THE DESTROYERS
The Empire of the Sea-Kings had not been immune from disaster and
defeat any more than any other great Empire of the ancient world.
The times of conquest and triumph, when Knossos exacted its human
tribute from the vanquished states, Megara or Athens, or from its
own far-spread dependencies, had occasionally been broken by periods
when victory left its banners, and when the indignities it had
inflicted on other states were retaliated on itself. Once at least
in the long history of the palace at Knossos, if not twice, there
had come a disastrous day when the Minoan fleet had either been
defeated or eluded, when some invading force had landed and swept
up the valley, had overcome what resistance could be made by the
guard of the unfortified palace, and had ebbed back again to its
ships, leaving death and fire-blackened walls behind it. The Second
Middle Minoan period closes with the evidence of such a general
catastrophe, in which the palace was sacked and fired, and there
are also traces which suggest that the end of the preceding period
was marked by a similar disaster.
But these catastrophes, whether the agents of them were mere sea-rovers,
making a daring raid upon the eyrie of the great sea-power, or
the warriors of rival mainland states, eager to avenge upon their
enemy what they themselves had suffered at her hands, or, as Dr.
Evans and other explorers incline rather to believe, Cretans from
Phæstos, whose purpose was merely to overthrow the ruling dynasty,
scarcely interrupted the current of Minoan development. If the
enemy came from without, he came only to destroy and plunder, not
to occupy, and, having done his work, departed; if from within
the Empire, his triumph made no breach in the continuity of the
Minoan tradition. The palace rose again from its ashes, greater
and more glorious than before, and men of the same stock carried
on the work that had been checked for a while by the rough hand of
war. The men of the Third Middle Minoan period reared the beginnings
of the second palace on the site where the first had stood, and in
the relics of their arts and crafts the same spirit which informed
the earlier period still prevails, with no greater modifications
than such as come naturally to the art of any nation by the mere
lapse of time.
From the beginning of Middle Minoan III. to the end of Late Minoan
II.--a period, that is to say, of either some 500 or almost 2,000
years, according to the scheme of Egyptian chronology which we
may adopt--the civilization of Crete apparently followed a course
of even and peaceful development. At Knossos, Phæstos, and Hagia
Triada the great palaces slowly grew to their final glory. The
art that had produced the beautiful polychrome Kamares ware passed
away, and was succeeded by the naturalism which has left us the Blue
Boy who gathers the white crocuses, and the faïence reliefs of the
Temple Repositories, a naturalism which, with various modifications
in style and material, persists to the end of Late Minoan I. In the
midst of this period (Late Minoan I.) come what are perhaps the
highest developments of Minoan art in the shape of the steatite vases
of Hagia Triada, Boxer, Harvester, and Chieftain. On the mainland
the kindred culture of Mycenæ was rising to its culmination, and
the art represented in the Circle-Graves was almost in the fulness
of its bloom. Naturalism declines in its turn, and is succeeded by
the Later Palace style, more grandiose, more mannered, and less
free than that which had preceded it. It was in the Later Palace
period (Late Minoan II.) that the miniature frescoes were painted,
to preserve for us the strangely modern style of the Minoan Court,
with its flounced and furbelowed dames. Naturalism, though failing,
was still capable of great things, and its last efforts in the palace
at Knossos gave us the magnificent reliefs of painted stucco, such
as the bull's head and the King with the peacock plumes. Over the
seas, the Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty were setting down on
their tomb walls those likenesses of the Keftiu which have helped
us to the date of this last development of Minoan greatness.
[Illustration XXII: THEATRAL AREA, KNOSSOS: RESTORED (_p_. 100)
_G. Maraghiannis_]
Probably the power and grandeur of the Empire was never more imposing
than during the hundred years before 1400 B.C. The House of Minos
at Knossos had reached its full development, and stood in all its
splendour, an imposing mass of building, crowning the hill of Kephala
with its five storeys around the great Central. Court, its Theatral
Area, and its outlying dependencies. Within its spacious porticoes and
corridors the walls glowed with the brilliant colours of innumerable
frescoes and reliefs in coloured plaster. The Cup-Bearer, the Queen's
Procession, the Miniature Frescoes of the Palace Sports, stood
out in all their freshness. Magnificent urns in painted pottery,
with reliefs like those of the great papyrus vase (Plate XXIII.),
decorated the halls and courts, and were rivalled by huge stone
amphoræ, exquisitely carved. The King and his courtiers were served
in costly vessels of gold, silver, and bronze _repoussé_ work.
The Empire of the Sea-Kings was at its apogee, and on every hand
there were the evidences of security and luxury.
But, as in the contemporary Egypt of Amenhotep III. a similar
development in all the comforts and luxuries of civilized life
was swiftly followed by the downfall under Akhenaten, so in Crete
the luxury of Late Minoan II. was only the prelude to its great
and final disaster. Exactly when the catastrophe came we cannot
tell. The Cretan Empire was certainly still existent in all its
glory in 1449 B.C., when Amenhotep II., the son of the great Tahutmes
III., came to the throne, for Rekh-ma-ra, the Vizier of Tahutmes,
in whose tomb the visit of the Keftian ambassadors is pictured,
survived, as we know, into the reign of Amenhotep. The twenty-six
years of Amenhotep II.'s reign, and the almost nine of Tahutmes
IV., bring us to the accession of Amenhotep III. in 1414, and the
thirty-six years of the latter take us to 1379 B.C. or thereby,
when the heretic Akhenaten, whose reign was to witness the downfall
of the Egyptian Empire in Syria, ascended the throne. Somewhere
within these seventy years the Empire of the Minoans passed away
in fire and bloodshed, and we shall probably not go far wrong if
we suppose that the great catastrophe came about the year 1400
B.C. The conclusion of Dr. Evans is that 'it seems reasonable to
suppose that the overthrow at Knossos had taken place not later
than the first half of the fourteenth century.'[*] Mrs. H. B. Hawes
places the fall of Knossos at 1450; but Rekh-ma-ra must have still
been living at that date, and, as Professor Burrows remarks, 'it
would at least be a strange coincidence if Egyptian artists were
painting the glories of the Palace at the very moment when they
were passing away.'
[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' pp. 52, 53.]
That there was a huge disaster, which broke for ever the power of
the Sea-Kings, is unmistakable. The Minoan kingdom did not fall
from over-ripeness and decay, as was the case with so many other
empires. The latest relics of its art before the catastrophe show
no signs of decadence; the latest specimens of its linear writing
show a marked advance on those of preceding periods. A civilization
in full strength and growth was suddenly and fatally arrested.
Everywhere throughout the palace at Knossos there are traces of
a vast conflagration. The charred ends of beams and pillars, the
very preservation of the clay tablets with their enigmatic records,
a preservation due, probably, to the tremendous heat to which they
were exposed by the furious blazing of the oil in the store jars
of the magazines, the traces of the blackening of fire upon the
walls--everything tells of an overwhelming tragedy. Nor was the
catastrophe the result of an accident. There is no mistaking the
significance of the fact that in the palace scarcely a trace of
precious metal, and next to no trace of bronze has been discovered.
Fire at Knossos was accompanied by plunder, and the plundering
was thorough. A few scraps of gold-leaf, and the little deposit
of bronze vessels that had been preserved from the plunderers by
the fact that the floor of the room in which they were found had
sunk in the ruin of the conflagration, are evidences, better than
absolute barrenness would have been, to the fact that the place
was pillaged with minute thoroughness, and the unfinished stone jar
in the sculptor's workshop tells its own tale of a sudden summons
from peaceful and happy toil to the stern realities of warfare.
The evidence from Phæstos and Hagia Triada tallies with that from
Knossos. Everywhere there are the traces of fire on the walls,
and a sudden interruption of quiet and luxurious life. The very
stone lamps still stand in the rooms at Hagia Triada, and on the
stairs of the Basilica at Knossos, as they stood to lighten the
last night of the doomed Minoans. Of course there are no records,
and if there were we could not read them; but it is easy to imagine
the disastrous sea-fight off the mouth of the Kairatos River, or
elsewhere along the coast, the wrecks of the once invincible Minoan
fleet driven ashore in hopeless ruin in the shallow bay, like the
Athenian fleet at Syracuse, the swift march of the mainland conquerors
up the valley, the brief, desperate resistance of the palace guards,
and then the horrors of the sack, and the long column of flushed
victors winding down to their ships, laden with booty, and driving
with them crowds of captive women. Similar scenes must have been
enacted at Phæstos and Hagia Triada, either by other forces of
invaders, or by the same host sweeping round the island.
From this overwhelming disaster the Minoan Empire never recovered.
The palace at Knossos was never reoccupied as a palace, at least on
anything like the scale of its former magnificence. The invaders
possibly departed as swiftly as they had come, or if, as seems
more probable, they eventually established themselves as a ruling
caste among the subject Minoans, they chose for their dwellings
other sites than those of the old palaces. The broken fragments of
the Minoan race crept back after the sack to the blackened ruins
of their holy and beautiful house, not to rebuild it, but to divide
its stately rooms and those of its dependencies by rude walls into
poor dwelling-houses, where they lived on--a very different life
from that of the golden days before the sack.
[Illustration XXIII: GREAT JAR WITH PAPYRUS RELIEFS (_p_. 206)]
In their own way they strove to continue, possibly under the modifying
influence of the art tradition of their conquerors, the great story
of the art of Knossos. There is no abrupt break in the style of the
pottery and other articles belonging to the latest Minoan period, as
compared with that of the days before the catastrophe. Technical skill
is almost as great as ever; it is degeneration in the inspiration of
the art that has begun. The spirit of the nation has been broken,
and its art is no longer living. Though the old models are followed,
it is with less complete understanding, with a perpetually increasing
interval, and with less and less fidelity. 'With the inability to
create new ideas of art and life,' says Dr. Mackenzie, 'is coupled
the slavish adherence to inherited tradition and custom in both.
Nothing new is produced, and nothing old is changed.'[*] 'For Crete
the sack is Ægospotami, Late Minoan III., the long months that
culminate in the surrender of Athens; the sack is Leipzig, Late
Minoan III., the slow closing in on Paris that leads up to the
abdication of Napoleon.'[**] Finally, even the technique fails, and
the great art which gave to the world the figures of the Cup-Bearer
and the King with the Peacock Plumes dies out in monstrosities.
[Footnote *: _Annual of the British School at Athens_, vol. xiii.,
p. 426.]
[Footnote **: R. M. Burrows, 'The Discoveries in Crete,' p. 100.]
The long decay was to some extent arrested by the coming of other
waves of invaders, probably Achæans, to whose influence may be
attributed the change in customs which begins to show itself in the
post-Minoan period. Burning begins to take the place of inhumation
as a means of disposing of the dead; Continental types of weapons
make their appearance in the tombs; iron swords and daggers are
even found. In life the men who use these weapons are clad, not
with the Minoan loin-cloth, but with the garments which we associate
with the Greeks of the Classical period, garments which require
the use of the fibula or safety-pin to fasten them. The potter's
art begins to find new motives, and to develop the use of the human
form as a type of adornment in a manner almost entirely foreign to
the Minoan tradition. At last, perhaps four centuries after the
fall of Knossos, comes the great tidal wave of Dorian invasion,
engulfing the work alike of conquerors and conquered, and blowing
out all the landmarks of the ancient cultures.
And through all these changes, and ever since, the ruined House of
Minos remained absolutely deserted, until, more than 3,000 years
after the sack, its echoes were wakened by the spades and picks
of Dr. Evans's workmen. Around the ruins grim and cruel legends
swiftly grew up. The old traditions, dimly surviving in the minds
of the native Cretans, of the bull-fight and the prize-ring, and
the tribute of toreadors from the conquered nations, seemed to be
corroborated by the very decorations of the palace walls, still
visible amidst the ruins, and around them were woven the stories
which have come down to us as legends of early Greece. 'Let us
place ourselves for a moment,' says Dr. Evans, 'in the position of
the first Dorian colonists of Knossos after the great overthrow,
when features now laboriously uncovered by the spade were still
perceptible amid the mass of ruins. The name [Labyrinth] was still
preserved, though the exact meaning, as supplied by the native
Cretan dialect, had been probably lost. Hard by the western gate,
in her royal robes, to-day but partially visible, stood Queen Ariadne
herself--and might not the comely youth in front of her be the
hero Theseus, about to receive the coil of thread for his errand
of liberation down the mazy galleries beyond? Within, fresh and
beautiful on the walls of the inmost chambers, were the captive
boys and maidens locked up here by the tyrant of old. At more than
one turn rose a mighty bull, in some cases, no doubt, according
to the favourite Mycenæan motive, grappled with by a half-naked
man. The type of the Minotaur itself as a man-bull was not wanting
on the soil of prehistoric Knossos, and more than one gem found
on this site represents a monster with the lower body of a man
and the forepart of a bull.
'One may feel assured that the effect of these artistic creations
on the rude Greek settler of those days was not less than that of
the disinterred fresco on the Cretan workman of to-day. Everything
around--the dark passages, the lifelike figures surviving from an
older world, would conspire to produce a sense of the supernatural.
It was haunted ground, and then, as now, "phantasms" were about. The
later stories of the grisly King and his man-eating bull sprang,
as it were, from the soil, and the whole site called forth a
superstitious awe. It was left severely alone by the new-comers.
Another Knossos grew up on the lower slopes of the hill to the
north, and the old Palace site became "a desolation and hissing."
Gradually earth's mantle covered the ruined heaps, and by the time
of the Romans the Labyrinth had become nothing more than a tradition
and a name.'[*]
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, pp. 131, 132.]
Who, then, were the invaders who, whether they remained as a ruling
caste in the land which they had conquered, or merely destroyed
and departed, inflicted upon the Minoan civilization a blow from
which it never recovered? The Cretans of Præsos, whose story of the
Sicilian expedition of Minos has already been mentioned, stated to
Herodotus that, after that great disaster, 'to Crete, thus destitute
of inhabitants ... other men, and especially the Grecians, went, and
settled there.' As Mr. Hogarth has pointed out, 'the men of Præsos
were no doubt, in the true saga spirit, foreshortening history by
crystallizing a process into a single event.' It is very improbable,
in view of the evidence afforded by the long survival and gradual
decay of the Minoan tradition, that there was any immediate general
occupation of the island on the part of the conquering race. The
process which finally resulted in the island of Crete becoming
'the mixed land,' with a heterogeneous population of Pelasgians,
Dorians, Achæans, and other tribes, must have been a gradual one,
extending, in all probability, over several centuries. Any large
influx of foreign elements was impossible so long as Crete was
dominated by a great and warlike central power; but once that power
was broken by the catastrophe in which the Palaces of Knossos and
Phæstos were overthrown, there was nothing to hinder the gradual
drifting in of the wandering tribes of the Ægean and of the North.
How that catastrophe came about we can see, not with any certainty
of detail, but with some amount of probability as to its general
outlines, from that echo of a period of wandering and strife in
the Mediterranean area which comes to us from the records of Ramses
III. at Medinet Habu. 'The isles were restless, disturbed among
themselves,' and it was one of the later waves of that storm which
broke itself against the armed strength of Egypt about 1200 B.C.
Probably the process of migration had been going on for several
generations. The rude but vigorous tribes of the North had been
pressing down upon the races which had created that remarkable
Bronze Age civilization of the Danubian area, whose relics have
been coming to light of late years; and these in their turn, under
the pressure from the North, had been moving down towards the
Mediterranean, driving before them the peoples, probably of kindred
stock to themselves, who had occupied the lands of the Mycenæan
civilization.
We know that long before the Homeric poems took shape the Achæans
had established themselves as the ruling caste in the Argolid,
in Laconia, and elsewhere; and that the pressure had begun even
while Mycenæ was at the height of its power is suggested by the
figures on one of the steles of the Circle-Graves, where a Mycenæan
chieftain in his chariot is pursuing an enemy whose leaf-shaped
sword shows that he was one of the Danubian race. The Mycenæan
was the victor in the first shock; but the steady pressure of the
tribes from the North was not to be permanently resisted, and the
end was the establishment of an alien race in power at Mycenæ. The
Mycenæan stele, where the chief of the ancient stock pursues his
Northern assailant, has its _motif_ reversed in the archaic Greek
stele discovered by Dr. Pernier at Gortyna, where a big Northerner
with round shield and greaves threatens a tiny Minoan or Mycenæan,
crouching behind his figure-of-eight shield. The two rude pictures
may be taken as typical of the beginning and the end of the process
which resulted in the establishment of the race of Agamemnon at
'Golden Mycenæ.' Pressed upon thus by the warlike Achæans, perhaps
already forced from their homes on the mainland, the Mycenæans
of Tiryns and Mycenæ were obliged to fare forth in search of new
dwelling-places. Not unnaturally the emigrants may have turned to
the land from which their civilization had originally sprung, in
the expectation that the Cretans would not refuse a welcome and a
home to men of their own stock. Seemingly they were disappointed in
their expectation. The Minoans, or, at least, the Minoan rulers, were
not prepared to admit peacefully the incursion of this new element
into their kingdom; and the wanderers, under the spur of desperate
need, took by force what was denied to them as suppliants. So, in
all probability, the glory of the Minoan Empire was destroyed by
the hands of its own children, the descendants of men whom Knossos
herself had sent forth to hold her mainland colonies.[*]
[Footnote *: _Cf_. Dr. Mackenzie, _Annual of the British School
at Athens_, vol. xiii., pp. 424, 425.]
In such circumstances there would be no sudden eclipse of the ancient
culture. Modified slightly, if at all, by the influx of what, after
all, was a kindred element, it would persist, as the evidence shows
it persisted, until it perished of natural decay. Even when the
Achæans, and, later still, the Dorians, followed in the wake of the
Mycenæan immigrants, though their advent brought, as we have seen,
important changes in customs and in art motives, the ancient native
culture remained the fundamental element of the newer civilization.
It has been pointed out by Mr. Hogarth that the Geometric vases
of the early Iron Age in Crete exhibit in their decoration merely
stylized Minoan motives, while 'the shields and other bronzes of the
Idæan Cave, the latest of which come down probably to the ninth
or even the eighth century, are artistic descendants of Minoan
masterpieces modified by some element of uncouthness which was
probably of Northern origin.'[*]
[Footnote *: _Fortnightly Review_, October, 1908, p. 602.]
Thus in slow decay, after the great catastrophe, passed away the
great civilization of the Minoan Empire. Not all of the tribes
which had owned the dominion of the House of Minos were content,
however, to remain as subjects to the mainland conquerors. The
destruction of the central power at Knossos must have involved, as
Dr. Evans has suggested,[*] the collapse of much of the commerce
on which the island of the Hundred Cities depended for the support
of its great population. Already in the reign of Amenhotep III.
of Egypt, that powerful monarch had been obliged to establish a
special coastguard service at the mouths of the Nile to protect his
trade-routes against the Lycian pirates. When the Minoan fleet was
no longer in being to police the Ægean, these and other piratical
races must have quickly driven the Cretan merchant marine from the
seas. The purple fisheries and the oil trade would dwindle and
die, and the population which had been supported by them would be
driven from a land which could no longer maintain it. The colonizing
movement which has left traces of Minoan culture in Anatolia, in
Palestine, in Sicily, and even in Spain, began, no doubt, at an
earlier period, when the Empire of the Sea-Kings was in its full
strength; but it probably received a considerable impulse at this
time of forced emigration. The sudden introduction of the same
culture into Cyprus at some period after 1400 B.C. has been referred
to conquest by men of the Ægean race, who may very well have been the
men of Knossos driven forth by the pressure of altered conditions
to find a new home for themselves.
[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' p. 59.]
The Mycenæan pottery found at Tell-el-Amarna shows that there was
still an opening in Egypt for the products of Ægean art at least as
late as the reign of Akhenaten; and it is more than probable that
in Egypt many of the _émigrés_ of the Minoan _débâcle_ found a home.
The art of the reign of Akhenaten is characterized by the somewhat
sudden outburst of a naturalistic style almost entirely foreign to
the Egyptian tradition; and, as Mr. Hall foresaw eleven years ago,
it has been suggested[*] that the naturalism of Tell-el-Amarna
owes some of its inspiration to the influence of the fugitives
who brought with them from Crete the traditions of the great art
of Knossos. Such a suggestion is no longer so improbable as it
seemed to be in 1901, when it was still a tenable theory that the
new development of Egyptian art was due to Mesopotamian influence,
and came from Mitanni with Queen Tyi, the wife of Amenhotep III.
Now that it is certain that Tyi was no Mitannian, but a native
Egyptian, that door is closed, and we must suppose either that
Egyptian art suddenly and spontaneously awakened to a new style of
vision and execution, from which, again, it as suddenly departed,
or else that some foreign influence was working strongly upon the
rigid Egyptian convention, modifying and vivifying it. If a foreign
influence, why not the influence of the Minoan _émigrés_, whose
art we at least know to have been capable of such an effect? Of
course, it is, after all, matter of surmise, and perhaps the chances
are rather in favour of the new art of Akhenaten's time having
been a genuinely native growth, influenced and inspired by the
new ideas with which the heretic King was seeking to leaven the
national life; but it is certainly far from unlikely that the break-up
of the Minoan Empire did influence the art of Egypt, and perhaps
that or other nations, in a manner something similar to, though on
a smaller scale than, that in which the capture of Constantinople
influenced the culture of Europe in the fifteenth century.
[Footnote *: R. M. Burrows, 'The Discoveries in Crete,' p. 96.]
We have already seen the evidence for the migration of Minoan tribes
of a later age in the assault of the Zakkaru and Pulosathu upon
Egypt 200 years after the fall of Knossos, and the establishment
of the latter tribe as an independent power upon the coast of
Palestine--events which may have been due to the advance of another
wave of Northern colonists upon the shores of Crete. One more glimpse
of the dying sea-power of the Cretan race, now itself disorganized
and predatory, is given us by the Golenischeff papyrus, which tells,
among other adventures of the unfortunate Wen-Amon, envoy of Her-hor,
the priest-King of Upper Egypt (_circa_ 1100 B.C.), how the Egyptian
ambassador was threatened with capture by eleven ships of Zakru
pirates, who put into Byblos when he was about to sail thence.
Whether these were genuine Minoans or not, it is impossible to
tell; their immediate connection was apparently with Dor, on the
coast of Palestine; but their name suggests the town of Zakro, in
Eastern Crete, and it is not unlikely that they belonged to the
same race as the Zakkaru of the time of Ramses III.
Thereafter the Egyptian records are silent as to the scattered
tribes of Crete, just as they had been silent since the rise of
the Nineteenth Dynasty as to the organized Empire of the Keftians.
The eleven shiploads of Zakru sea-robbers are the last degenerate
representatives of the great marine which, under the Kings of the
House of Minos, had once held the undisputed Empire of the Ægean.
The ring of Minos was destined to lie for long ages beneath the
waves before the descendants of Theseus brought it up again.