LETTERS AND RELIGION

Of all the discoveries yet made on Cretan soil, that which, in the end, will doubtless prove to be of the greatest importance is the discovery of the various systems of writing which the Minoans successively devised and used. As yet knowledge with regard to these systems has not advanced beyond the description of the materials and their comparison with those furnished by other scripts, a task which has so far been accomplished by Dr. Evans in the first volume of his 'Scripta Minoa.' An immense amount of material has been accumulated, and has been separated into various classes, which have been shown to be characteristic of different periods of Minoan history. It is possible to arrive at a general understanding of the matters to which certain items of the material refer, but the actual reading of the inscribed tablets has as yet proved to be impossible. To all appearance, moreover, a considerable proportion of the material appears to be not literary, in any true sense, but to consist of inventories and accounts, perhaps also of legal documents and other such records of purely business and practical interest. Even so it would be a matter of no small importance could it be found possible to decipher the records, let us say, of the War Office or Admiralty of Knossos, or to survey the details of royal house-keeping in those far-off days; and it may still be hoped that, when the ardently desired bilingual inscription at last turns up and makes decipherment possible, we may find that documents of more genuinely literary interest are not altogether lacking. One thing at least is abundantly clear—that, as Dr. Evans put it in the summary of his first year's results, 'that great early civilization was not dumb,' but, on the contrary, had means of expression amply adequate to its needs.

In 1894 M. Perrot wrote:[*] 'As at present advised, we can continue to affirm that for the whole of this period, nowhere, neither in the Peloponnese nor in Greece proper, no more on the buildings than on the thousand and one objects of luxury or domestic use that have come out of the tombs, has there anything been discovered which resembled any kind of writing.' The statement was perfectly true to the facts as then known; but it was obviously unthinkable that, while the Egyptians and Babylonians had their fully developed scripts, and while ruder races, such as the Hittites, had their systems of writing, the men who built the splendid walls and palaces of Tiryns and MycenÆ, and wrought the diadems and decorations of the Shaft-Graves, should have been so far back in one of the chiefest essentials of human progress as to be unable to communicate with one another by means of writing. We have already seen how the discoveries of the first year's work at Knossos settled that question for ever, and revealed the existence of more than one form of writing. Since then the material has been rapidly accumulating, and at present the number of objects—tablets, labels, and other articles-inscribed with the various Cretan scripts can be counted by thousands.

[Footnote *: Perrot et Chipiez, 'La GrÈce primitive: l'Art mycÉnien,' p. 985.]

The earliest form of Minoan writing that can be traced consists of rude pictographic symbols engraved upon bead-seals and gems. This primitive pictographic writing is characteristic of the Early Minoan period, and throughout the succeeding period of Middle Minoan it was gradually developed into a hieroglyphic system which is believed to present some analogies to the Hittite form of writing. But in the latest phases of the Third Middle Minoan period there begins to appear, at Knossos and elsewhere, a series of inscriptions in a very different style. The characters are no longer hieroglyphic, but have become definitely linear, and are arranged very much as in ordinary writing. In general they are incised upon the clay tablets of which so many hundreds have been found, but there are several instances in which they have been written with ink, apparently with a reed pen, as in the case of the two Middle Minoan III. cups found at Knossos, which bear linear inscriptions executed before the clay was fired. While in the case of the hieroglyphic inscriptions the characters run indifferently from left to right, or from right to left, in this linear script their fixed direction is the usual one, from left to right. Suffixes were apparently used to indicate gender, and pictorial signs indicating the contents of the document are also in use, though more sparingly than they came to be in the later form of script. Such signs as occur seem to show that the documents in which they are found mainly related to matters of business. The saffron-flower, various vessels, tripods, and balances, probably for the weighing of precious metals, occur most frequently among these determinatives.

At Knossos this form of linear writing, Dr. Evans's Class A, appears to have had a comparatively short vogue. Documents belonging to it are only found in the particular stratum which is connected with Middle Minoan III., and are to be dated, according to Dr. Evans's latest revision of the chronology, not later than 1600 B.C., the period at which Middle Minoan III. closes. In the Late Minoan periods which follow, the linear script of Class A is superseded at Knossos by another form, Class B. In other parts of the island, however, Class A seems to have survived as a general form of writing much longer than at Knossos. At Hagia Triada the very large deposits of linear writing—larger, indeed, than the representation of Class A at Knossos—belong to the First Late Minoan period, and are contemporary with the wonderful work of the steatite vases and the fresco of the hunting-cat; while at PhÆstos the final catastrophe of the palace took place at a time when the linear writing of Class A was still in full use. At Zakro, Palaikastro, Gournia, and elsewhere, examples of this script have been found, showing that it was prevalent, at all events, throughout Central and Eastern Crete; and in all cases it is associated with remains which belong to the close of Middle Minoan III. and the beginnings of the Late Minoan period. But it would appear that this form of writing was not confined to Crete, but was more widely diffused. Traces of it, or of a script very closely allied with it, have been found at Thera, while at Phylakopi in Melos evidence has come to light of a whole series of marks closely corresponding to the Cretan Class A. This would seem to suggest what in itself is entirely probable, that the language used in Minoan Crete was predominant, or at all events was understood and largely used, throughout the Ægean area. The inscription on the libation table found by Dr. Evans at the DictÆan Cave belongs to this class, and also that upon the similar object found by Mr. Currelly at Palaikastro.

When, at the beginning of the Late Minoan period, the Palace of Knossos was remodelled, another great change accompanied the architectural one. This was the entire supersession of the linear script, Class A, by another similar but independent form, which has been named Class B. Somewhat remarkably, although the specimens of the script discovered at the Palace of Knossos and its immediate dependencies are far more numerous than those of Class A, the use of Class B seems, so far as the evidence yet collected goes, to have been entirely confined to Knossos. The beginning of the use of this system may have been in the early part of the fifteenth century B.C., and it was in full service at the great catastrophe of Knossos, at the end of the fifteenth or beginning of the fourteenth century B.C. Its use still continued after the fall of the Minoan power, tablets inscribed with this form of writing being found in the Late Minoan III. House of the Fetish Shrine at Knossos. According to Dr. Evans, whose 'Scripta Minoa' sums up all that is at present known of these enigmatic Cretan writings, Class B is not a mere outgrowth of Class A. The scripts are certainly allied, and there are indications that B is the more highly developed of the two, having a smaller selection of characters and a less complicated system of compound signs; but at the same time several of the signs found in B do not occur in A at all, and some of those which belong to both scripts are found in a more primitive form in B. The language expressed in both scripts must, however, have been essentially the same. It is suggested, therefore, that in the supersession of Class A by Class B we have another indication of the dynastic revolution which is supposed to have caused that ruin of the palace which closed the Middle Minoan period.

The records of Class B give evidence of a very considerable advance in the art of writing. 'The characters themselves have a European aspect. They are of upright habit, and of a simple and definite outline, which throws into sharp relief the cumbrous and obscure cuneiform system of Babylonia. Although not so cursive in form as the Hieratic or Demotic types of Egyptian writing, there is here a much more limited selection of types. It would seem that the characters stood for syllables or even letters, though they could in most cases also be used as words.... The spaces and lines between the words, the espacement into distinct paragraphs, and the variation in the size of the characters on the same tablet, according to the relative importance of the text, show a striving after clearness and method such as can by no means be said to be a characteristic of Classical Greek inscriptions.'[*] A decimal system of numbers was in use, the highest single amount referred to being 19,000, and percentages were evidently well understood, as a whole series of tablets is devoted to them.

[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' pp. 39, 40.]

The tablets themselves were originally of unburnt, but sun-dried, clay, and their preservation, as we have seen, is probably due to the excessive heat to which they were exposed during the great fire which destroyed the palace. 'Fire itself, so fatal to other libraries, has thus insured the preservation of the archives of Minoan Knossos.' Great care was plainly bestowed upon the storage of the tablets. They were stored in chests and coffers of various materials, and were evidently carefully separated according to the different departments to which their contents referred. In one deposit near the northern entrance, which was the 'Sea-Gate' of the palace, the largest of the seatings which had secured the cases in which the tablets were stored bore a representation of a ship, possibly an indication of the fact that these tablets belonged to the Minoan Board of Admiralty. One set of tablets had been stored in a room which presents all the appearance of having been an office, and the frequent occurrence in this deposit of the figures of a horse's head, a chariot, and a cuirass, suggests that the store belonged to the Minoan War Office, and refers to the equipment of the Chariot Brigade of the Knossian army.

Further evidence of the business-like methods of the Minoan officials was given by the fact that many of the seals belonging to the various stores were countermarked on the face, and had their backs countersigned and endorsed, evidently by examining officials, while they appear to have been regularly filed and docketed for reference. Indeed, the Minoan methods have already borne the test of having been accepted as evidence in a modern court of law. 'In 1901,' says Dr. Evans, 'I discovered that certain tablets had been abstracted from the excavations, and had shortly afterwards been purchased by the museum at Athens. It further appeared that one of our workmen—a certain Aristides—had left the excavation about the same time for Greece, and had been seen in Athens offering "antikas" for sale under suspicious circumstances. On examining the inscriptions on the stolen tablets I observed a formula that showed that some or all of the pieces belonged to a deposit found in Magazine XV. A reference to our daybooks brought out the fact that the same Aristides had taken part in the excavation of this particular magazine a little before the date of his hasty departure. On his return to Crete, some months later, he was accordingly arrested, and the evidence supplied by the Minoan formula was accepted by the Candia Tribunal as a crowning proof of his guilt. Aristides—"the Unjust"—was thus condemned to three months' imprisonment.' Few criminals attain to the dignity of being convicted on evidence 3,500 years old.

Certain of the tablets contain lists of persons of both sexes, apparently denoted by their personal names, the signs which appear to stand for the name being followed in each case by an ideograph which is the determinative of 'man,' or 'woman,' as the case may be. It is, of course, impossible to say as yet to what rank or class the people thus catalogued may have belonged; but the conjecture may be hazarded that these lists may be the major-domo's records of the male and female slaves of the household, or perhaps of the artisans who appear to have dwelt within the precincts of the palace. Another type of record is given by tablets such as that represented in Plate XIV. The tablet contains eight lines of well-written inscription, and consists apparently of twenty words, divided into three paragraphs. In this case there are no determinatives and no numerals; and it is possible that the document may be a contract, or perhaps an official proclamation.

That such tablets were not the only form in which the Minoans executed the writing of their various documents is evident from the fact already noticed, that inscriptions have been found executed with a reed-pen, and, though those extant are written on clay vessels, it is obvious that the reed-pen was not a very suitable instrument for writing on such materials, and that its existence presupposes some substance more adapted to the cursive writing of a pen—parchment, possibly, or papyrus, which could be readily obtained from Egypt. Unfortunately, such materials, on which, in all probability, the real literary documents of the Minoans, if there were any such documents, would be written, can scarcely have survived the fire which destroyed the palace, or, if by any chance they escaped that, the subsequent action of the climate; so that whatever genuinely literary fragments may yet come to light must be looked for on the larger tablets, and at the best can scarcely be more than brief extracts. We cannot expect from Crete a wealth of papyri such as Egypt has preserved for the archÆologist.

Into quite a different category from any of the ordinary Minoan tablets comes the disc found at PhÆstos in 1908. Its general character has been already described. The long inscription which covers both of its faces is written in a form of hieroglyphics which, to some extent, resembles the Minoan pictographic system, but is not the same. The crested helmets which occur frequently as signs, the round shields, the fashion of dress of both men and women, and the style of architecture depicted in the hieroglyphic rendering of a house or pagoda, are not Minoan; and, on the whole, the evidence seems to point to the disc being the product of some allied culture, perhaps Lycian, in which a language closely akin to that of Minoan Crete was used. The inscription on the disc is carefully balanced and arranged, and each side contains exactly the same number of sign-groups, with one additional group on face A, which is separated from the preceding part of the inscription by a dash. Certain sets of sign-groups recur in the same order, as though they constituted some kind of refrain. From these indications it has been suggested that the whole inscription is a metrical composition, a short poem or hymn—perhaps one leaf of an Anatolian Book of Psalms whose other pages have perished. It is agreed that the language and religion of the western coast of Asia Minor were closely allied to those of Crete, and it is possible that when the Minoans developed their own language on somewhat different lines from the mainlanders, they maintained in parts of their religious service the old form of the speech common to themselves and their Anatolian relatives, as a kind of sacred language.[*]

[Footnote *: See Appendix, p. 264.]

Thus, it is abundantly evident that the civilization of Minoan Crete, far from being dumb, had varied and perfectly adequate means of expressing itself. The old Cretan tradition that the Phoenicians did not invent the letters of the alphabet, but only changed those already existing, is amply justified; for this seems to have been precisely what they did. The Phoenician mind, if not original, was at all events practical. The great stumbling-block in the way of the ancient scripts was their complexity—a fault which the Minoan users of the Linear Script, Class B, had evidently already begun to recognize and endeavour to amend. What the Phoenicians did was to carry the process of simplification farther still, and to appropriate for their own use out of the elements already existing around them a conveniently short and simple system of signs. The position which they came to occupy, after the Minoan empire of the sea had passed away, as the great carriers and middlemen of the Mediterranean, gave their system a spread and a utility possible to no other system of writing; and so the Phoenician alphabet gradually came to take its place as the basis of all subsequent scripts. Unquestionably it was a great and important service which was thus rendered by them; but, all the same, the beginnings of European writing must be traced not to them, but to their predecessors the Minoans, and the clay tablets of Knossos, PhÆstos, and Hagia Triada are the lineal ancestors of all the written literature of Europe.

In attempting to deal with the Minoan religion we are met by the fact that it is as yet quite impossible to present any connected view of the subject. As in the case of their literature we have the actual records but cannot read them, so in the case of their religion a considerable mass of facts is apparent, but we have no means of co-ordinating them so as to arrive at any definite idea of a religious system. Some of the ritual we can see, and even understand something of the Divinity to whom it was addressed, but the theology is lacking. Accordingly, nothing more can be done than to present the fragmentary facts which are apparent.

The Minoans, it seems fairly clear, were never, like their successors the Greeks, the possessors of a well-peopled Pantheon; nor was the chief object of their adoration a male deity like the Greek Zeus. There are, indeed, traces of a male divinity, who was adopted by the Greeks when they obtained predominance in the island, as the representative of their own supreme deity, and who became the Cretan Zeus. But in Minoan times this being occupied a very subordinate place, and undoubtedly the chief object of worship was a goddess—a Nature Goddess, a Great Mother— ποτνια θηρων, the Lady of the Wild Creatures—who was the source of all life, higher and lower, its guardian during the period of its earthly existence, and its ruler in the underworld.

The functions of this great deity, it has been aptly pointed out, are substantially those claimed for herself by Artemis in Browning's poem, 'Artemis Prologizes':

'Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along;
I shed in hell o'er my pale people peace;
On earth, I, caring for the creatures, guard
Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek,
And every feathered mother's callow brood,
And all that love green haunts and loneliness.'

She was a goddess alike of the air, the earth, and the underworld, and representations of her have survived in which her various attributes are expressed. As goddess of the air, she is represented by a female figure crowned with doves; as goddess of the underworld, her emblems are the snakes, which we see twined round the faÏence figure at Knossos, or the terra-cotta in the Gournia shrine. Her figure is often seen upon seals and gems, standing on the top of the rock or mountain, with guardian lions in attendance, one on either side, and sometimes with a male votary in the background.

The earliest form of her worship, and one which proved very persistent, was apparently aniconic. The divinity was not embodied in any graven image, but was inherent in such objects as the rude natural concretions found in the House of the Fetish Shrine, or was supposed to dwell in sacred trees, on which sometimes perch the doves which indicate that the goddess is present as ruler of the air, or which are twined with serpents, showing her presence as goddess of the earth and underworld. In the place of sacred trees we have often sacred pillars, which seem to have been objects of worship down to Late Minoan II. at least, since in the Royal Villa at Knossos, dating from this period, there is a pillar-room similar to the much earlier pillar-rooms of the Great Palace. The little group of three pillars found at Knossos evidently represents the divinity in her aspect as a heavenly goddess, for the pillars have doves perching upon their capitals. Sometimes, as in the case of the Lion Gate at MycenÆ, and other representations, we have the pillar with the two supporting lions, an anticipation of the anthropomorphic figure of the goddess on the rock. It is possible that in some cases the figures of the Double Axes standing between horns of consecration were also looked upon as embodiments of the divinity. A similar mode of representing deity occurs in the earlier stages of many religions, and the sacred pillar set up by Jacob at Bethel may be instanced as an example of its presence in the beginnings of the Hebrew worship.

In general the Minoan Great Mother appears to have been looked upon as a being of beneficence, and as the giver of 'every good and perfect gift'; but her association with the lion and the snake shows that there was also a more mysterious and awful side to her character. When the later Greeks came into the island and found this deity in possession, she became identified, in the various aspects of her many-sided nature, with various goddesses of the Hellenic Pantheon. Foremost and specially she became Rhea, the mother of the gods, who had fled to Crete to bear her son Zeus. Otherwise she was Hera, the sister and the spouse of Zeus, and in this case the story of the marriage of the great goddess and the supreme god probably represents the fusion of religious ideas on the part of the two races, the conquerors taking over the deity of the conquered race, and uniting her with the Sky God whom they had brought with them from their Northern home. She also survived as Aphrodite, as Demeter, and, in her capacity as Lady of the Wild Beasts, as Artemis.

The suggestion of the association of Zeus with the Minoan goddess may have been given to the Northern conquerors by a feature of the Cretan religion which they found already in existence. On certain seal impressions and engraved gems there are indications that the great Nature Goddess was sometimes associated with a male divinity. This being, however, seems to have occupied an obscure and inferior position. In most of the scenes in which he is represented he, is either in the background, or reverentially stands before the seated female divinity. It would appear that the AchÆans appropriated this insignificant god as the representative of their own Zeus, attributed to him birth from the Great Goddess in her own cave-sanctuary of Dicte, and endowed him with many of the attributes which she had formerly possessed, including the Double Axe emblem of sovereignty, so that in Hellenic times the supreme deity of the island was always the Cretan Zeus, Zeus of the Double Axe, though in reality he was no Cretan god at all, or at best a secondary divinity, dressed in borrowed plumes and with greatness thrust upon him.

As to the forms of worship with which the Great Mother of Crete was served, comparatively little is known. The most striking feature is the seemingly total absence of what we should call temples. In this respect Crete presents a curious contrast to Egypt: in Egypt we have an abundance of vast temples, but practically no surviving palaces; in Crete the case is exactly reversed, and we have huge palaces but no temples. The reason of this appears to be, as Dr. Mackenzie has pointed out,[*] that the Minoan religion was of an entirely domestic character. 'At Knossos all shrines are either house-shrines or palace-shrines. The divinities are household and dynastic divinities having an ancestral character and an ancestral reputation to maintain.' To put it in a word, worship in the Minoan religion was essentially Family Worship. No doubt there were public ceremonials also, in which the King, who seems to have been Priest as well as King (if, indeed, he was not viewed as an incarnation of deity), performed the principal part; but there can have been nothing like the habitual publicity of parts of the worship of the god which was contemplated in the great peristyle courts of the Egyptian temples and the processional arrangements of part of their service. 'At Knossos,' says Dr. Mackenzie, 'we found, as a matter of fact, that there was a tendency for each house to have a room set apart for family worship. Of such shrines the palace was found to have more than one. Those shrines were found to be in a very private part of the house, and usually to have no thoroughfare through them.'

[Footnote *: Annual of the British School at Athens, vol. xiv., p. 366.]

What these shrines were like we may to some extent judge from the fragmentary fresco found at Knossos, representing one of the pillar-shrines where the Great Goddess was worshipped in her emblems of the sacred pillars. The structure consists of a taller central chamber, with a lower wing on either side of it. The material of which it is built is apparently wood, faced and decorated in certain parts with chequer-work in black-and-white plaster. The whole building rests upon large blocks of stone, immediately above which in the central chamber comes a solid piece of building, adorned first with the chequer-work, and then, above this, with two half-rosettes bordered with kuanos. Over this rises the open chamber of the shrine, which contains nothing but two pillars of the familiar Minoan-MycenÆan type, tapering downwards from the capitals. These rise from between the sacred horns, which occur in practically every religious scene as emblems of consecration (cf. the 'horns of the altar' in the Hebrew temple worship). The lower chambers on either side contain each a single pillar, again rising from between the horns of consecration. A Minoan lady, dressed in a gown of bluish-green, sits with her back to the wall of the right-hand lower chamber, and the scale of the shrine is given by the fact that, her seat being on the same level as the floor of the chamber, her head is in a line with the roof beam which rests on the capital of the sacred pillar. The remains of an actual shrine discovered in 1907 close to the Central Court at Knossos show that the fresco does not exaggerate the smallness of the sacred buildings. The Gournia shrine, situated in the centre of the town, is about twelve feet square, and its discoverer believes that the walls of the sacred enclosure may never have stood more than eighteen inches high. Here, again, were the horns of consecration, the doves, and the snakes twined round the image of the goddess.

Of what sort were the acts of worship in connection with the Minoan Religion? Sacrifice was certainly prominent, and the bull was probably the chief victim offered to the goddess. In one of the scenes on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, a bull is being sacrificed, and his blood is dripping into a vessel placed beneath his head. Behind is the figure of a woman, whose hands are stretched out, presumably to hold the cords with which the victim is bound. Two kids crouch on the ground below the bull, perhaps to be offered in their turn. Libation also formed part of the ceremonial, and on the same sarcophagus there are two scenes in which it occurs. In the one instance (Plate XXVIII.), the vessel into which the offering is being poured stands between two sacred Double Axes with birds perched upon them; in the other the libation-vessel stands upon an altar with a Double Axe behind it. The three receptacles of the DictÆan Libation Table suggest a threefold offering like that of mingled milk and honey, sweet wine, and water, which, in the Homeric period, was made to the Shades of the Dead and to the Nymphs.

As was perhaps natural in the cult of a goddess, the chief part in the ritual seems to have been taken by priestesses. Men share in the ceremonies also, but not so frequently, and apparently in subordinate rÔles. Part of the ritual evidently consisted of dancing, and music also had its place, as is evident from the figures of the lyre and flute players on the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada. The question of whether the Minoans had any worship of ancesters or sacrifice to the dead is raised by several relics. Above the Shaft-Graves at MycenÆ stood a circular altar, where offerings must have been made either to the Shades of the Dead or on behalf of them, and the scenes on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus, resembling so curiously those of the Egyptian ceremony of 'the Opening of the Mouth,' suggest a belief in the continued existence of the spirit, either as an object to be propitiated by sacrifice, or as a being which needed to be sustained in its disembodied state by offerings of meat and drink.

The relation of the Minoan King to the religion of his country is a point of some interest, though the facts known are scarcely sufficient to afford ground for more than surmise. The very structure of the palace at Knossos gives evidence of the importance of the part which he played in spiritual matters, and of the intimate connection which existed in the Minoan, as in so many other ancient faiths, between Royalty and Religion. There are not only several shrines and altars in the palace, but it is probable, as Dr. Mackenzie has pointed out,[*] that the so-called bathrooms at Knossos and PhÆstos are not bathrooms at all, but small chapels or oratories, so that altogether religion bulks very largely in the arrangements of the Royal dwelling. In fact, the Kings and Queens of Knossos were Priest-Kings and Priest-Queens, the heads of the spiritual as well as of the material life of their people; and it is not at all unlikely, from what is known of the religious views of other ancient peoples, that the Priest-King was looked upon as an incarnation of divinity. If so, of what divinity? It is here that, in all likelihood, we get near the heart of the Minotaur legend. 'The characteristic mythical monster of Crete,' says Miss Jane Harrison,[**] 'was the bull-headed Minotaur. Behind the legend of Pasiphae, made monstrous by the misunderstanding of immigrant conquerors, it can scarcely be doubted that there lurks some sacred mystical ceremony of ritual wedlock (ιερος γαμος) with a primitive bull-headed divinity.... The bull-Dionysos of Thrace, when he came to Crete, found a monstrous god, own cousin to himself.... Of the ritual of the bull-god in Crete, we know that it consisted in part of the tearing and eating of a bull, and behind is the dreadful suspicion of human sacrifice.' The actual evidence found on Minoan sites for the existence of such a bull-headed divinity is somewhat slight, the clearest instance being a seal-impression from Knossos, representing a monster who bears an animal head, possibly a bull's, upon a human body, and who is evidently regarded as divine, since he is seated and reverently approached by a human worshipper; but, taken in connection with the universal currency of the Minotaur legend, it is probably sufficient. What relation this monstrous divinity held to the other objects of Minoan worship is not apparent.

[Footnote *: Annual of the British School at Athens, xiv., p. 366. The suggestion is also made by Mosso, 'The Palaces of Crete,' pp. 64-66.]

[Footnote **: 'Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,' pp. 482, 483.]

It may be, then, that this deity was the one of whom the King was supposed to be the representative and incarnation, and in that case the bull-grappling, which was so constant a feature of the palace sports, had a deeper significance, and was in reality part of the ceremonial associated with the worship of the Cretan bull-god. In this connection Professor Murray has emphasized[*] certain facts in connection with the legendary history of Minos, which would seem to link the Cretan monarchy with a custom not infrequently observed in connection with other ancient monarchies and faiths. It will be remembered that the legend of Minos states variously that he 'ruled for nine years, the gossip of Great Zeus,' and that every nine years he went into the cave of Zeus or of the bull-god, to converse with Zeus, to receive new commandments, and to give account of his stewardship. The nine-year period recurs in the account of the bloody tribute of seven youths and seven maidens who were offered to the Minotaur every ninth year. May we not, therefore, have in these statements a distorted recollection of the fact that the Royal Incarnation of the Bull-God originally held his office only for a term of nine years, and that at the end of that period he went into the DictÆan Cave, the sanctuary of his divinity, and was there slain in sacrifice, while from the cave his successor came forth, and was hailed as the rejuvenated incarnation of divinity, to reign in his turn, and then to perish as his predecessor had done? In this case the seven youths and seven maidens who were offered to the Minotaur at the end of the nine-year period may have been slain with him to be his companions and servants in the underworld, or, as is perhaps more likely, they may, in a later stage of the custom, have been accepted as his substitutes, so that the death of the King was merely a ritual one.

[Footnote *: 'The Rise of the Greek Epic,' pp. 127, 128.]

Of course, this explanation of the Minos legend and the story of the human tribute is in the meantime only a supposition, and not susceptible of absolute proof; but the constant recurrence of the nine-year period is, at least, very striking, and it is worth remembering that a custom precisely similar to that suggested has existed in connection with several ancient monarchies, and, indeed, survives to the present day. In the ancient Ethiopian kingdom the King was obliged to slay himself when commanded to do so by the priests. A similar custom prevailed in Babylonia and among the ancient Prussians, while several modern African tribes slay their King when the first sign of age or infirmity begins to show itself in him. Professor Flinders Petrie has shown[*] that the greatest of the Egyptian feasts, the 'Sed' Festival, was a ceremonial survival of a time when the Pharaoh, the Priest-King and representative of God on earth, was slain at fixed intervals. The object in all such cases is manifestly to secure that the incarnation of divinity shall always be in the prime of his vigour, and shall never know decay. It is impossible, no doubt, to say that such a feature belonged to the Minoan religious polity; the evidence is not such as to admit of certainty, yet it is not unlikely that in a custom similar to this lies the interpretation of the main features of the Minotaur legend.

[Footnote *: 'Researches in Sinai,' pp. 181-185.]

Such, then, was the Empire of the Minoan Sea-Kings as it has been revealed to us by the excavations and researches of the last ten years. Apart from the actual information gained of this great race, which must henceforward be regarded as one of the originating sources of Greek civilization and learning, and therefore, to a great extent, of all European culture, perhaps the most striking and interesting result that has been attained is the remarkable confirmation given to the broad outlines of those traditions about Crete which have survived in the legends and in the narratives of the Greek historians. The fable of the Minotaur is now seen to be no mere wild and monstrous imagining, but a reflection, vague and grotesque as seen through the mist of centuries, of customs which did actually exist in the palace life of Knossos, and were very probably parts of the religious practice of the country. The slaying of the Minotaur by the Athenian Theseus may well be an echo of the conquest of the Minoan Empire by the mainland tribes. The story which makes Theseus bring up from the Palace of Amphitrite the ring which Minos had thrown into the sea, seems almost certainly to be a symbolic expression of the passing over of the sea-power of the Ægean from the once-omnipotent Minoans to the AchÆans and the other restless tribes who for generations after the fall of Knossos held the dominion of the ocean, and were the terror of all peaceful nations, and a menace to the existence of even so great a power as Egypt. No one now dreams of hesitating to accept the statements of Herodotus and Thucydides as to the great sea-empire of Crete. Whoever the Minos to whom they allude may have been—whether he was actually a single great historical monarch who brought the glory of the kingdom to its culmination, or whether the name was the title of a race of Kings, is a matter of small moment. In either case the sea-power of Minoan Crete was a reality which endured, not for one reign, but for many reigns; and it is practically certain that, during a long period of history, the whole sea-borne trade of Europe, Asia, and Africa, was in the hands of these, the earliest lords of the ocean.

GOLDSMITHS' WORK FROM BEEHIVE TOMBS, PHÆSTOS (p. 216)
G. Maraghiannis