James Baikie

THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS'

In the revival of interest in the origins of Greek civilization it was manifest that Crete could not long be left out of account, for the traditions of Minos and his laws, and of the wonderful works of DÆdalus, pointed clearly to the fact that the great island must have been an early seat of learning and art. Most of these traditions clustered round Knossos, the famous capital of Minos, where once stood the Labyrinth, and near to which was Mount Juktas, the traditional burying-place of Zeus. The remains apparent on the site of the ancient capital were by no means imposing. In 1834 Pashley found that 'all the now existing vestiges of the ancient metropolis of Crete are some rude masses of Roman brick-work'; and Spratt in 1851 saw very little more, mentioning only 'some scattered foundations and a few detached masses of masonry of the Roman time,' though in the time of the Venetian occupation there was evidently more to be seen, as Cornaro speaks of 'a very large quantity of ruins, and in particular a wall, many paces long and very thick.' But expectation still fixed on Knossos as the most probable site for any Cretan discoveries.

A MAGAZINE WITH JARS AND KASELLES, KNOSSOS (p. 69)

The attention of Schliemann and Stillman had been drawn to a hill called 'Kephala,' overlooking the ancient site of Knossos, on which stood ruined walls consisting of great gypsum blocks engraved with curious characters; but attempts at exploration were defeated by the obstacles raised by the native proprietors. In 1878 Minos KalochÆrinos made some slight excavations, and found a few great jars or pithai, and some fragments of MycenÆan pottery; but up to the year 1895, when Dr. A. J. Evans secured a quarter of the Kephala site from one of the joint proprietors, nothing of any real moment had been accomplished. Dr. Evans had been attracted to Crete by the purchase at Athens of some seal-stones found in the island, engraved with hieroglyphic and linear signs differing from Egyptian and Hittite characters. In the hope that he might be led to the discovery of a Cretan system of writing, and relying upon the ancient Cretan tradition that the Phoenicians had not invented letters, but had merely changed the forms of an already existing system, he began in 1894 a series of explorations in Central and Eastern Crete. On all hands more or less important evidence of the existence of such a script came to light, especially from the DictÆan Cave, where a stone libation-altar was found, inscribed with a dedication in the unknown writing. But Dr. Evans was persuaded that Knossos was the spot where exploration was most likely to be rewarded, and his purchase of part of the site of Kephala in 1895 was the beginning of a series of campaigns which have had results not less romantic than those of Schliemann, and even more important in their additions to our knowledge of the prehistoric Ægean civilization.

The political troubles of the time were unfavourable to exploration. Fighting was going on in the island, and religious prejudices ran very high. When the new political order came into being with the appointment of Prince George of Greece as Commissioner, an obstacle was still found in the way in the shape of a French claim to prior rights of excavation. This, however, was finally withdrawn on the advice of Prince George, and in the beginning of 1900 Dr. Evans was at last able to secure the remainder of the site, and on March 23 in that year excavation began, and was carried on with a staff of from 80 to 150 men until the beginning of June.

Almost at once it became apparent that the faith which had fought so persistently for the attainment of its object was going to be rewarded. The remains of walls began to appear, sometimes only a foot or two, sometimes only a few inches below the surface of the soil, and by the end of the nine weeks' campaign of exploration about two acres of a vast prehistoric building had been unearthed—a palace which, even at this early stage in its disclosure, was already far larger than those of Tiryns and MycenÆ. On the eastern slope of the hill, in a deposit of pale clay, were found fragments of the black, hand-made, polished pottery, known as 'bucchero,' characteristic of neolithic sites, some of it, as usual, decorated with incised patterns filled in with white. This pottery was coupled with stone celts and maces, obsidian knives, and a primitive female image of incised and inlaid clay. All over the palace area, as the excavations went farther and farther down, the neolithic deposit was found to overlie the virgin soil, sometimes to a depth of 24 feet, showing that the site had been thickly populated in remote prehistoric times.

But the neolithic deposit was not the most striking find. On the south-west side of the site there came to light a spacious paved court, opening before walls faced with huge blocks of gypsum. At the southern corner of this court stood a portico, which afforded access to this portion of the interior of the palace. The portico had a double door, whose lintel had once been supported by a massive central column of wood. The wall flanking the entrance had been decorated with a fresco, part of which represented that favourite subject of MycenÆan and Minoan art—a great bull; while on the walls of the corridor which led away from the portal were still preserved the lower portions of a procession of life-size painted figures. Conspicuous among these was one figure, probably that of a Queen, dressed in magnificent apparel, while there were also remains of the figures of two youths, wearing gold and silver belts and loin-cloths, one of them bearing a fluted marble vase with a silver base. At the southern angle of the building, this corridor—the 'Corridor of the Procession'—led round to a great southern portico with double columns, and in a passage-way behind this portico there came to light one of the first fairly complete evidences of the outward fashion and appearance of the great prehistoric race which had founded the civilization of Knossos and MycenÆ. This was the fresco-painting, preserved almost perfectly in its upper part, of a youth bearing a gold-mounted silver cup (Plate VI.). His loin-cloth is decorated with a beautiful quatrefoil pattern; he wears a silver ear-ornament, silver rings on the neck and the upper arm, and on the wrist a bracelet with an agate gem.

'The colours,' says Dr. Evans in teat brilliant article in the Monthly Review which first gave to the general public the story of his first season's discoveries, 'were almost as brilliant as when laid down over three thousand years before. For the first time the true portraiture of a man of this mysterious MycenÆan race rises before us. The flesh-tint, following, perhaps, an Egyptian precedent, is of a deep reddish-brown. The limbs are finely moulded, though the waist, as usual in MycenÆan fashions, is tightly drawn in by a silver-mounted girdle, giving great relief to the hips. The profile of the face is pure and almost classically Greek.... The lips are somewhat full, but the physiognomy has certainly no Semitic cast.... There was something very impressive in this vision of brilliant youth and of male beauty, recalled after so long an interval to our upper air from what had been, till yesterday, a forgotten world. Even our untutored Cretan workmen felt the spell and fascination. They, indeed, regarded the discovery of such a painting in the bosom of the earth as nothing less than miraculous, and saw in it the icon of a Saint! The removal of the fresco required a delicate and laborious piece of under-plastering, which necessitated its being watched at night, and old Manolis, one of the most trustworthy of our gang, was told off for the purpose. Somehow or other he fell asleep, but the wrathful saint appeared to him in a dream. Waking with a start, he was conscious of a mysterious presence; the animals round began to low and neigh, and "there were visions about"; "φανταζε&iota," he said, in summing up his experiences next morning, "the whole place spooks!"'[*]

[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, pp. 124, 125.]

The Southern Portico gave access to a large court which turned out, from later investigation, to have been really the Central Court of the palace, the focus of the life of the whole huge building. The block of building between the West and the Central Courts was divided into two by a long gallery (Plate VII.), 3.40 metres in breadth, running almost the whole length of the structure, and paved with gypsum blocks. Between this gallery and the western wall of the palace lay a long range of what had evidently been magazines for the storage of oil, and perhaps of corn. They were occupied by rows of huge earthenware jars, or pithoi, sufficiently large to have held the Forty Thieves, or to have accommodated the soldiers of Tahuti in their venture on Joppa (Plates VIII. and IX.). In one of the magazines no fewer than twenty of these jars were found. They were all ornamented, some of them very elaborately, with spiral and rope-work patterns; one of them, found, not in a magazine, but in a small room near the Central Court, was particularly elaborate in its adornment, and stood almost five feet in height (Plate X. 2). Down the centre line of each magazine ran a row of small square openings in the floor—'kaselles,' as they came to be called—which at one time had evidently been receptacles, some of them, perhaps, for oil, but some of them certainly for valuables. They were carefully lined with lead, and in some cases the slabs of stone covering them could not be removed without lifting the whole pavement. In spite of such precautions, however, they had been well rifled in ancient days, and little was left to tell of what their contents may once have been. The magazines were well fitted to convey a strong impression, not only of the size, but also of the splendour of the palace which needed such storerooms. There was no meanness or squalor about the domestic offices of the House of Minos. The doorways leading into the magazines from the Long Corridor were of fine stone-work, and the side-walls, both of the gallery and the magazines, had been covered with painted plaster, presenting a white ground on which ran a dado of horizontal bands of red and blue, further bands of the same colours forming a frieze below the ceiling level. This, of course, had been merely the basement of the palace, and had been surmounted by another storey or storeys, of which nothing was left except fragments of the painted plaster which had once decorated the walls.

To the rooms composing the block of building between the Long Gallery and the Central Court, access had been given from the latter area; and it was in these rooms that, as the excavations progressed, some of the most remarkable features of the palace began to disclose themselves. About halfway along the court were found two small rooms, connected with one another, in the centre of each of which stood a single column composed of four gypsum blocks, each block marked with the sign of the Double Axe; and these pillars suggested a connection with ancient traditions about Minos and his works (Plate XI.). They were apparently sacred emblems connected with the worship of a divinity, and the Double Axe markings pointed to the divinity in question. For the special emblem of the Cretan Zeus (and also apparently of the female divinity of whom Zeus was the successor) was the Double Axe, a weapon of which numerous votive specimens in bronze have been found in the cave-sanctuary of Dicte, the fabled birthplace of the god. And the name of the Double Axe is Labrys—a word found also in the title of the Carian Zeus, Zeus of Labraunda. But tradition linked the names of Minos and Knossos with a great and wonderful structure of DÆdalus which went by the name of the Labyrinth; and the coincidence between that name and the Labrys marks on the sacred pillars and on many of the blocks in the palace at once suggested that here was the source of the old tradition, and here the actual building, the Labyrinth, which DÆdalus reared for his great master. 'There can be little remaining doubt,' says Dr. Evans, 'that this vast edifice, which in a broad historic sense we are justified in calling the "Palace of Minos," is one and the same as the traditional "Labyrinth." A great part of the ground-plan itself, with its long corridors and repeated successions of blind galleries, its tortuous passages and spacious underground conduit, its bewildering system of small chambers, does, in fact, present many of the characteristics of a maze.'[*] The connection thus suggested even by the first year's excavations has grown more and more probable with the work of each successive season.

[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, p. 131.]

Passing farther north along the line of the Central Court, access was given by a row of four steps to an ante-chamber, which opened upon another room, of no great size in itself, but of surpassing interest from the character of its appointments. 'Already, a few inches below the surface, freshly preserved fresco began to appear. Walls were shortly uncovered, decorated with flowering plants and running water, while on each side of the doorway of a small inner room, stood guardian griffins with peacock's plumes in the same flowery landscape. Round the walls ran low stone benches, and between these, on the north side, separated by a small interval, and raised on a stone base, rose a gypsum throne with a high back, and originally covered with decorative designs. Its lower part was adorned with a curiously carved arch, with crocketed mouldings, showing an extraordinary anticipation of some most characteristic features of Gothic architecture. Opposite the throne was a finely wrought tank of gypsum slabs—a feature borrowed perhaps from an Egyptian palace—approached by a descending flight of steps, and originally surmounted by cypress-wood columns, supporting a kind of impluvium. Here truly was the council chamber of a MycenÆan King or Sovereign Lady.'[*] The discovery of the very throne of Minos, for such we may fairly term it, was surely the most dramatic and fitting recompense for the explorer's patience and persistence. No more ancient throne exists in Europe, or probably in the world, and none whose associations are anything like so full of interest (Plate I.).

[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, pp. 123, 124.]

The Throne Room still preserved among its dÉbris many relics of former splendour. Fragments of blue and green porcelain, of gold-foil, and lapis lazuli and crystal, were scattered on the floor, and several crystal plaques with painting on the back, among them an exceedingly fine miniature of a galloping bull on an azure ground; while an agate plaque, bearing a relief of a dagger laid upon a folded belt, almost equalled cameo-work in the style and delicacy of its execution. In a small room on the north side of the Central Court was found a curiously quaint and delicate specimen of early fresco painting—the figure of a Little Boy Blue—more thoroughly deserving of the title than Gainsborough's famous picture, for, strangely enough, he is blue in his flesh-tints, picking and placing in a vase the white crocuses that still dapple the Cretan meadows.

The northern side of the palace was finished with another portico, and in this part of the building there came to light a series of miniature frescoes, valuable, not only as works of art, but as contemporary documents for the appearance, dress, and surroundings of the mysterious people to whom this great building was once home. Here were groups of ladies with the conventional white complexion given by the Minoan artists to their womankind, wonderfully bedizened with costumes resembling far more closely the evening dress of our own day than the stately robes of classic Greece with their severe lines. In their very low-necked dresses, with puffed sleeves, excessively slender waists, and flounced skirts, and their hair elaborately dressed and curled, they were as far as possible removed from our ideas of Ariadne and her maids of honour, and might almost have stepped out of a modern fashion-plate. 'Mais,' exclaimed a French savant, on his first view of them, 'Mais ce sont des Parisiennes.' These fine Court ladies were seated, or perhaps rather squatted, according to the curious Minoan custom, in groups, conversing in the courts and gardens, and on the balconies of a splendid building. In the spaces beyond were groups of men, of the same reddish-brown complexion as the Cup-bearer, wearing loin-cloths and footgear with puttees halfway up the leg, their long black hair done up into a crest on the crown of the head. In one group alone thirty men appear close to a fortified post; in another, youths are hurling javelins against a besieged city. 'The alternating succession of subjects in these miniature frescoes suggests the contrasted episodes of Achilles' shield. It may be that we have here parts of a continuous historic piece; in any case these unique illustrations of great crowds of men and women within the walls of towns and palaces supply a new and striking commentary on the familiar passage of Homer describing the ancient populousness of the Cretan cities.'[*] Only the wonderful tomb paintings of ancient Egypt can excel these vivid miniatures in bringing before us the life of a bygone civilization; nothing else to approach them has come down from antiquity.

[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, p. 126.]

The main entrance of the palace seemingly lay on the north side, where the road from the harbour, three and a half miles distant, ran up to the gates. Here was the one and only trace of fortification discovered in all the excavations. The entrance passage was a stone gangway, on the north-west side of which stood a great bastion, with a guard room and sally-port—a slender apology for defence in the case of a prize so vast and tempting as the Palace of Knossos. Obviously the bastion, with its trifling accommodation for an insignificant guard, was never meant to defend the palace against numerous assailants, or a set siege; it could only have been sufficient to protect it against the sudden raid of a handful of pirates sweeping up from the port (Plate XII. 2). How was it that so great and rich a structure came to be left thus practically defenceless? The mainland palaces of the MycenÆan Age at Tiryns and MycenÆ are, so to speak, buried in fortifications. Their vast walls, 57 feet thick in some parts at Tiryns, 46 feet at MycenÆ, towering still after so many centuries of ruin to a height of 24½ feet in the case of the smaller citadel, and of 56 feet at the great stronghold of Agamemnon; their massive gateways, and the ingenious devices by which the assailant was obliged to subject himself in his approach to a destructive fire on his unshielded side—everything about them points to a land and a time in which life and property were continually exposed to the dangers of war, and the only security was to be found within the gates of an impregnable stronghold. But Knossos, far richer, far more splendid, than either Tiryns or MycenÆ, lies virtually unguarded, its spacious courts and pillared porticoes open on every side. Plainly, the Minoan Kings lived in a land where peace was the rule, and where no enemy was expected to break rudely in upon their luxurious calm. And the reason for their confidence and security is not far to seek, if we remember the statements of Thucydides and Herodotus.

'The first King known to us by tradition as having established a navy is Minos,' says the great Athenian historian. The Minoan Empire, like our own, rested upon sea-power; its great Kings were the Sea-Kings of the ancient world—the first Sea-Kings known to history, over-lords of the Ægean long before 'the grave Tyrian trader' had learned 'the way of a ship in the sea,' or the land-loving Egyptian had ventured his timid squadrons at the command of a great Queen so far as Punt. And so the fortifications of their capital and palace were not of the huge gypsum blocks which they knew so well how to handle and work. They were the wooden walls, the long low black galleys with the vermilion bows, and the square sail, and the creeping rows of oars, that lay moored or beached at the mouth of the Kairatos River, or cruised around the island coast, keeping the Minoan peace of the Ægean. So long as the war-fleet of Minos was in being, Knossos needed no fortifications. No expedition of any size could force a landing on the island. If the crew of a chance pirate-galley, desperate with hunger, or tempted by reports of the wealth of the great palace, succeeded in eluding the vigilance of the Minoan cruisers, and made a swift rush up from the coast, there was the bastion with its armed guard, enough to deal with the handful of men who could be detached for such a dare-devil enterprise. But in the fleet of Knossos was her fate; and if once the fleet failed, she had no second line of defence on which to rely against any serious attack. There is every evidence that the fleet did fail at last. The manifest marks of a vast conflagration, perhaps repeated more than once during the long history of the palace, and the significant fact that vessels of metal are next to unknown upon the site, while of gold there is scarcely a trace, with the exception of scattered pieces of gold-foil, appear to indicate either that the Minoan Sovereigns failed to maintain the weapon which had made and guarded their Empire, or that the Minoan sailors met at last with a stronger fleet, or more skilful mariners. Sea-power was lost, and with it everything.

Near the main north entrance of the palace was found one of the great artistic treasures of the season's work. This was a plaster relief of a great bull's head, which had once formed part of a complete figure. These figures of bulls, as we have already seen in connection with the Palace of Tiryns, were among the most favourite subjects of MycenÆan and Minoan art; but nothing so fine as the Knossos relief had yet been discovered. 'It is life-sized, or somewhat over, and modelled in high relief. The eye has an extraordinary prominence, its pupil is yellow, and the iris a bright red, of which narrower bands again appear encircling the white towards the lower circumference of the ball. The horn is of greyish-blue, and both this and the other parts of the relief are of exceptionally hard plaster, answering to the Italian gesso duro.... Such as it is, this painted relief is the most magnificent monument of MycenÆan plastic art that has come down to our time. The rendering of the bull, for which the artists of the period showed so great a predilection, is full of life and spirit. It combines in a high degree naturalism with grandeur, and it is no exaggeration to say that no figure of a bull, at once so powerful and so true, was produced by later classical art.'[*] Plate XIII. shows that this high praise is not undeserved; to match the naturalism of this magnificent Minoan monster one must turn to the Old Kingdom tomb reliefs of Egypt, or to the exquisite Eighteenth Dynasty statue of a cow unearthed in 1906 by Naville from the Temple of Mentuhotep Neb-hapet-Ra, at Deir-el-Bahri.

[Footnote *: Annual of the British School at Athens, vol. vi., p. 52.]

But the discovery which will doubtless prove in the end to be of greater importance than any other, though as yet the main part of its value is latent, was that of large numbers of clay tablets incised with inscriptions in the unknown script of the Minoans. By the end of March the finding of one tablet near the South Portico gave earnest of future discoveries, and before the season ended over a thousand had been collected from various deposits in the palace. Of these deposits, one contained tablets written in hieroglyphic; but the rest were in the linear script, 'a highly developed form, with regular divisions between the words, and for elegance scarcely surpassed by any later form of writing.' The tablets vary in shape and size, some being flat, elongated bars from two to seven and a half inches in length, while others are squarer, ranging up to small octavo. Some of them, along with the linear writing, supply illustrations of the objects to which the inscriptions refer. There are human figures, chariots and horses, cuirasses and axes, houses and barns, and ingots followed by a balance, and accompanied by numerals which probably indicate their value in Minoan talents. It looks as though these were documents referring to the royal arsenals and treasuries. 'Other documents, in which neither ciphers nor pictorial illustrations are to be found, may appeal even more deeply to the imagination. The analogy of the more or less contemporary tablets, written in cuneiform script, found in the Palace of Tell-el-Amarna, might lead us to expect among them the letters from distant governors or diplomatic correspondence. It is probable that some of them are contracts or public acts, which may give some actual formulÆ of Minoan legislation. There is, indeed, an atmosphere of legal nicety, worthy of the House of Minos, in the way in which these records were secured. The knots of string which, according to the ancient fashion, stood in the place of locks for the coffers containing the tablets, were rendered inviolable by the attachment of clay seals, impressed with the finely engraved signets, the types of which represented a great variety of subjects, such as ships, chariots, religious scenes, lions, bulls, and other animals. But—as if this precaution was not in itself considered sufficient—while the clay was still wet the face of the seal was countermarked by a controlling official, and the back countersigned and endorsed by an inscription in the same MycenÆan script as that inscribed on the tablets themselves.'[*]

[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, pp. 129, 130.]

The tablets had been stored in coffers of wood, clay, or gypsum. The wooden coffers had perished in the great conflagration which destroyed the palace, and only their charred fragments remained; but the destroying fire had probably contributed to the preservation of the precious writings within, by baking more thoroughly the clay of which they were composed. As yet, in spite of all efforts, it has not proved possible to decipher the inscriptions, for there has so far been no such good fortune as the discovery of a bilingual inscription to do for Minoan what the Rosetta Stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphics. But it is not beyond the bounds of probability that there may yet come to light some treaty between Crete and Egypt which may put the key into the eager searcher's hands, and enable us to read the original records of this long-forgotten kingdom (Plate XIV.).

Even as it is, the discovery of these tablets has altered the whole conception of the relative ages of the various early beginnings of writing in the Eastern Mediterranean area. The Hellenic script is seen to have been in all likelihood no late-born child of the Phoenician, but to have had an ancestor of its own race; and the old Cretan tradition on which Dr. Evans relied at the commencement of his work, has proved to be amply justified. 'In any case,' said Dr. Evans, summing up his first year's results, 'the weighty question, which years before I had set myself to solve on Cretan soil, has found, so far at least, an answer. That great early civilization was not dumb, and the written records of the Hellenic world were carried back some seven centuries beyond the date of the first-known historic writings. But what, perhaps, is even more remarkable than this, is that, when we examine in detail the linear script of these MycenÆan documents, it is impossible not to recognize that we have here a system of writing, syllabic and perhaps partly alphabetic, which stands on a distinctly higher level of development than the hieroglyphs of Egypt, or the cuneiform script of contemporary Syria and Babylonia. It is not till some five centuries later that we find the first dated examples of Phoenician writing.'[*]

[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, p. 130.]

Among the other finds of this wonderful season's work were several stone vases, of masterly workmanship, in marble, alabaster, and steatite, a few vases in pottery of the stirrup type (a type common on other MycenÆan sites, but noticeably rare at Knossos, probably because in the great palace the bulk of such vases were of metal, and were carried off by plunderers in the sack), and a noble head of a lioness, with eyes and nostrils inlaid, which had evidently once formed part of a fountain. One other discovery was most precious, not for its own artistic value, which is slight enough, but for the link which it gives with one of the other great sister civilizations of the ancient world. This was the lower part of a small diorite statuette of Egyptian workmanship, with an inscription in hieroglyphic which reads: 'Ab-nub-mes-Sebek-user maat-kheru' (Ab-nub's child, Sebek-user, deceased). The name of the individual and the style of the statuette point to Sebek-user, whoever he may have been, having been an Egyptian of the latter days of the Middle Kingdom, probably about the Thirteenth Dynasty. This is the first link in the chain of evidence, which, as we shall see later, shows the continuous connection between the Minoan and Nilotic civilizations.

Nine weeks after the excavations on the hill of Kephala had begun, the season's work was closed, and, surely, never had a like period of time been more fruitful of fresh knowledge, more illuminative as to the conditions of ancient life, or more destructive of hoary prejudices. It was a new world, new because of its very ancientry, that had begun to rise out of the buried past at the summons of the patient explorer.