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Updated: May 16, 2025
At Knossos a carefully hewn tomb held, along with the body of the dead artificer, specimens of the tools of his trade a bronze saw, adze, and chisel. 'A whole carpenter's kit lay concealed in a cranny of a Gournia house, left behind in the owner's hurried flight when the town was attacked and burned. Probably the chief industry of the island was the manufacture and export of olive oil.
It was the same flood which had sunk Knossos and Memphis. It was tranquil, indifferent, knowing us not, reckoning us all one with the Sumerians. They were below it. It had risen above them. Now the time had come when it was laving the base of London. The crew cried out to us that over there was the entrance to the West India Dock. We knew that place in another life. But should Charon joke with us?
If those dark walls could only reveal the story of the doomed lives which they once imprisoned, we should probably be able to realize, even more fully than we do, the shadowed side of all the glittering splendour of Knossos, and the grim element of barbaric cruelty which mingled with a refined artistic taste and a delight in all forms of beauty.
The discoveries which were made during the last quarter of the nineteenth century by Schliemann and his successors at Mycencæ, Tiryns, Orchomenos, and elsewhere, were quite conclusive as to the former existence of a civilization quite equal to, and in all probability the original of, that which is described for us in the Homeric poems; but it was not until the treasures of Knossos and Phæstos began to be revealed in 1900 and the subsequent years that it became manifest that what was known as the Mycenæan civilization was itself only the decadence of a far richer and fuller culture, whose fountain-head and whose chief sphere of development had been in Crete.
In both places the divine spirit is believed to associate itself with sacred pillars, such as the Double Axe pillars at Knossos; in both it is personified as a Woman Goddess, the mother of all life, to whom is added a son, who is also a consort; while the emblems of the ancient cults the guardian lions of the goddess on the hill, the Double Axe, and the triple pillars with perching doves are property common to both Crete and Asia.
The great chest at Knossos which was once decorated with the faïence plaques was, of course, part of the furnishing of a royal home, and we are not to suppose that such magnificent pieces of furniture were common; but in their own fashion the ordinary Minoan houses were doubtless quite adequately appointed, and the great variety of domestic utensils which has survived shows that life in the Bronze Age homes of Crete was by no means a thing of primitive and rough-and-ready simplicity, but was well and carefully organized in its details.
Such an area had been found at Phæstos by the Italian explorers, and it was natural to expect that something corresponding to it would not be lacking at Knossos. When found, it proved to be of later date and of more developed form than the structure at Phæstos; but the general idea was the same.
In none of these great civilizations of the ancient world were splendour and cruelty separated by any great interval from one another, nor was a very remarkable degree of refinement inconsistent with a carelessness of life, and even such a thirst for blood, as we would consider more natural in a savage state; but it is seldom that the evidences of the two things lie so close to one another as where at Knossos the innocent figure of the crocus-gatherer almost covers the very mouth of the horrible pit in which the captives of Minos waited for the day when their lives were to be staked on the hazard of the arena.
This was the entire supersession of the linear script, Class A, by another similar but independent form, which has been named Class B. Somewhat remarkably, although the specimens of the script discovered at the Palace of Knossos and its immediate dependencies are far more numerous than those of Class A, the use of Class B seems, so far as the evidence yet collected goes, to have been entirely confined to Knossos.
The white limestone walls and the shining portals of "Parian marble," described by Strabo as characteristic of the Egyptian labyrinth, have been compared with the shining white selenite or gypsum used at Knossos, and certain general resemblances between the Greek architecture of the Minoan age and the almost contemporary Egyptian architecture of the XIIth Dynasty have been pointed out.* Such resemblances may go to swell the amount of evidence already known, which tells us that there was a close connection between Egyptian and Minoan art and civilization, established at least as early as 2500 B.C.
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