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Updated: May 31, 2025
These urns are made of baked clay, and are shaped somewhat like the ordinary steatite ollas found in the California coast graves, but the bottoms instead of being round run down to a sharp apex; on the top was a cover, the upper part of which also terminated in an apex, and around the border, near where it rested on the edge of the vessel, are indented scroll ornamentations.
Round or bean-shaped, pierced for suspension, usually soft stone, e.g. slate or steatite. Sometimes hard, as hematite or rock crystal. Two animals ranged like heraldic supporters characteristic. Obsidian. Natural glass, volcanic, black. Source Melos. Used for knives throughout Bronze Age.
In the case of the Hagia Triada vases the gold-coated steatite had no charms for the plunderer, who merely stripped off the gold-leaf and left its foundation to testify to us of the skill of these ancient craftsmen. The largest of the three stands 18 inches in height. It is divided by horizontal bands into four zones.
Holder says of the inhabitants of Santa Catalina that although their implements were of stone, wood, or shell "the skill with which they modelled and made their weapons, mortars, and steatite ollas, their rude mosaics of abalone shells, and their manufacture of pipes, medicine-tubes, and flutes give them high rank among savages."
In our excursions about the island, we did not meet with any kind of animal; a magpie, and another larger bird, probably attracted by the smoke of our fire, paid us a visit from the shore, and were the only living things seen during our stay. The rock constituting the cliffs along the shore where we were encamped, is a talcous rock, or steatite, with brown spar.
The zoologist carried a meerschaum; the guides smoked out of Indian calumets of the celebrated steatite, or red claystone. Mike had his dark-looking "dudeen," and Jake his pipe of corn "cob" and cane-joint shank.
Great bowls and urns, toy canoes, mortars and pestles, of serpentine, sandstone, and steatite, wrought with a lost art, if, indeed, the art had ever been known beyond this island, and baked to richest dyes, were placed at the head and feet of skeletons more lofty in stature than their fellows.
There are the varieties of three minerals, which are very commonly met with in greater or less abundance in mineralogical trips: they are of calcite, steatite, and quartz. They occur in so many modifications of form, color, and condition that one might speedily form a cabinet of these, if they were taken when met with, and imagine it to be of great value. The first of these is calcite.
But from the great rhyton found at Hagia Triada, from a steatite relief found at Knossos in Igor, and from various seal-impressions, we know that boxing was one of the favourite sports of the Minoans, as it was of the Homeric and the classical Greeks; and the Theatral Area may have served well enough for such exhibitions as those in which Epeus knocked out Euryalus, and Odysseus smashed the jaw of Irus.
At Hagia Triada the very large deposits of linear writing larger, indeed, than the representation of Class A at Knossos belong to the First Late Minoan period, and are contemporary with the wonderful work of the steatite vases and the fresco of the hunting-cat; while at Phæstos the final catastrophe of the palace took place at a time when the linear writing of Class A was still in full use.
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