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Updated: May 16, 2025
Of the later pottery of Knossos, which substituted naturalistic motives, executed in monochrome, for the conventional polychrome designs of the Kamares period, many specimens were also found during the excavations of this season.
Even so it would be a matter of no small importance could it be found possible to decipher the records, let us say, of the War Office or Admiralty of Knossos, or to survey the details of royal house-keeping in those far-off days; and it may still be hoped that, when the ardently desired bilingual inscription at last turns up and makes decipherment possible, we may find that documents of more genuinely literary interest are not altogether lacking.
And when they reached that place the master of the ship, thinking that what had been done was not in accordance with the will of King Minos, stayed the ship there. He waited until other ships came from Knossos. And when they came they brought word that Minos would not slay nor demand back Theseus nor the youths and maidens of Athens.
That the citizens of the little town were not entirely ignorant of letters was evidenced by the presence of a tablet bearing an inscription in the linear script of Knossos, Class A, and the beauty of their painted pottery shows that they were by no means lacking in refinement and artistic feeling.
That there existed in the Minoan and Mycenaean ages skilful potters and metal-workers, is shown by the vases of Knossos and the gold cups found at Vaphio near Sparta; that they built habitable buildings and decorated them to the best of their ability is also proved, as, for example, the palace of Tiryns, but it has not yet been shown that their builders reached the degree of skilled design, at which building becomes architecture.
The times of conquest and triumph, when Knossos exacted its human tribute from the vanquished states, Megara or Athens, or from its own far-spread dependencies, had occasionally been broken by periods when victory left its banners, and when the indignities it had inflicted on other states were retaliated on itself.
It is a fortunate circumstance that Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra should have caused them to be portrayed when they did, for in two or three generations more the glory of Knossos had passed away, never to be revived.
In details, we have the frieze of kuanos of the Palace of Alcinous, paralleled by the fragments discovered, as already mentioned, at Tiryns, and by similar friezes at Knossos, while the bronze walls of the same palace have been, if not paralleled, at all events illustrated, by the bronze decorations of the vaults of the great bee-hive tombs at Mycenæ and Orchomenos.
In the representations of the Keftiu, on the walls of Rekh-ma-ra's tomb, the shoes are white, and have bindings of red and blue, and in some cases are delicately embroidered. Such examples as the shoe on an ivory figure found at Knossos, and the terra-cotta model of a shoe found at Sitia, show the daintiness with which the Minoans indulged themselves in the matter of footwear.
'Fire itself, so fatal to other libraries, has thus insured the preservation of the archives of Minoan Knossos. Great care was plainly bestowed upon the storage of the tablets. They were stored in chests and coffers of various materials, and were evidently carefully separated according to the different departments to which their contents referred.
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