbable, in view of the fact that among them the Cretan art and architecture of the grand period had been established during the First Late Minoan age. In this fact we see evidence of Cretan princes (Minyae and Cadmeans?), or at least native chiefs, employing Cretan architects and artists, ruling for a space over more barbarous subjects of a different race. And we see the same thing in Thessaly later on. It was only when in the period of its decadence Cretan art had become generally diffused over the Aegean area, and even at Troy temporarily dispossessed the native Trojan art, that Thessaly became Aegeanized. And this was probably also only for a time. For it seems by no means impossible that the Northern geometric art of the “Dipylon” period, which is usually associated with the invading Achaians or Dorians (more generally with the latter), is the descendant of the earlier geometric art of the Neolithic Thessalians, Phocians, and Boeotians. There is no doubt that the “Geometric” art of Greece is the art of the oldest Aryan Greeks, from the tenth to the eighth centuries, or at any rate as late as the middle of the eighth century. And it seems reasonable to suppose that it was a renascence of the older native art of Northern Greece in the midst of which Cretan art made but a temporary stay, leaving as its chief bequest the technical methods of the Minoan ceramic artists, which were taken on by the “Geometric” potters, while they kept to their own non-Aegean style of ornament.

This view is confirmed by a further discovery in Thessaly. Characteristic of the later period of the Third Late Minoan age, when the degenerate Cretan ceramic had become a sort of zoivri throughout Greece, is the building of palaces in a style quite different from that which had been in vogue during the great Minoan age in Crete. We find them at Mycenae, at Tiryns, and perhaps in Crete, at Agia Triada. These buildings were much simpler in plan than the older Cretan palaces, and in their main arrangements are identical with the typical Achaian chief's house as described in the Homeric poems. They mark a set of ideas in architecture as distinct from those of the Minoan Cretans as do the earlier and later Geometric ceramics of Northern Greece. They are obviously an introduction from the North, to whose colder climate they are suited, while the Cretan palaces are more appropriate to the South. Now, in Thessaly have been found in the chiefs’ houses of the Neolithic people the prototypes of these “Achaian” palaces. The arrangements of these Neolithic Northern houses are the same, on a smaller scale, as those of the “Achaian” palaces of Mycenae, Tiryns, and Crete. In these last the architectural skill handed down from the Minoan culture has been used with effect; that is the sole difference.

We see, then, that in later times, first the North-Greek type of house found among the Neolithic Thessalians, then later the North-Greek style of pottery found among the Neolithic people of the North, was adopted in the South. And this change was contemporary with the partial substitution of burning for inhumation in the disposal of the dead, with the first adoption of iron to replace bronze for weapons and tools, and finally with the coming of the Aryan Greeks into the Aegean and the Peloponnese.

To the introduction of iron (from the Danube-valley) and of cremation we shall return later. At present, we are only concerned to show that the Aryan Greeks who introduced them, and the “geometric” pottery into the South, were probably the descendants of the Neolithic Northern tribes among whom the Minoan culture had been introduced during the Late Minoan age. And this conclusion seems not impossible from the facts adduced above.

The Neolithic Northerners may then have been the ancestors of some of the Hellenes, whom all tradition brings from Thessaly. They were probably Indo-Europeans, with their own undeveloped culture, which the non-Aryan culture of Crete and the Aegean was only able to displace temporarily after many centuries of contact, when it was itself decadent.

The Cretan domination was unable to affect the native culture, at any rate in Thessaly, more than temporarily. It brought the Northerners the knowledge of bronze, and taught them how to build, but the peculiar artistic ideas of the conquered held true, and when the civilization of their conquerors declined, and the conquered in their turn became the conquerors, the Hellenic (Achaian) house came South with the Hellenes or Achaians even to Crete itself, and later on, the Northern Geometric pottery followed.

The end of the Second Late Minoan period is marked by a catastrophe, the destruction of Knossos. The royal palace-city had been destroyed before, and we see from the small provincial towns of Gournia and Pseira, excavated by American explorers, that fire and sword were not uncommonly the fate of Aegean settlements in the Minoan age. But the destruction of Knossos was complete, its site was deserted, and its great art disappeared, to be succeeded by the far inferior productions of the Third Late Minoan age, which were not specifically Cretan, but rather the common property of Greece. This marks the difference between the ceramic styles of the First and Second and the Third Late Minoan periods. That of the earlier period is Cretan, that of the later may be only indirectly of Cretan origin. It appears suddenly when the "Great Palace" ceramic style as suddenly disappears, about 1400 BC. Its motives of decoration arc derived from those of the Cretan potters, but its direct continuity with the Cretan wares is not obvious. There is a gap, though not one of time, between them, and this may be accounted for by supposing that the Third Late Minoan style of pottery is in reality “Mycenaean”, as it used to be called, that it is, in fact, a style that arose in the Peloponnese and the islands, developed on Cretan models by the Minoan conquerors of Continental Greece and the Aegean.

And the coming of this pottery to Crete may tell us who the conquerors were who destroyed Knossos and brought the Minoan empire to an end. They were, it may be, the descendants of those Cretans who had gone forth to colonize Pylos, Mycenae, and Orchomenos, and had sent the yearly tribute of Athenian youth to be sacrificed to the deity of Knossos. And with them marched their subjects, the Achaeans or Danaoi of the North.

Did the Minoans simply submit to their conquerors, or did they seek refuge in another land? The coming of the Cadmeans to Boeotia ought, we think, to be assigned to an earlier period, and the descendants of the Cadmeans probably took part in the destruction of Knossos, The legends of the expedition of Minos to Sicily against Kokalos, King of Kamikos, and his death, of the second expedition to avenge his death, and of the Cretan colonization of Hyria in Italy, may have arisen from a confusion of an actual attempt of the Knossian thalassocrats to wage war in Sicily, and an actual colonization in Italy of dispossessed Minoans after the fall of Knossos. A more definite answer to our question may perhaps be found in the history of the civilization of Cyprus. The Bronze Age culture of Cyprus pursued a path of its own, producing a peculiar style of art, as exemplified in its pottery, related rather to that of Asia Minor than that of the Aegean, till, suddenly, the Cretan culture appears in its midst. And the earliest Cretan art found in Cyprus, as we see it in certain of the remains discovered at Enkomi, Curium, and Hala Sultan Tekke, are of the Second and Third Late Minoan periods, or at any rate of the beginning of the Third. Of the First style (only a century older) but a few examples have been found; of the Middle Minoan a single sherd. With these remains were found Egyptian objects which are of one period only, the end of the XVIIIth Dynasty, that is to say the very time of the destruction of Knossos. Is it too rash to suppose that the Cretan colony in Cyprus, which appears so suddenly at this time, with no previous history behind it, was a colony of fugitives from Crete, who, by virtue of their superior culture, easily and soon won for themselves a dominant position amid the lethargic eastern islanders? These seem to have submitted at once to the conquerors, as we find their pottery placed side by side with that of the newcomers in the same sepulchres.

Henceforward a peculiar form of decadent Minoan culture, a Cyprian version of “Late Minoan III”, lived on in Cyprus, and of it we have splendid relics in the later remains from Enkomi, now, with those of the period of the conquest, in the British Museum. The later vases show an important modification of Minoan traditions in that the human form is constantly depicted on them (in Crete it had never occurred), and their forms shew the strong Northern influence of the later “Third Late Minoan” style in Greece.

The “Third Late Minoan” period must be the period of the political hegemony of the kings of Mycenae and the Argolid in Greece, to which the Homeric poets ascribed the ancient glories of the heroic civilization of Greece. It was they who destroyed Knossos and to whom the sceptre of Minos passed. Whether the poets were right in calling them “Achaians” and “Danaoi” we do not know. Legend brought Pelops, the founder of the house of Agamemnon, from Asia Minor, and it is by no means impossible that some Anatolian invasion may not have established rulers of Anatolian (Hittite) origin in Greece. There is nothing Achaian about the Pelopids. The Homeric poets were themselves Achaians, and may well have made their heroes Achaians. And, as we shall see, it is by no means impossible that the whole poetical description of the Peloponnesian princes as Achaians was a mistake, due to a confusion of the Thessalian Argos, where Achaians certainly lived, with the Peloponnesian Argos. There may never have been any Achaians in the Peloponnese till, much later, the great invasion of the Thesprotian tribes from beyond Pindus, of which Herodotus speaks, drove the Achaians and the later Boeotians and Dorians out of Thessaly, and resulted in the expulsion of the Minyae from Boeotia and the settlement of the Pelasgi in Attica. It was only then that the Achaians possessed themselves of the Peloponnese, and succeeded to the heritage of the older Mycenaean chiefs, to lose it after a short time to the Dorians. The use of the word “Achaians” to describe the Mycenaeans of the Pelopid dynasty is therefore to be deprecated; they may more probably have been Ionians, for the Achaians took the north coast of the Peloponnese from its inhabitants, who were Ionians. And the Ionians were certainly less purely Hellenic in race than the other Greeks, and were probably just such a . mixture of Indo-European (Greek) and Aegean elements as the “Mycenaeans” of the Third Late Minoan period probably I were, a mixture of Achaians (if one likes) with Aegeans, but not pure Achaians.

 

6. The Period of the Invasions

The great Thessalian or Thesprotian invasion, which probably took place in the thirteenth century B.C., and followed that of the Boeotians, had far-reaching effects. By it an overwhelming Aryan and iron-using population was first brought into Greece. The earlier Achaian (?) tribes of Aryans in Thes­saly, who had perhaps lived there from time immemorial, and had probably already infiltrated southwards to form the mixed Ionian population about the Isthmus, were scattered, only a small portion of the nation remaining in its original home, while of the rest part conquered the South and another part emigrated across the sea to the Phrygian coast. Of this emigration to Asia the first event must have been the war of Troy, originally, as we shall see, perhaps an expedition of Thessalian Achaians and Thessalian Argives, not of Peloponnesians at all. The Boeotian and Achaian invasion of the South scattered the Minyae, Pelasgians, and Ionians. The remnant of the Minyae emigrated to Lemnos, the Pelasgi and Ionians were concentrated in Attica and another body of Ionians in the later Achaia, while the Southern Achaeans pressed forward into the Peloponnese. A mixed body of Peloponnesians, Ionians, Kythnians, Arcadians, Ionians, and Laconians took ship across the sea and appeared in the midst of the probably non-Greek Minoan colonists of Cyprus, who had established themselves there some two centuries before. These second colonists from Greece brought with them a Peloponnesian dialect of Greek, which henceforth became the language of the island. With the same movement must be associated the immigration into Pisidia of the Pamphylians, a similar “mixed multitude”, and the colonization of the Aleian plain in Cilicia by Mopsos and his men, who occupied the cities of Mallos and Tarsus.

Further, with the same migration must be associated the great wandering of the Philistines and their allies from Crete, driven out probably by Achaians, who overran Palestine and were finally brought to a stop by Rameses III on the borders of Egypt. The traditional date of the Trojan War, as given by the Parian Chronicle, 1194-1184 BC, accords remarkably with the known date of the war of Rameses III with the Philistines, about 1190 B.C.

The indications of archaeology and of legend agree marvellously well with those of the Egyptian records in making the Third Late Minoan period one of incessant disturbance, very different from the comparative peace of the great Minoan days. The whole basin of the Eastern Mediterranean seems to have been a seething turmoil of migrations, expulsions, wars, and piracies, started first by the Mycenaean (Achaian) conquest of Crete, and then intensified by the constant impulse of the Northern iron-users into Greece. “The Isles were restless : disturbed among themselves”, say the Egyptian chroniclers, who, as we shall see, record at least two distinct attacks upon Egypt by the “Peoples of the Sea” in the thirteenth and twelfth centuries. Some of these tribes, Lukki or Luka (Lycians), the Danuna, who were Greeks, while others, the Shardina and Shakalsha, may have been Italians or from Asia Minor, are already found hovering on the Asiatic coasts and taking service in the wars of Palestine as early as the time of the Tell el-Amarna letters (c. 1370 BC), very shortly after the destruction of Knossos and the Keftian power.

Already the first wave of disturbance had reached the coast of Asia, and the sea-tribes were endeavouring to possess themselves of strongholds on the Palestinian coast from which to carry on their piracies. The Danuna had apparently already succeeded in doing this, and others soon followed. For three centuries these outposts of Greek pirates maintained themselves, and at the end of the XXth Dynasty we find the town of Dor still occupied by the Aegean Tjakarai, whom we shall soon mention.

None of the tribes who made war on Rameses II (c. 1295 B.C.) as subject-allies of the Hittites were Aegeans, all being natives of Asia Minor. The westernmost of them, the Dardenui or Dardanians and the Masa or Mysians, were (if correctly so identified), though dwellers by the Aegean, probably not included within the circle of Aegean civilization, as, owing to the domination  of the Hittites as far as the Aegean, the Minoan culture had never been able to effect any foothold on the coast of Asia Minor. The Luka or Lycians, who had already appeared a century before as sea-rovers, and had then attacked Alashiya and the coast of the Egyptian Delta, were the only seafaring tribe among them, and the only one which was probably affected at all by Aegean influence. But the Akaiwasha who directly attacked Egypt from the sea, in com­pany with Shardina and Shakalsha and another tribe, the Tursha, together with a horde of the restless Libyans, in the reign of Meneptah, were probably Greeks. If we regard the termination of their name as a Mediterranean ethnic suffix akin to the Lycian -azi or -aza, we can fairly regard these Akaiwasha as the first representatives in history of the Achaians. The date of their expedition is about 1230 B.C. This date agrees very well with the probable time of their wanderings after the conquest of Thessaly by the Thesprotians, and we can regard the Akaiwasha ravagers of the Egyptians as a body of Achaian warriors of the same kind as those who laid siege to Troy and founded the colonies of Aeolis at this same period. The Tursha may very well be Tyrsenians, Turs(c)i, whose sea-migration from Asia Minor to Italy is probably to be placed about this time.

The main body of the horde which passed through Asia Minor and Palestine to the borders of Egypt in the reign of Rameses III (c. 1196 BC) seems to have come from Greece. “Their main strength”, says the inscription recording this great event, “was Pulesatha (Pulesti), Tjakarai, Danauna, and Uashasha”. All these tribes were probably Aegeans, and one was certainly, two were probably, of Cretan origin. For the Pulesti were the Philistines, whom both Hebrew and Greek traditions bring from Caphtor (Keftiu) or Crete to Palestine, and, this being certain, the identity of the Uashasha with the Cretan Axians is rendered highly probable, while the possibility that the Tjakarai came from the eastern end of Crete, where the place-name Zakro still exists, is by no means to be dismissed lightly. There are evidently dispossessed Cretans, who migrated both by land and sea from Lycia, probably in alliance with a horde of western Anatolians, perhaps displaced by the Phrygian invasion, which must have taken place about this time, along the Asiatic coast, “no land standing before them, beginning from Kheta and Alashiya”. The western dominion of the Hittites of Khatti bowed before this irresistible storm, while Alashiya, the coast-land of Cilicia (and N. Phoenicia?), fell an easy prey. The aim of the Pulesti and their allies was no doubt to reach the rich land of Palestine, with the coast of which they had been familiar for centuries; and they passed on thither. Rameses III prevented them from going farther, and raiding the Egyptian Delta, which they no doubt also intended to do, though they could never have hoped to settle there permanently. A permanent occupation of Palestine was, however, evidently intended, as they came with women, children, and all their belongings. And they succeeded in effecting their aim: the Egyptians, though they defeated them, could do no more than bring the great migratory mass to a standstill, and left them in occupation of the Shephelah, exacting, perhaps, some sort of I recognition of Egyptian overlordship, to which it is not probable that the Philistines paid very much attention. The transplanted Aegeans imposed a powerful yoke on Canaan, which lasted till, nearly two centuries later, they had become weakened by all the unfavourable conditions of their existence as a foreign garrison in a strange land, and had begun to be absorbed by the conquered Semites. Then the Israelitish tribes, whom at first they had driven into the hills, and whose budding civilization they had destroyed, gathered themselves together into a national kingdom, which forced the foreigners back towards the sea-coast and finally destroyed their separate existence. Three centuries after their first corning the separate nationality of the Philistines had entirely disappeared, and of their language nothing but a few personal names survived in use in Philistia. The parallel to the extinction of the Danish language and nationality of the Northmen in Normandy two hundred years after Rollo’s conquest is curiously exact. So history always repeats itself when conditions are similar.

Of their presence many traces have been found in the shape of Aegean pottery of debased “Late Minoan III” style, such as we should expect to find Cretans using in the twelfth century, chiefly at Tell es-Safi, the ancient Gath, the town of Goliath; and in buildings at Gath and at Gezer. This fact is a conclusive confirmation of the truth of the legend that brings the Philistines from Crete. And with them they brought iron.

 

7. The Iron Age

It is to the Thesprotian invasion, which displaced the Achaians, that, in all probability, the general introduction of iron into Greece is to be assigned. The invaders came ultimately from the Danube region, where iron was probably first used in Europe, whereas their kindred, the Achaians, had possibly already lived in Thessaly in the Stone Age, and derived the knowledge of metal from the Aegeans. The speedy victory of the newcomers over the older Aryan inhabitants of Northern Greece may be ascribed to their possession of iron weapons. But the defeated must soon have acquired the knowledge of the new metal from the conquerors, and it is to the dispersion of the defeated Achaians throughout the Greek world that we must assign the spreading of the use of iron. Even to Crete Northerners, probably Achaians, brought their iron weapons, with the practice of cremation and the “Geometrical” pottery of the North, which we find in Crete (at Mouliana) in graves side by side with bodies buried in pottery coffins (larnakes) and Mycenaean ware of the latest and most debased type. Whether the Achaeans had always burnt their dead we do not know, but whereas they had probably learnt the use of iron from the Illyrian invaders, the “Geometrical” pottery must, if it is the descendant of the older geometric styles of North Greece developed under Late Mycenaean influence, be Achaian, and have, originally, nothing to do with the Illyrian iron-bringers. However this may be, we know that now the Aryan practice of cremation first appears in Southern Greece, with geometric pottery and iron weapons. And that these new features of national civilization are to be associated with the final conquest of Greece by the Aryan Greeks there is no doubt. And that this conquest was largely effected by the southern and eastern movement of the Achaians, driven out of Thessaly by the Illyrian invaders, seems very probable.

The Cretan discovery at Mouliana shows us how for a time bronze and iron were used side by side, while the old Aegean culture was dying. Other explorations in Crete show us that the terrible wars and confusion of this period had almost destroyed the ancient culture of the island. The old Minoan cities, unfenced from the attacks of the destroyers, were abandoned, and the population, terribly reduced by strife and emigration, fled to fortresses in the hills. The shore was abandoned to the pirates, Achaians, Italians, and probably Carians and Lycians (Philistines), who infested the seas, while the Phoenician traders, who now for the first time entered the Greek seas, trafficked, as we know from the Homeric poems, with the barbarized Aegeans and stole them to be sold as slaves in the markets of Sidon and Tyre.

So the Iron Age began, amid the ruins of the old Aegean civilization. Only in Cyprus did the bronze-using Minoan culture still persist a little while longer; the copper of that island would favour the continuance of the Bronze Age there, as in Egypt.

We know something of this time, when iron had not yet displaced the use of bronze, but both were used together, from the older lays of the Iliad. A Chian poet, who bore the name Homeros, seems in the ninth century BC (this is the traditional date for him) to have welded into a magnificent whole poems which had themselves been put together by earlier poets from lays which described a great event in the story of the Achaian colonization of Aeolis, namely the siege of the Phrygian city of Troy or Ilios, by Agamemnon, King of Argos, and the great quarrel between him and his ally Achilleus, King of the Thessalian Myrmidones. We all know the form which the poem took in the hands of the Chian, but it is improbable that the conception that a huge host, drawn from all parts of Hellas, under the leadership of the king of Peloponnesian Argos and Mycenae, marched against Priam, in any way corresponds to the facts or to the statements of the oldest lays. In them the war was doubt­less waged only by the Thessalian Achaians against the Phrygians, who lived on the coast of the Aegean over against them. We have a hint of this in the fact that Argos is called “horse-feeding”. This epithet can only refer to the Thessalian Argos. It was this Argos which Agamemnon really ruled, but in the later days when the poems were put together, the chief centre of Achaian power was, or had but lately been, Peloponnesian Argos, which they had taken from the Ionian (?) Mycenaeans when, driven from Thessaly by the Thesprotians, they entered the Peloponnese. To Asiatic Achaian poets of the ninth century Argos could only mean the great neo-Achaian Argos in the plain of the Inachos, and so the Thessalian Achaian chiefs who warred against Troy in the twelfth century were identified with the neo-Achaian lords who ruled the Peloponnesian Argos and Mycenae from the twelfth to the eleventh, and then the whole traditional dominion of the ancient Cretan-Ionian princes of Mycenae in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries, with their allies from Lakonia, Pylos, and Crete, was brought up in warlike array against Troy beside her original and probably historical enemies, the Thessalian Argeioi. So the ancient glories of Mycenae were appropriated by the Achaians, and the Achaian poets of Asia made the ancient Thessalian heroes of their race lords and kings of all Greece.

The poems probably give us a general idea of Greece as it was from the thirteenth to the tenth centuries: here we see a trait that must belong to the earlier rather than the later time, here is something that bears the impress of later date. In many things the latest poet of all no doubt introduces ideas which belonged to his own time, as in the appearance of Thersites, the first Greek demagogue, meet to be held up to the derision of an aristocratic audience of Achaian chiefs. But in the main the poem which he welded together describes a society older than that which must have existed in the ninth century. Perhaps we cannot say that he consciously archaized : the older songs which he used and put together, and had been put together by his predecessors, described the manners and customs of the old days when they were first sung, the oldest of them probably not very long after the migration. Homer did not translate them into the manners and customs of his own day, though he allows traces of the later ideas of his own time here and there to appear.

We can then say that the Homeric culture is rather that of the Achaians of the twelfth or eleventh than of the ninth century. Bronze is still the usual metal for weapons, but iron is known, and occasionally appears. It is the period when both metals were in use, but bronze was still commoner than iron, and less valuable. The dead are usually burnt in the new fashion, but are also buried (and indeed the older custom always persisted in Greece alongside the newer). The polity of the tribes is entirely of the new age, but is still of the simple Aryan type which has so often been described. Only a few traits, like that of Thersites, shew the influence of the period of final redaction, when the political problems of the new Greece were beginning to make themselves felt. The island of Lesbos is described as still in the possession of a Phrygian population : by the ninth century it must long have been hellenized. Thrace is the land of a rich and civilized prince; we may doubt if this was still the case in the ninth century. The Phoenician traders were no doubt still in evidence then; but it is noticeable that they are called Sidonians, not Tyrians: by the ninth century Tyre had long supplanted Sidon as the chief city of Phoenicia.

The Iliad, and those older parts of the Odyssey that are directly influenced by the more ancient poem, shew us then a Greece that is not yet the Greece of classical days, though this later Greece was already beginning its history when the last Homer sang. A final event had then happened which was to bring about the birth of the new Greece, but of it we find no trace in the poems, the stuff of which belonged to the older day. This was the Dorian invasion, the Return of the Heraklids.

That the later legends give the main story of this event more or less correctly we need not doubt. Its result was the bringing into Southern Greece of a population that was the most Aryan of all the Greek tribes, the most free from Aegean admixture. The Dorians, like the Boeotians, were a tribe that had originally lived in Illyria, and had advanced into the Achaian land before the pressure of the Thesprotians behind them. We can hardly doubt that the impulse to their final southward move­ment was given by the Thesprotians who had taken Thessaly from the Achaians, and that under the name of Dorians were included many tribes of the vigorous Illyrian newcomers. The Dorians properly speaking can only have been a small clan, and were possibly but the leaders of a host of the new inhabitants of the North. That their kings were of Achaian blood is probable enough. That they were at first defeated, in trying to pass the Isthmus, by the Achaian princes of Argolis, and that eventually they gained their purpose by crossing the Gulf of Corinth at Naupaktos (“the place where they made ships”), is no doubt a historical fact. The result we know. The Peloponnese was dorized. Messenia and Argolis exchanged Achaian for Dorian princes, the dispossessed Achaians were driven into the Ionian territory which became the historical Achaia, while in Laconia was established the most definitely Dorian state of all, which enslaved the older population, Achaian as well as Aegean (as the Thessalians had reduced their predecessors to the status of Penestae), and ruled with a rod of iron from the village which they built by the older Achaian capital, Lacedaemon. The peculiar Spartan institution of the double kingship may conceivably represent the dual character of the new nation, Illyrian as well as Dorian-Achaian.

In Northern Greece Boeotia was also dorized, and the Megarid was torn from Attica, from which land the great Ionian migration now carried a crowd of the dispossessed, Achaians no doubt as well as Ionians, to the shores of Asia, where Achaians from Thessaly and Cretans from Crete had already gone a century or more before. The Dorian invasion and Ionian migration may safely be placed in the eleventh century, though it may be doubted whether the conquest of the Peloponnese and establishment of the new Spartan and Argive kingdoms was finally effected till the tenth, and the occupation of Aigina may have taken place still later. The Dorian sea-migration, which took Dorians to Crete, and the Southern Cyclades, and eventually to the new Doris in Asia, can hardly have begun till the ninth century, only a hundred years or less before the beginning of the great colonizing movement from Ionia that proclaimed the dawn of the Greek renascence.

With the Dorian migration the prehistoric and legendary period of Greek history ends. The dawn of the historic period, though not yet the dawn of history, may be seen in the time of the Homeric poets of Asia, who lived at the courts of Aeolis and Ionia, where the remnants of the old Aegean culture which had been brought by the Aeolian and Ionian emigrants were now working with the ruder elements of Aryan Greek culture to form the second civilization of Greece. It was in Aegean Ionia that the torch of Greek civilization was kept alight while the homeland was in a mediaeval condition of comparative barbarism: Cyprus too, helped, though she was too far off for her purer Minoan culture to affect the Aegean peoples very greatly. It was in Ionia that the new Greek civilization arose : Ionia, in whom the old Aegean blood and spirit most survived, taught the new Greece, gave her coined money and letters, art and poesy, and her shipmen, forcing the Phoenicians from before them, carried her new culture to what were then deemed the ends of the earth.