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The Twelfth Dynasty is placed by Professor Petrie at about 3400 B.C., by the traditional dating about 2500 B.C., while the modern German school brings down the date as low as 2000 B.C. No more can be said than that Middle Minoan II. certainly does not begin earlier than 3400 B.C., and can scarcely begin later than 2000 B.C. The period closes with the evidence of a great catastrophe at Knossos, in which the palace was burned; and, as already mentioned, the fact that Phæstos shows no evidence of such a disaster at this point has roused the suspicion that the Lords of Phæstos may have been responsible for the destruction of the greater palace.
And outside was the garden, with its lemon-trees growing in vast jars like the jars of Knossos but marked with Barberini bees; its white and red camellias be-carpeting the soft grass with their fallen petals; its dark and tragic recesses where melancholy trees hung above piled fragments of the great Domitian villa whose ruins lay everywhere beneath our feet; its olive gardens sloping to the west, and open to the sun, open, too, to white, nibbling goats, and wandering bambini; its magical glimpse of St.
Late Minoan II., with all its triumphs of architecture and art, was brought to an abrupt close by the sack of the palaces, probably about 1400 B.C., and the great frescoes of the palace at Knossos were the last evidences of a magnificence which was never to be revived again on Cretan soil. During this period intercourse between Crete and Egypt must have been frequent and close.
The dress is further remarkable for a tight ring-like girdle which greatly compresses the waist and emphasises the broad hips. The little statue is about ten inches high, and was found by Sir Arthur Evans at Knossos, the ancient buried city the capital of Crete, in the Later Palace.
In view of this connection, and the known close relations between Crete and Egypt, from the end of the XIIth Dynasty to the end of the XVIIIth, we might have hoped to recover at Knossos a bilingual inscription in Cretan and Egyptian hieroglyphs which would give us the key to the Minoan script and tell us what we so dearly wish to know. But this hope has not yet been realized.
A considerable portion of the area of the palace at Knossos, dating from the preceding age, is now covered up by new construction, and the second palace begins to assume the form which was completed in the subsequent period.
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.
The statuette of Sebek-user, son of Ab-nub, evidenced a connection between Knossos and Egypt in the time of the later Middle Kingdom. This cartouche of Khyan shows that the connection was maintained in that dark period of Egyptian history which lay between the fall of the Middle Kingdom and the rise of the Empire.
Late Minoan II. To Late Minoan II. belong the great glories of the second palace at Knossos, which arrived at its greatest splendour just before the time at which it was to be destroyed.
The original is a statuette in faïence, ten inches high, and was discovered by Sir Arthur Evans in the palace at Knossos in Crete.
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