The Sea-Kings of Crete

CHAPTER XI. Letters and Religion

LETTERS AND RELIGION

CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PLATE I. The Throne of Minos II. (1) The Ramp, Troy, Second City; (2) the Circle-Graves, Mycenae III. Wall of Sixth City, Troy IV. The Lion Gate, Mycenae V. (1) Vaulted Passage in Wall, Tiryns; (2) Beehive Tomb (Treasury of Atreus), Mycenae VI. The Cup-Bearer, Knossos VII. The Long Gallery, Knossos VIII. A Magazine with Jars and Kaselles, Knossos IX. (1) Magazine with Jars and Kaselles; (2) Great Jar with Trickle Ornament X. (1) Part of Dolphin Fresco; (2) A Great Jar, Knossos XI. Pillar of the Double Axes XII. (1) Minoan Paved Road; (2) North Entrance, Knossos XIII. Relief of Bull's Head XIV. Clay Tablet with Linear Script, Knossos XV. (1) Palace Wall, West Side, Mount Juktas in Background; (2) Bathroom, Knossos XVI. A Flight of the Quadruple Staircase; (2) Wall with Drain XVII. (1) Hall of the Double Axes; (2) Great Staircase, Knossos XVIII. The King's Gaming-Board XIX. Ivory Figurines XX. (1) Main Drain, Knossos; (2) Terra-cotta Drain-Pipes XXI. Theatral Area, Knossos: Before Restoration XXII. Theatral Area, Knossos: Restored XXIII. Great Jar with Papyrus Reliefs XXIV. The Royal Villa: (1) The Basilica; (2) Stone Lamp XXV. (1) Knossos Valley; (2) Excavating at Knossos XXVI. Great Staircase, Phaestos XXVII. The Harvester Vase, Hagia Triada XXVIII. Sarcophagus from Hagia Triada XXIX. Minoan Pottery XXX. Late Minoan Vase from Mycenae XXXI. Kamares Vases from Phaestos and Hagia Triada XXXII. Goldsmiths' Work from Beehive Tombs, Phaestos

SKETCH MAP OF CRETE

PLAN OF KNOSSOS

THE SEA-KINGS OF CRETE

AND THE

PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATION OF GREECE

CHAPTER I. The Legends

THE LEGENDS

The resurrection of the prehistoric age of Greece, and the disclosure of the astonishing standard of civilization which had been attained on the mainland and in the isles of the AEgean at a period at least 2,000 years earlier than that at which Greek history, as hitherto understood, begins, may be reckoned as among the most interesting results of modern research into the relics of the life of past ages. The present generation has witnessed remarkable discoveries in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, but neither Niffur nor Abydos disclosed a world so entirely new and unexpected as that which has been revealed by the work of Schliemann and his successors at Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns, and by that of Evans and the other explorers--Italian, British, and American--in Crete. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian discoveries traced back a little farther streams which had already been followed far up their course; those of Schliemann and Evans revealed the reality of one which, so to speak, had hitherto been believed to flow only through the dreamland of legend. It was obvious that mighty men must have existed before Agamemnon, but what manner of men they were, and in what manner of world they lived, were matters absolutely unknown, and, to all appearance, likely to remain so. An abundant wealth of legend told of great Kings and heroes, of stately palaces, and mighty armies, and powerful fleets, and the whole material of an advanced civilization. But the legends were manifestly largely imaginative--deities and demi-gods, men and fabulous monsters, were mingled in them on the same plane--and it seemed impossible that we should ever get back to the solid ground, if solid ground had ever existed, on which these ancient stories first rested.

For the historian of the middle of the nineteenth century Greek history began with the First Olympiad in 776 B.C. Before that the story of the return of the Herakleids and the Dorian conquest of the men of the Bronze Age might very probably embody, in a fanciful form, a genuine historical fact; the Homeric poems were to be treated with respect, not only on account of their supreme poetical merit, but as possibly representing a credible tradition, though, of course, their pictures of advanced civilization were more or less imaginative projections upon the past of the culture of the writer's own period or periods. Beyond that lay the great waste land of legend, in which gods and godlike heroes moved and enacted their romances among 'Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras dire.' What proportion of fact, if any, lay in the stories of Minos, the great lawgiver, and his war fleet, and his Labyrinth, with its monstrous occupant; of Theseus and Ariadne and the Minotaur; of Daedalus, the first aeronaut, and his wonderful works of art and science; or of any other of the thousand and one beautiful or tragic romances of ancient Hellas, to attempt to determine this lay utterly beyond the sphere of the serious historian. 'To analyze the fables,' says Grote, 'and to elicit from them any trustworthy particular facts, appears to me a fruitless attempt. The religious recollections, the romantic inventions, and the items of matter of fact, if any such there be, must for ever remain indissolubly amalgamated, as the poet originally blended them, for the amusement or edification of his auditors.... It was one of the agreeable dreams of the Grecian epic that the man who travelled far enough northward beyond the Rhiphaean Mountains would in time reach the delicious country and genial climate of the virtuous Hyperboreans, the votaries and favourites of Apollo, who dwelt in the extreme north, beyond the chilling blasts of Boreas. Now, the hope that we may, by carrying our researches up the stream of time, exhaust the limits of fiction, and land ultimately upon some points of solid truth, appears to me no less illusory than this northward journey in quest of the Hyperborean elysium.' Grote's frankly sceptical attitude represents fairly well the general opinion of the middle of last century. The myths were beautiful, but their value was not in any sense historical; it arose from the light which they cast upon the workings of the active Greek mind, and the revelation which they gave of the innate poetic faculty which created myths so far excelling those of any other nation.

Within the last forty years all this has been changed. Opinions like that so dogmatically expressed by our great historian are no longer held by anyone who has followed the current of modern investigations, and remain only as monuments of the danger of dogmatizing on matters concerning which all preconceived ideas may be upset by the results of a single season's spade-work on some ancient site; and he would be a bold man who would venture to-day to call 'illusory' the search for 'points of solid truth' in the old legends, or to assert that 'the items of matter of fact, if any such there be,' are inextricable from the mass of romantic inventions in which they are embedded. The work, of course, is by no means complete; very probably it is scarcely more than well begun; but already the dark gulf of time that lay behind the Dorian conquest is beginning to yield up the unquestionable evidences of a great, and splendid, and almost incredibly ancient civilization, which neither for its antiquity nor for its actual attainment has any cause to shrink from comparison with the great historic civilizations of Mesopotamia or the Nile Valley; and while the process of disentangling the historic nucleus of the legends from their merely mythical and romantic elements cannot yet be undertaken with any approach to certainty, it is becoming continually more apparent, not only that in many cases there was such a nucleus, but also what were some of the historic elements around which the poetic fancy of later times drew the fanciful wrappings of the heroic tales as we know them. It is not yet possible to trace and identify the actual figures of the heroes of prehistoric Greece: probably it never will be possible, unless the as yet untranslated Cretan script should furnish the records of a more ancient Herodotus, and a new Champollion should arise to decipher them; but there can scarcely be any reasonable doubt that genuine men and women of AEgean stock filled the roles of these ancient romances, and that the wondrous story of their deeds is, in part at least, the record of actual achievements.

In this remarkable resurrection of the past the most important and convincing part has been played by the evidence from Crete. The discoveries which were made during the last quarter of the nineteenth century by Schliemann and his successors at Mycencae, Tiryns, Orchomenos, and elsewhere, were quite conclusive as to the former existence of a civilization quite equal to, and in all probability the original of, that which is described for us in the Homeric poems; but it was not until the treasures of Knossos and Phaestos began to be revealed in 1900 and the subsequent years that it became manifest that what was known as the Mycenaean civilization was itself only the decadence of a far richer and fuller culture, whose fountain-head and whose chief sphere of development had been in Crete. And it has been in Crete that exploration and discovery have led to the most striking illustration of many of the statements in the legends and traditions, and have made it practically certain that much of what used to be considered mere romantic fable represents, with, of course, many embellishments of fancy, a good deal of historic fact.

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