THE MINOANS IN CRETE
Those, then, were the two great powers on land in the very old days
of the story of mankind. There was Egypt along the Nile, and
Babylonia--for a thousand and more years, rather to be called
Assyria--along the Euphrates and Tigris.
But there was also yet a third power, very great, very ancient, and
highly civilised, a sea-power, with its capital in the big island,
which you will sec on the map, lying to the south of Greece, Crete.
You will observe, perhaps, that it quite agrees with all that we find
in the later story of mankind, that a nation living on an island
should be powerful at sea. To-day you see the great sea-powers,
ourselves and Japan. We live on islands that are small when compared
with the lands of Germany, France, America, Russia, China; but we
have more power in ships and seamen. Perhaps America is going to
have a greater power than Japan, but at the time that I am writing
she has not.
It is only of rather recent years that we have come to know much
about this very ancient Cretan civilisation, and chiefly it is owing
to the work of a great antiquary, Sir Arthur Evans, that we have
discovered the story. It must be very interesting to be an antiquary
and to dig--or to order a gang of diggers to {77} dig under your
directions--and not to know what you may be going to turn up next:
now a gold ear-ring, now a bronze sword, now the edge of a worked
stone that may be the corner-stone of a building which more digging
may prove to be one of the greatest and most marvellous buildings in
the world!
[Sidenote: Knossos]
It sounds like a fairy story; but it was a fairy story which Sir
Arthur Evans made come true at a place in Crete where the ancient
city of Knossos used to be. He found wonderful things--an immense
palace, a place which inscriptions, also there discovered, show to
have been a temple of the gods as well. The king, it is evident, was
high-priest as well as king: we have seen that union of the two
offices, the king's and the priest's, before, both in Egypt and in
Babylonia. (When I say before, I mean that I wrote of it earlier in
the story. I do not mean that it came any earlier in the time of its
actual happening.) There is evidence to show that the Cretan people
were civilised, could make fine works of art and so on, right back to
the very earliest date at which the evidences from the peoples living
along the river-courses have anything to show us. Maybe the Cretans
acquired their civilisation even earlier than the others.
We cannot be sure of that. What we can be sure of is that an
enormous number of years ago they were marvellous engineers and
architects, as well as workers of ornaments, and of fine pottery and
glazed ware. The palace at Knossos is an immense place, with great
columns, walls, halls. We wonder as much at the splendid imagination
of the architect who could plan buildings on such a grand scale so
very long ago as we do at the engineer's power to work and lift into
position such huge stones as we find were used in the building. And
{78} the delicacy of the finish is wonderful too. It is not only the
vastness of the size that amazes us. That is the chief wonder of the
Egyptian pyramids. But the buildings and other remains in Crete are
more wonderful still.
This Cretan civilisation at so very early a date makes an
extraordinary chapter in the world's story. It would still have been
a story very extraordinary if it had been only just the story of what
happened in the island of Crete, and did not spread beyond it. But,
as a matter of fact, it did spread very far beyond that island. It
spread out north, east, south, and west--up into Greece, across to
Syria, down to Egypt, and away to Sicily.
In your books you are likely to read about all this as "the Minoan
civilisation." Probably there really was some great king of old in
Crete whose name was Minos. It is possible that there were many of
the name, and that all the kings of his dynasty were called Minos,
with some other name besides to distinguish them. However that may
be, the Cretan legendary story was that Minos was a very great king,
half divine, who gave laws and the arts of civilisation to his
people, rather as Khammurabi was supposed to have given laws to the
Babylonians. And, again like Khammurabi, Minos was supposed to have
received these laws from a deity, the greatest deity that the
Minoans, as they were called, knew. But this deity of theirs was
supposed to be female, a goddess, the goddess Ishtar of the
Babylonians--the Ashtaroth of the Bible. The Cretans, however, made
her the chief of all the gods. The Babylonians held her in second
place, as spouse of the chief god Shamash, the sun-god.
These splendid buildings of the Minoans, as they {79} have been
discovered for us by the digger, have a much more modern, a much less
strange, appearance than those either of Babylonia or of Egypt. The
Babylonian buildings especially look to us, as we make pictures of
them in our minds, like palaces of some great ogre. The supports at
each side of the doors and gates are very often in the form of huge
winged bulls. Human heads and figures of colossal size are to be
seen everywhere. And the human heads have generally great beards,
and perhaps the rest of the hair worked up into a square pattern,
with curls, so that they look horrible. All the insides of the
Babylonian palaces seem to have been adorned with enormous hunting
scenes, worked in a kind of gypsum which was found in the country. I
think we should feel terribly afraid if we suddenly found ourselves
in an ancient Babylonian palace or even an Egyptian one.
But I believe that we should feel very much happier and more at home
if we could be transported suddenly into one of the old Minoan
palaces. And I believe that I can make a guess why that is so.
[Sidenote: Cretan architecture]
The Babylonian and the Egyptian style of building was found in these
two countries, but neither Babylonians nor Egyptians went much across
the sea--the Mediterranean Sea. But these Cretans, as I have said,
were great sea-goers. They were the great naval power in the
Mediterranean. So they went, and carried with them their ideas and
their ways of building, everywhere. The effect of that is seen most
of all perhaps at the site of an old Greek city on the mainland of
Greece, Mycenæ, where great excavations have been made. But the
effect is found in many other places too. So it has come down
through the Greeks and through the Romans, and has been in the minds
{80} and in the eyes of later builders, although the builders were
generally, as we may suppose, not at all aware that they owed
anything to these builders of so many thousands of years ago.
It is a curious thing that in Egypt, in Babylonia, and also in Crete,
some of the very oldest buildings and some of the very oldest works
of art are the best. We have a comfortable idea in our minds that
we--that is to say, mankind--have been making progress, have been
improving, all through the story; but unfortunately there are some
things in which we do not seem to have improved--some kinds of work
in which the oldest is the best.
And as I have said that the ancient buildings found in Crete are of a
style that does not look nearly so strange to us as the ancient
buildings of the countries on the mainland, so the Minoan engravings
show us the people of that very far-off time dressed in a fashion
that seems almost familiar to us. They do not look nearly so strange
as the people that we see pictured and graven on the walls of those
other palaces and tombs and temples.
We find many evidences, and evidences of many different kinds, of the
sea-faring habits of the ancient Cretans, and of their great power.
We find Minoan works of art in the tombs of Egyptian kings, and
Egyptian ornaments in the Minoan palaces. We find, as I have said,
the Minoan bronze work as far to the west as Sicily. Athens, the
great Athens of Greece, seems to have been subject to the Minoans and
to have paid tribute to them. And a very cruel form some of that
tribute took. According to the old historians, they had to send
seven maidens and seven youths each year to Crete; and we seem to be
able to guess the purpose for which they were sent.
{81}
The legend is that they had to be sent each year to be devoured by,
or be sacrificed to, a Cretan monster called the Minotaur. The name
Minotaur is from Minos and tauros, meaning a bull. It was figured as
a half human, half bull-like monster.
[Sidenote: The Labyrinth]
One of the most famous of the buildings discovered by the diggers in
Crete is the Labyrinth, a building of an immense number of passages
in which you were almost certain to lose your way if you did not know
it. You would be lost, and never come back, and the Minotaur was
supposed to live in this Labyrinth, and you would wander about there
till he came upon you and killed you.
[Illustration: COIN OF KNOSSOS (SHOWING LABYRINTH).]
This legend of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth is particularly worth
attending to because it shows us so well how the unreal stories grew
up out of the real, and how we are sometimes able to find out the
real truth under the unreal story.
There was this real Labyrinth in Crete; and this tribute of seven
maids and seven youths was, we may be tolerably sure, demanded of the
Athenians. One or more of the drawings on the Minoan palace walls
show bull-fights going on, and in the bull-ring are not only men, but
also maidens, fighting the bull. One does not know whether all the
Athenian maidens and youths were intended for this bull-fighting, but
it is exceedingly likely that many of them were condemned to it, just
as prisoners of war and others were made to fight lions in the
amphitheatre at Rome. And out of this fact, of the maidens and
youths in the bull-ring, might very easily grow the story of the
Minotaur--the bull-monster of Minos--and his victim.
{82}
How Theseus slew the Minotaur and found his way out of the Labyrinth
by a clue given him by Ariadne, the king's daughter, who had fallen
in love with him, is all a further fancy that grew up out of the
solid facts of the Labyrinth and the bull-fighting.
It is very wonderful that these ancient people should have been able
to make their power felt so far from their home island, because of
the difficulty in crossing the open seas. Their ships were propelled
by the oars of rowers and by the wind in the sails when the wind was
in their favour--that is to say, was blowing in the direction in
which they wanted to go. The sails of modern sailing vessels are so
arranged that our ships can sail up into the wind, as it is called.
They can go in a direction at right angles to the direction of the
wind very easily, and even when it is a little opposed to them, by
means of setting the sails so as to catch the wind side-ways. But
there is no evidence that the Minoans were able to do this, and we
know that in far later days of our story no such device was used.
They had a squarish-shaped sail attached to the mast, more like our
lug-sail than any other kind of rigging that is used now. And yet,
with these poor appliances, they went to Egypt, to Syria, and to
Sicily, and no doubt farther west again. And they went in numbers,
for otherwise they would not have been able to subjugate the native
people as we know that they did at Athens.
[Sidenote: The pirates]
We may suppose that they went for a double purpose--for trade and
also for piracy, to take forcible possession of what they wanted
wherever they found it. In those days, and for a long time
afterwards, it does not seem as if they had any idea that it was
contrary to what was right and just to take anything that they were
able to take from another nation. Any {83} idea of what we call
international justice was very little thought of, if thought of at
all. They could, and they did, make laws among themselves which
surprise us by their justice, but these laws were for each nation
itself. We have seen the idea of a single god, supreme over a whole
nation, held at times by them, but even that did not mean that they
had an idea of a single god supreme over the whole of the world. He
was a national god only, and if the idea of the divine law was thus
national only, it was not likely that they would have the idea that
any laws made by man were to be obeyed beyond the limits of the
nation by which they were made.
So we may be sure that these ancient Minoans were what we should call
pirates. They swept the sea in their ships attacking and capturing
the ships of other peoples wherever they found them, and landing and
making forays on the mainland much as the Vikings of Norway did
around our own shores at a far later date. And this state of things
in the Mediterranean is worth particular attention because these
pirates, of one nation or another, will be found actively at work all
through the pages of this great story of mankind. The Mediterranean
was not freed from them until a very recent date.
Now, that piracy, together with the style of architecture and the
making of smaller works of art which they practised, are the two
great facts to remember about this wonderful civilisation of the
ancient Minoans. For just about the year 1500 B.C., at which we left
the story of Egypt, or a little later, some terrible catastrophe
overtook the Minoans. What happened we do not know. It has been
guessed that they suffered an invasion and a complete overthrow {84}
by the Dorians, a people who had come down from the north and had
taken possession of that southern part of Greece which is called the
Peloponnese. But nothing is certainly known, except that the Minoans
did suffer a very complete overthrow, that their power was shattered,
their splendid buildings were destroyed, and they seem to vanish out
of the story altogether. Their conquerors were evidently a people
far less civilised and accomplished than they. Antiquaries tell us
that there were at least two distinct stages in the making of
buildings and works of art under the Minoans before this last
catastrophe, but after that there is no building, no art work, worth
accounting for. It all went.
But they had left the mark of their genius in the buildings at Mycenæ
and elsewhere, and they had established the habit of piracy in the
seas about their island.
So now, I think, we have the frame set in which we may place the
picture. We have these ancient Egyptians leading the kind of life
that I have tried to show you. We have the Babylonians and Assyrians
along those other river-courses established as a great power in the
east, and we have the Minoans, very shortly to be overthrown and to
disappear, scouring the seas in their ships and having all the power
along the coasts. And between them, in the very midst, is that
country of Syria and Palestine which--especially Palestine, because
it is south of Syria--lies right in the course which the great
empires must traverse when they come to grips with each other.
Palestine is the country through which they must pass whether for
trade or for war with each other. You can imagine what a terrible
position that must have been. Syria {85} and Palestine, as you know,
were peopled by Semitic tribes, to which race the Babylonians also
belonged originally. But the divisions and differences, both between
the Babylonians and the others, and between these others, among
themselves, were many and of various kinds. Some must have regarded
each other as almost of the same kindred. Others must have seemed
quite strange and foreign. It was a great mixture.
And for the moment, in or about 1500 B.C., the Israelites as a nation
are not in Palestine at all. They are in the land of Goshen,
undergoing that oppression of which you know. Within 300 years or so
they will make their Exodus and begin their forty years of wandering
in the wilderness, to re-appear in the story, under the leadership of
Joshua; conquering the Canaanites and so establishing themselves
right in the most dangerous position of all, in Palestine, on the
highway between the two great empires.
{86}