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The shortness of stature indicated by the bones is a feature which one would scarcely have inferred from the other line of evidence available the actual representations of men and women of their own race which the Minoans have left in their fresco-paintings; but allowance must, of course, be made for the artistic convention which tended to accentuate slenderness of figure, and therefore to increase apparent height.
The evidence from Phæstos and Hagia Triada tallies with that from Knossos. Everywhere there are the traces of fire on the walls, and a sudden interruption of quiet and luxurious life. The very stone lamps still stand in the rooms at Hagia Triada, and on the stairs of the Basilica at Knossos, as they stood to lighten the last night of the doomed Minoans.
Accordingly, nothing more can be done than to present the fragmentary facts which are apparent. The Minoans, it seems fairly clear, were never, like their successors the Greeks, the possessors of a well-peopled Pantheon; nor was the chief object of their adoration a male deity like the Greek Zeus.
It does not appear that the gold-silver alloy 'electrum, of which the Egyptians were so fond was used by the Minoans. Of the social life of the people in these prehistoric times we know practically nothing. Only one inference, possibly precarious enough, may be made from one of the features of the architecture of Knossos.
That the Minoans were skilled metal-workers was obvious, for many of their ceramic triumphs presented manifest indications of having been adaptations of metal forms; and the gold cups of Vaphio, which, there can be little doubt, came originally from Crete, bore witness to a skill which would not have disgraced the best Renaissance goldsmiths.
Evans conjectures that it was the decay of the trade in oil during the troubled days after the sack of the palaces that drove the Minoans abroad from their island home to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
Part of the ritual evidently consisted of dancing, and music also had its place, as is evident from the figures of the lyre and flute players on the sarcophagus of Hagia Triada. The question of whether the Minoans had any worship of ancesters or sacrifice to the dead is raised by several relics.
Unfortunately, such materials, on which, in all probability, the real literary documents of the Minoans, if there were any such documents, would be written, can scarcely have survived the fire which destroyed the palace, or, if by any chance they escaped that, the subsequent action of the climate; so that whatever genuinely literary fragments may yet come to light must be looked for on the larger tablets, and at the best can scarcely be more than brief extracts.
Thrown back from the frontier of Egypt by the victory of Ramses III., they established themselves on the maritime plain of Palestine, where perhaps the Minoans had already occupied trading-settlements, and there formed a community consisting of five cities, governed by five confederate tyrants.
That such tablets were not the only form in which the Minoans executed the writing of their various documents is evident from the fact already noticed, that inscriptions have been found executed with a reed-pen, and, though those extant are written on clay vessels, it is obvious that the reed-pen was not a very suitable instrument for writing on such materials, and that its existence presupposes some substance more adapted to the cursive writing of a pen parchment, possibly, or papyrus, which could be readily obtained from Egypt.
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