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Updated: May 16, 2025
The chief aid in the formation of such an idea is given by the remains of the pottery which have survived from each period, and it is largely from the classification of the pottery at Knossos and other sites that the scheme adopted by Dr. Evans and other workers has been derived.
Everywhere throughout the palace at Knossos there are traces of a vast conflagration.
Silver is comparatively scarce on Minoan, as on other Ægean sites, though a number of fine silver vessels have been found at Knossos and elsewhere; and this scarcity is perhaps due, not only to the greed of the plunderers, but also to the fact that, during the greater part of the period covered by the Minoan Empire, the metal itself was actually scarcer and more valuable than gold.
The saffron-flower, various vessels, tripods, and balances, probably for the weighing of precious metals, occur most frequently among these determinatives. At Knossos this form of linear writing, Dr. Evans's Class A, appears to have had a comparatively short vogue.
'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.
Evans two years ago at Knossos, and a huge copper jug with four ring-handles round the sides. All these vases are specifically and definitely Mycenaean, or rather, following the new terminology, Minoan. They are of Greek manufacture and are carried on the shoulders of Pelasgian Greeks.
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. That there was a huge disaster, which broke for ever the power of the Sea-Kings, is unmistakable.
Of course, one must suppose that the poorer quarters of the town would scarcely be represented on a fabric designed for use in the palace; but the actual remains of a Minoan town, unearthed at Gournia by Mrs. H. B. Hawes, show that that town, at least, was largely composed of houses which must have pretty closely resembled those on the porcelain plaques of Knossos.
One thing at least is abundantly clear that, as Dr. Evans put it in the summary of his first year's results, 'that great early civilization was not dumb, but, on the contrary, had means of expression amply adequate to its needs. We have already seen how the discoveries of the first year's work at Knossos settled that question for ever, and revealed the existence of more than one form of writing.
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."
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