The Minoans
[Illustration: A LADY OF THE MINOAN COURT
From _The Annual of the British School at Athens_
[_Frontispiece_]
The Minoans
_by_ George Glasgow
[Illustration]
Jonathan Cape
Eleven Gower Street, London
_First published March_, 1923
_Second impression April_, 1923
_All rights reserved_
_Printed in Great Britain by_ Butler & Tanner, _Frome and London_
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO
RONALD MONTAGU BURROWS
MY GREAT FRIEND AND TEACHER
PREFACE
Sir Arthur Evans’ renewed campaign of excavation in Crete has again
attracted considerable public attention to the remarkable disclosures
of the last twenty years. Sir Arthur Evans himself is at present
engaged in compiling in three big volumes the consecutive story of
Minoan civilization as revealed by his own excavations. The present
writer is convinced that the story of Cretan discovery is such as to
appeal to the imagination of a wide public who have no specialist
interest in archæology. The story has all the interest of adventure and
exploration. This book is an attempt to meet what such a public wants.
I have tried to give a general picture of the world which existed in
the Mediterranean four thousand years ago, and of the amazing process
by which it has been revealed, so that it can be understood by those
totally unacquainted with classical study, and I have tried to give
it in one hour’s reading. For those who want to go further I give
references to other books. It must be understood that this book does
not aim at an exact account of the archæological position as it exists
to-day. With new excavations being carried out this very year, and with
new material in the hands of the excavators, as yet unpublished and
undigested, any attempt to be strictly up to date would merely mean the
progressive and indefinite postponement of the book. The broad lines
of the discovery of Minoan civilization are clear, and in the writer’s
opinion, even because a new campaign of excavation is now started,
ought to be presented now in a form to be easily understood. The
results of the discoveries of this spring, for instance, add important
details to our knowledge--some of which I have incorporated--but do not
affect fundamentals.
Some of the substance of the following chapters was published in
1920 and 1921 in _Discovery_, to the Editor of which I am grateful
for permission to re-publish them. In a somewhat different form the
substance was also published by me in 1914-1915 in the _National Home
Reading Magazine_.
It is to my friend Dr. Ronald Montagu Burrows that I, in common with
thousands, owe my interest in Crete. He died on May 14, 1920, before
his time. He was incredibly, challengingly young and vigorous both in
appearance and in activity, and at fifty-two was producing work at the
top of his brilliant form. His work was a mixture of youth and maturity
such as one does not often find. In 1907, when he first published
his _Discoveries in Crete_, men were confused by the avalanche of
discovery in Crete which had been going on since the opening of the
century. Burrows’s achievement--for which scholars and the intellectual
public have ever since been grateful--was to give a comprehensive and
interpretive account of the whole revelation and to place it in its
perspective. Before that even scholars as a whole had not seen wood for
trees.
Dr. Burrows’s own excavations at Pylos and Sphacteria and at Rhitsona
were typical of him. He cleared up the narrative and established the
good faith of the historian Thucydides. Scholars had in vain tried to
find any trace of the fortifications said by Thucydides to have been
erected there by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian war. Only a few
months before Burrows first went out--he was then a young man who did
not know the difficulty of what he attempted--a celebrated geographer,
Dr. Grundy, had explored the site and reported that there was no trace
of the fortifications. Burrows discovered substantial remains hidden
away under the brushwood, and succeeded in proving that they fully
corresponded with Thucydides’s account.
I am grateful to Professor R. S. Conway and to Sir Arthur Evans for
reading my manuscript and helping me with suggestions; but neither must
be held responsible for anything that appears in the book.
1922.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PREFACE 7
1 CRETE THE FORERUNNER OF GREECE 13
2 THE SEA-FARING PEOPLE OF CRETE 20
3 MINOS AND THE MINOTAUR 24
4 KNOSSOS 30
5 PREHISTORIC ENGINEERING AND ARCHITECTURE 37
6 INTERNAL POLITICS: THE RELATIONS OF KNOSSOS
AND PHÆSTOS 44
7 MINOAN ARCHITECTURE AND FRESCO PAINTING 48
8 THE POTTERY 55
9 THE ORIGIN OF WRITING 65
10 CRETAN RELIGION 75
11 MEN AND WOMEN, CLOTHES AND CUSTOMS 83
12 FROM PREHISTORIC CRETE TO CLASSICAL GREECE 90
INDEX 93
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
A Lady of the Minoan Court _Frontispiece_
Bull Leaping _facing page_ 35
The Cupbearer ” 39
Polychrome Cups ” 62
Chapter 1: _Crete the Forerunner of Greece_
Mr. Veniselos was brought up in Crete. It is not the first time in
history that Crete has passed on her products to Greece and to Europe.
Four thousand years ago the very foundations of Greek and of European
civilization were laid in Crete, which was then mistress of the sea
and the dominant factor in the Ægean. Yet we none of us were aware of
this until Sir Arthur Evans, a few years ago, began digging in Crete.
When Mr. Veniselos was a boy the very existence of a prehistoric Cretan
civilization was unknown. Our knowledge of it has been almost entirely
revealed since 1900. In this short time the spades of Sir Arthur Evans
have revolutionized our whole conception of the early history of
Europe. Excavation at Knossos, Phæstos and other sites in Crete has
disclosed the existence of a people whose form of civilization, the
earliest in Europe, flourished long before recorded history begins. It
has told us about their daily life, games, amusements, art, religion,
writing (though the language is not yet understood); their physical
type, dress, the homes they lived in. The fashion of the women’s
dresses, as revealed on ornaments and other art relics, with an open
neck and flounced skirts, made a French scholar exclaim: “Mais ce sont
des Parisiennes!”
A big palace, as big as Buckingham Palace, has been unearthed
at Knossos. It has a drainage system which an eminent Italian
archæologist, Dr. Halbherr, has described as “absolutely English,” and
which certainly forestalls the hydraulic engineering of the nineteenth
century. This four thousand years ago.
The digging in Crete has created all the excitement of exploration.
When the painted panel was discovered giving a sensational bull-baiting
scene from a Minoan circus-show, or the Phæstos disc covered with
picture writing, or the fresco painting of the Cupbearer at Knossos,
the excitement reached its height. It was not confined to the
excavators. An old workman who was on night duty watching the Cupbearer
fresco during the delicate operation of its removal, was woke up by
disturbing dreams and declared after that “The whole place was full of
ghosts.”
Charles Kingsley has no doubt turned in his grave. When he wrote _The
Heroes_ he was writing, as he himself explained, a fairy story for
his children. He little knew that his fairy story was in many ways
historical truth. He wrote, for instance, that the palace of King Minos
at Knossos was like a marble hill. He did not know that there actually
lived a King Minos in Crete, and that his palace, standing on a hill at
Knossos, was built, if not of marble, at any rate of stone.
Up to the last half-century the whole story of classical Greece,
as taught in the schools and in the Universities, was regarded as
something original, as the beginning of things springing suddenly,
like the mythical Athene, into life. The sculpture, architecture,
philosophy, oratory, and drama of the fifth century B.C., were accepted
unquestioningly and with awe as the spontaneous first-fruits of Greek
genius. The history of Greece, as then understood, went back only to
the eighth century B.C., beyond which were the Dark Ages and nothing.
Before the time of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides it is true there
had been a problematic poet, half mythical, half real, elusive and
shadowy, known as Homer. The fact that he was represented as having
been born in nine separate places was an illustration of the vagueness
in which the poet’s identity was enveloped. He (or they, if his poems
were a composite work) had sung of deeds and of men who seemed to
echo from those Dark Ages. Whatever speculation there was as to Homer
himself and his identity, no one ever doubted that if he was a real
person he certainly was the first real person that European history
could establish. During the last twenty years he has been shown to have
been not the beginning but the end of an enormous phase of Greek and
European history.
Now that the real beginnings of Greek civilization are beginning to be
known, it strikes one as remarkable that up to now they should have
been so completely buried in two senses. It is the more remarkable
because a good deal was known about other corresponding origins in the
Near East. In Egypt and Babylonia the old traditions had been passed on
by later generations to Greek writers, who preserved, imperfectly it is
true, the necessary connecting links. In the case of Greek civilization
not only were there no stepping-stones back to the corresponding phase;
it did not even seem to occur to anybody that there had been such a
phase. The unquestioning and complacent acceptance as myths (which
is the same thing as the tacit and complete disbelief) of the epic
stories which centred round Agamemnon and the Homeric heroes was never
challenged up to the middle of the last century. The historian Grote,
for instance, declared that “to analyse the fables and to elicit from
them any trustworthy particular facts” would be “a fruitless attempt”
(_History of Greece_, 2nd edition, 1849, p. 223).
Such was the outlook of Grote’s contemporaries. Then an important
thing happened. A poor boy named Schliemann had been told these Greek
fables by his father, and to his child’s mind the stories appeared as
literally true. One day a drunken miller came into the grocer’s shop
where he worked, and began to recite some lines of Homer. Schliemann
was fascinated, and, so the story goes, spent all his spare cash in
whisky wherewith to encourage the miller to repeat the lines again and
again; and then prayed God that he might some day have the happiness of
learning Greek himself. His literal faith in the “myths” remained with
him, and he made up his mind to find the walls of Troy. Being poor he
had to spend a lifetime of hard saving before he was in a position to
put his faith to the test. Late in life, however, he had saved enough
money for the purpose and went to Hissarlik, the spot in Asia Minor
where the town of Troy was said to have stood. He began digging into
the earth, and to his joy discovered the buried walls of a town. It was
proved later that the walls he discovered belonged not to the Homeric
city, as Schliemann naturally assumed, but to another city which had
existed on the same site a thousand years earlier. He had dug within
and through the circle of the Homeric walls without discovering them.
From Troy he went to Mycenæ and Tiryns on the Greek mainland, and
there discovered the visible relics of the Homeric stories centering
on the Greek mainland. Schliemann’s achievement was to establish the
historical existence of the “Mycenæan civilization.” We now know that
this civilization flourished from about 1400 B.C. to 1100 B.C. It is
a romantic story of the way in which Schliemann justified his simple
faith in the historic background of the Homeric poems. Schliemann
deserved the explorer’s satisfaction which he enjoyed, and which
manifested itself on one occasion when he sent a telegram to the King
of the Hellenes announcing that he had found the tomb of Agamemnon
at Mycenæ. One wishes that it had been literally true, as Schliemann
thought it was. In any case it was he who laid the foundations for
the whole structure of modern prehistoric research in the Eastern
Mediterranean.
The most exciting and the most important part of that research has been
the opening up of Crete. The Cretan discoveries of Sir Arthur Evans
and other excavators, British, American and Italian, have proved that
the Mycenæan culture revealed by Schliemann was itself a late and even
decadent phase of a great Mediterranean civilization which had its
centre in Crete.