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The furniture of the rooms has perished, except in the case of such articles as were of stone or plaster; but the evidence we possess of the comfort and even the luxury of the life of these times in other respects suggests that the townsfolk of Gournia and the other Cretan towns were not lacking in any of the essentials of a comfortable home life.
The houses at Gournia, Palaikastro, and Zakro, which may be taken as typical specimens of ordinary Minoan domestic architecture, must have been much more like modern houses than anything that we know of in Greek towns of the Classical period; and the elevations of Minoan villas preserved in the faïence plaques from the chest at Knossos suggest the frontages of a suburban avenue.
Bronze was smelted in furnaces, the remains of one of which still exist near Gournia; and was cast in moulds, many of which have survived. The tools and weapons which were made of the metal show an average alloy of about ten per cent. of tin. For beaten work, copper in an almost pure state appears to have been used.
Phæstos and Hagia Triada are as devoid of fortification as Knossos. Gournia and Palaikastro are open towns.
She was a goddess alike of the air, the earth, and the underworld, and representations of her have survived in which her various attributes are expressed. As goddess of the air, she is represented by a female figure crowned with doves; as goddess of the underworld, her emblems are the snakes, which we see twined round the faïence figure at Knossos, or the terra-cotta in the Gournia shrine.
At Zakro, Palaikastro, Gournia, and elsewhere, examples of this script have been found, showing that it was prevalent, at all events, throughout Central and Eastern Crete; and in all cases it is associated with remains which belong to the close of Middle Minoan III. and the beginnings of the Late Minoan period.
An expedition sent out by the University of Pennsylvania, under Miss Harriet Boyd, has discovered much of importance to Mycenæan study in the ruins of an ancient town at Gournia in Crete, east of Knossos. Here, however, little has been found that will bear directly on the question of relations between Mycenaean Greece and Egypt.
Gournia had had its modest palace, occupying an area of about half an acre, with its adaptation, on a diminutive scale, of the Knossian Theatral Area, its magazines, and its West Court, where palace and town met, as at Knossos, for business purposes.
One of the characteristic features of the period is the fact that the stirrup-vase, found at Hagia Triada and Gournia in Late Minoan I., but almost totally wanting in Late Minoan II., now becomes common.
The remains of an actual shrine discovered in 1907 close to the Central Court at Knossos show that the fresco does not exaggerate the smallness of the sacred buildings. The Gournia shrine, situated in the centre of the town, is about twelve feet square, and its discoverer believes that the walls of the sacred enclosure may never have stood more than eighteen inches high.
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