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Updated: June 5, 2025
Such are the conclusions to which modern discovery in Crete has impelled us with regard to the pictures of the Keftiu at Shêkh 'Abd el-Kûrna. It is indeed a new chapter in the history of the relations of ancient Egypt with the outside world that Dr. Arthur Evans has opened for us. And in this connection some American work must not be overlooked.
In all the chief tombs there are pictured processions of Northerners, Westerners, Easterners, and Southerners, the North being represented by Semites, the East by the men of Punt, the South by negroes, and the West by the Keftiu; and we can compare the men of the Knossos frescoes with their fellow-countrymen as depicted on the tomb-walls of the Theban grandees, and be certain that, allowing for the differences in the style of art, they are essentially the same people.
This misled modern archaeologists down to the time of Dr. Evans's discoveries at Knossos, though how these utterly un-Semitic looking Keftiu could have been Phoenicians was a puzzle to everybody. We now know, of course, that they were Mycenaean or Minoan Cretans, and that the Ptolemaic antiquaries made a mistake in identifying the land of Keftiu with Phoenicia.
Besides the trade in oil, it would seem that there must have been a trade in the purple of the murex, and no doubt the Keftiu mariners found a ready market for this much-prized product long before the Phnicians dreamed of Tyrian purple. Minoan pottery was manifestly also an article of export a fragile cargo for those days.
These Keftiu, then, were the Minoans of the Great Palace period of Crete, the pre-Hellenic Greeks, the Pelasgi of old Greek tradition, in whose time the great civilization of the Minoan Empire reached its culminating point, and was within a little of its final disaster.
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