Towards the end of the Minoan Age Cretan culture began to spread
generally over the Ægean, and extended to the mainland. Cretan vases
are found as far north as Bœotia, and the many Cretan relics discovered
in Mycenæan tombs were not all war-souvenirs; some of them, belonging
to times before the fall of Knossos, were the peaceful product of
Cretan workmen who had been induced by the Lords of Mycenæ to emigrate.
The men from the North who finally overthrew what we call the
Minoan civilization, became to some extent the repositories of
Cretan tradition. They carried on a less splendid phase of Cretan
civilization, a phase which was distinguished by the name “Mycenæan.”
They had come to Greece from lands still further north, whence they had
themselves been driven to seek new homes. They came down in successive
waves of invasion, the men who formed the first wave being known as the
“Achæans,” the “yellow-haired Achæans” of Homer. It was they--so at
least some authorities hold--who sacked Knossos, and who afterwards,
during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., wandering about in
search of adventure, became the terror of the whole Ægean. An Egyptian
inscription of those times says: “The Isles were restless: disturbed
among themselves.”
Egypt herself felt the effect of the disturbances. From the “isles in
the midst of the Great Green Sea” there no longer came the peaceful
Minoans to pay friendly tribute to the King of Egypt; instead
there came the Achæans, on an unpeaceful mission. Two raids were
made--according to the students of Egyptian records--one about 1230
B.C., another about 1200 B.C. (See H. R. Hall, _The Ancient History of
the Near East_, p. 70. Methuen, 1913.) Mr. Hall gives the more definite
date of c. 1196 for the second invasion. Not long after we find the
Achæans, in Agamemnon’s famous expedition, fighting against the Trojans
in Asia Minor. They took the city at last in 1184 B.C., if we accept
the date which Greek tradition pointed to. It is their deeds in the
latter war that were sung by Homer. Two generations after the Trojan
war, shortly before 1100 B.C., Greece was overrun by the Dorians, who
formed the second great wave of Northern invaders. After that came the
Dark Age, out of which about 800 B.C. emerged classical Greece.
Classical Greece was the fusion of the two main elements of prehistoric
times, the artistic Mediterranean people on the one hand, and the
robust Northern invaders on the other. Just as the fusion was probably
consummated in the Dark Age, so the first poet of classical Greece,
Homer, whether one person or the embodiment of many, heralded their new
life in poems which seemed to take their subject from that Dark Age.
What Homer wrote was probably less legendary than historical. Whether
the traditions of the Minoan Age in Crete were kept alive through the
Dark Age in Ionia, whither it is thought that they were carried by
Achæan refugees at the time of the Dorian invasion, which extended
to Crete, or whether they remained dormant in Crete itself, and in
the Mycenæan centres of the mainland of Greece, it is in either case
certain that they were well preserved, for their traces are plainly
to be seen throughout Greek civilization. From the Greek writers they
descended to the poets of Rome, and so to the art and literature of
Europe.
INDEX
Achæans, 90, 91, 92
Ægean People, 20
Ægean Sea, 27
Ægeus, King, 27
Androgeos, 27
Architecture, 48-54
Ariadne, 27, 37
Babylonia, 16
Baths, 51;
or chapels, 51, 52
Bosanquet, Professor R. C., 73
Bronze Age, 21, 49, 54
Bull in Minoan worship, 78
Bull leaping, 35
Burial rights, 79-82
Burrows, Dr. Ronald Montagu, 8, 9, 22, 33, 39, 43, 46, 51, 52
Chapels (or baths?), 51, 52
Clay tablets, 33
Command of the Seas, 47
Commerce, 24, 26
Conway, Professor R. S., 10, 74
Cornwall, 21
Craniology, 84
Cretan race, physical characteristics, 83
Cupbearer, 14, 39
Dædalus, 28, 37
Dancing place, 35
Dark Ages, 15, 16, 23, 92
Dating, 24;
Egyptian equations, 25
Delos, 29
“Discovery,” 8
Dog’s Leg Corridor, 41
Dorians, 91, 92
Double Axe, 78
Drainage, 42
Dress, 86
Dromos, 80
Dussaud, M., 46
Egypt, 16
Evans, Sir Arthur, 7, 10, 13, 19, 29, 31, 32, 38, 42, 50, 52, 65, 67,
71, 73, 81
Fortifications, 30, 31
Fresco-painting, 53
Gournia, 54
Great staircase, 40, 41, 42, 50
Grote, 17
Grundy, Dr., 9
Gypsum, 49, 51, 52
Hagia Triada, 50, 52
Halbherr (Dr.), 14
Hall, E. H., 54
Hall, H. R., 31, 45, 91
Hall of Colonnades, 41
Hall of Double Axes, 41
Hawes, C. H. & H. B., 38, 45
Heaton, Noel, 34, 53
Herodotus, 26, 89
Hissarlik, 17
Hogarth (Mr.), 76
Homer, 15, 20, 22, 30, 40, 55, 67, 91, 92
Horses, 87
Iron Age, 54, 81
Kamares Pottery, 61
Kingsley, Charles, 14
Knossos, 13, 14, 15, 20, 22, 28;
palace, 30-43;
relations with Phæstos, 44-47;
main drain, 50
Labyrinth, 27, 29, 37
Lang, Andrew, 67
Lighting arrangements, 41, 52, 53
Lime plaster, 53
Lycia, 68, 89
Mackenzie, Dr., 42, 58
Mediterranean race, 86
Minoan earthquake, 32
Minoan Empire, 27, 28, 30
Minoan Libraries, 33
Minoan Periods, 21, 22
Minos, 26, 37;
Supreme Judge, 40, 43
Minotaur, 27
Mosso, Angelo, 21, 49, 51
Mycenæ, 18, 30
Mycenæan civilization, 18, 90
Myres, Professor, 61, 84
National Home Reading Magazine, 8
Nomenclature, 22
Obsidian, 26
Palace style, 32
Palaikastro, 48, 54
Pernier, Dr. L., 48
Phæstos, 13, 20, 21;
relations with Knossos, 44-47, 52
Phæstos Disc, 14
Philistines, 28
Phœnicia, 85
Pottery, 21, 25;
firing furnace and potter’s wheel, 26, 55-64;
value of in archæology, 55;
for purposes of dating, 57;
Stone Age, 58;
Bronze Age, 59;
polishing, 58;
paint, 59;
kiln, 59;
wheel, 60;
Kamares, 61;
“trickle” ornament, 62;
lily vase, 62;
naturalism, 64;
octopus vase, 64;
hardware, 64
Pylos, 9
Queen’s Megaron, 41
Religion, 75, 82;
Mother Goddess, 75;
Velchanos, 75, 76;
mortality of gods, 76, 77;
temples, 77;
family shrines, 77;
cult objects, 78, 79;
double axe, 78;
horns of consecration, 79;
tombs and form of burial, 79-82;
tholos, 80;
pit-cave, 80;
pot burial, 81;
graves, 81;
cremation, 81
Rhitsona, 9
Ridgeway, Sir William, 87, 88
Schliemann, 17, 18, 19, 22
Socrates, 29
Spencer, Herbert, 89
Sphacteria, 9
Stone Age, 20, 44, 48, 57
Theatre, 35
Tholos tomb, 80
Throne room, 39, 52
Thucydides, 9, 26
Tiryns, 18, 30
Tomb of the double axes, 81
Trojan war, 91
Tylissos, 52, 53
Veniselos, 13
Vrokastro, 54
War equipment, 86
Water supply, 42, 50, 51
Women, 88, 89
Wood, Use of in building, 49
Workrooms of palace, 43
Writing, origin of, 65-74;
clay tablets, 68;
pictographs, 69;
hieroglyphs, 70;
determinatives, 71;
linear script, 71;
pen and ink, 72;
inventories, 72, 73;
numerals, 73;
Præsos inscription, 73