The plan of the palace of Knossos is at first sight rather confusing,
especially when one reflects that it represents only the ground floor
of the original building and that one has to imagine, in some places
two, and in others perhaps three storeys of rooms above it. If this is
the old labyrinth of legend, no wonder, you think, that Theseus needed
his Ariadne to show him a way out of it; and that Dædalus, who built
it, could himself find no other means of escape but by flying straight
up into the air!
But it is the nature of legend to exaggerate; and one can easily
understand how, years after the destruction of the palace, the
deserted ruins with their ghostly corridors and chambers would create
the impression of an “inextricable maze” which was crystallized by
tradition and became the setting for so many of the Cretan stories.
As it stood in the days of Minos, the palace would not, of course, be
anything so fantastic. The arrangement of the rooms and corridors,
though on a great and elaborate scale, was based on a simple plan. The
mass of buildings in the west wing of the palace is divided into two
halves by a long corridor running north and south, those in the east
wing by one running east and west, and the four divisions thus made
fall into a regular scheme.
In the west corridor, which is four yards wide and sixty-six yards
long, there are still standing some of the huge stone vases, “big
enough,” as Sir Arthur Evans has said, “to hide the Forty Thieves.”
They were used for the storage of grain, oil, wine, dried fruits, and
the like. Opening on this corridor from the west there is a series of
magazines and small chambers which were also used for storage purposes;
while under the floors, both of the magazines and of the corridor,
were strong cists, some of them lined with lead, which would perhaps
contain the State treasures. The entrance which leads from the west
court or market-place, and which is conveniently near the commissariat
quarters, would be used by tradesmen. Speaking of the outer wall of
the palace which borders on the west court, the Haweses (_Crete the
Forerunner of Greece_, p. 66) remark: “This has a projecting base,
whereon the peasants and humbler merchants could sit dozing, with
one eye upon their merchandise and pack animals. During the long
morning hours when traffic was busiest, this seat was always in the
shade--a pleasant refuge from the sun’s rays that beat so fiercely
on the open court.” The low narrow ledge would not, however, have
been particularly comfortable to sit on. In a narrow corridor to the
west of the south main entrance was found the fresco painting of the
Cupbearer, an astonishing work of art. It portrays a Minoan youth,
stiff with dignity, carrying a gold and silver vase before him. It did
not originally stand in the corridor in which it was found and to which
it has given its name, but on the west wall of the south entrance. It
fell into the corridor when the connecting wall broke down. There is
a reproduction of the Cupbearer on the cover of Dr. Burrows’s _The
Discoveries in Crete_, which lacks, of course, the brilliant colours of
the original.
[Illustration: CUPBEARER
From _The Discoveries in Crete_. By R. M. Burrows (John Murray)
[_To face page 39_]
On the other side of the central corridor of the west wing are the
rooms in which State and religious functions were held. In the Throne
Room, which is almost intact, the magnificent throne of Minos is still
standing, carved out of solid stone, and along the wall on each side of
it are the stone benches on which his counsellors sat. This would be
the chief room of the Minoan Government, in which foreign ambassadors
were received and the affairs of State generally administered;
important cases of justice would also be settled there, and Minos
would be Supreme Judge. It will be remembered that Minos was not only
the legislative head of a great sea empire. Being of divine origin
himself, he is represented as a great Law-giver and Priest of Zeus,
holding converse with the god every nine years in the Dictæan cave and
receiving from him, like the Moses of the Old Testament, a famous code
of laws which held good throughout the period of the Minoan Empire.
At his death, in accordance with the belief that men in the Lower World
carried on the duties of their lifetime, he became a Judge of the
Dead. Recounting his visit to the nether regions, Odysseus says: “Then
I saw Minos, the famed son of Zeus, with his golden sceptre, dealing
out justice to the dead, as he sat there; and around him, their King,
the dead asked concerning their rights, sitting and standing, in the
wide-gated house of Hades” (Homer, “Odyssey,” xi. 568-571).
Leaving the west wing of the palace and crossing the central court,
you descend into the east wing by the Great Staircase which, even when
found, was in a surprising state of preservation, and which by the
end of 1910 had had the remains of no fewer than five flights restored
to their original position. This staircase was traversed, as its
discoverer said, “some three and a half millenniums back by kings and
queens of Minos’ stock, on their way from the scenes of their public
and sacerdotal functions in the west wing of the palace to the more
private quarters of the royal household.” These quarters occupy the
south-east corner of the palace, built on the slope of the hill and
overlooking the valley. Approaching them from the central corridor
which runs due east from the central court, you pass first through the
men’s halls--the Hall of the Colonnades and the Hall of the Double
Axes--and thence by a dark crooked corridor, called from its shape the
Dog’s Leg Corridor, the effect of which was “to enhance the privacy of
the rooms beyond,” you come to the Queen’s Megaron, and the ladies’
apartments. A megaron was a sort of hall with columns across it, open
at one end to let in the light. In other parts of the building, light
was admitted by means of shafts sunk from the roof to the ground floor.
The queen’s megaron is especially luxurious; it is decorated on a
principle which, as Sir Arthur Evans says, was used later by the
Romans of the Empire. The wall paintings, done in perspective, included
a scene of the sea with fishes playing, another of forest life, and a
dado of dancing girls.
It was in this part of the building, too, that the drainage and water
supply put the engineers on their mettle. This was the lowest part of
the sloping hillside on which the palace stood, and the water supply,
which came from the neighbourhood of the North Gate, had to be so
organized as to prevent flooding--a stiff enough problem for engineers
of 4,000 years ago. They solved it by a system of parabolic curves
which subjected the flow to friction. Sinks, lavatories, underground
pipes suggest modern drainage. They, nevertheless, were in use at
Knossos.
The rooms of the building in this south-east part were arranged in
terraces at different levels on the hillside. The fact of the grand
staircase having five flights does not mean that there were five
storeys one on top of the other. As a result of the final restoration
of this staircase by Sir Arthur Evans and Dr. Mackenzie in 1910, it
appears that “the upper landing of the fifth flight does not lead on to
the ground floor of the central court, but answers in height to what
must have been the first floor of the rooms on the other or western
side. It must itself, therefore, have led on to some raised building,
probably a terrace, that ran along the eastern side of the court”
(_Britannia Yearbook_, 1913, “Crete,” p. 269. Dr. R. M. Burrows).
There remains the north-east section. This was occupied by the artists
and workmen of the palace. In one room olives were pressed, the oil
being carried away by a conduit which turns twice at right angles till
it reaches a spout set in the wall lower down the hill, more than fifty
feet away. There the oil-jars were filled, and oil-jars are still
standing in an adjoining room. Another room has been identified by the
imagination of Sir Arthur Evans as the schoolroom. In other rooms pots
were “thrown” and painted; stone vases carved; gold, silver, and bronze
work moulded; sculptures were chiselled; seal stones and gems cut; and
the favourite miniatures in ivory were carved which, in a compass of
ten or eleven inches, reproduced a human form to the minutest detail of
veins and finger-nails.
It will be seen, then, that the palace of Knossos was something more
than the seat of King Minos. It contained a community completely
organized within its walls, and independent of any outside connexion,
after the manner of a mediæval castle.