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Hitherto Knossos had yielded only one small and inadequate representation of that seafaring enterprise upon which the Minoan power rested, though even this had, in its own way, a certain suggestiveness of the romance and terror of the sea.
When we turn to poor and mountainous countries like Greece, the conditions are very different. It was an old belief among the Hellenes that in the days before the Trojan War 'the world was too full of people. The increase was doubtless made possible by the trade which developed in the Minoan period, but the sources of food-supply were liable to be interfered with.
Had it been possible to establish synchronisms with both Babylonian and Egyptian chronology, the result would not only have been satisfactory as regards our knowledge of the Minoan periods, but might have proved to have a secondary outcome of the very greatest importance in the settlement of the acute controversy which at present rages round the chronology of ancient Egypt from the earliest period down to the rise of the New Empire.
When we observe, therefore, among the earlier Phoenician and south Syrian antiquities much that was imported, and more that derived its character, from Cyprus and even remoter centres of the Aegean culture of the latest Minoan Age, we cannot regard as fantastic the belief of the Cretan discoverer, Arthur Evans, that the historic Phoenician civilization, and especially the Phoenician script, owed their being in great measure to an immigration from those nearest oversea lands which had long possessed a fully developed art and a system of writing.
The boundaries which Plato assigns to the Empire of the lost State are practically identical with those over which Minoan influence is now known to have spread, while the description of the island itself is such as to make it almost certain that Crete was the original from which it was drawn.
This discovery of oil presses in ancient buildings, by the way, has served in more than one case to arouse speculation as to the antiquity of oil lamps such as were once supposed to belong only to a much later epoch. Whether in the Minoan days they had such lamps or not, it is known that they had at least an oil press and a good one.
In Crete the last period of Middle Minoan had been succeeded by the first of Late Minoan, in which the great palace of the Middle period was being gradually transformed into a still larger and more magnificent structure, which was not to be completed until the succeeding period.
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.
The various seal-stones and impressions, and the gold ring from Mokhlos, are interesting, but it would have been much more satisfactory had we been able to see representations of the Minoan galleys as complete as those which Queen Hatshepsut has left of the ships of her merchant squadron.
Sen-mut's tomb gives us a date about 1480 B.C., and Rekh-ma-ra's may bring us down to 1450 B.C., or thereby. It is somewhat striking that the periods of greatest splendour alike for the Egyptian Empire and for the Minoan should virtually coincide. In either case, the duration of the culmination of splendour was short.
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