The Sea-Kings of Crete

uest and triumph, when Knossos exacted its human tribute from the vanquished states, Megara or Athens, or from its own far-spread dependencies, had o

the valley, had overcome what resistance could be made by the guard of the unfortified palace, and had ebbed back again to its ships, leaving death and fire-blackened walls behind it. The Second Middle Minoan pe

scarcely interrupted the current of Minoan development. If the enemy came from without, he came only to destroy and plunder, not to occupy, and, having done his work, departed; if from within the Empire, his triumph made no breach in the continuity of the Minoan tradition. The palace rose again from its ashes, greater and more glorious than before, and men of the same stock carried on the work t

uralism which, with various modifications in style and material, persists to the end of Late Minoan I. In the midst of this period (Late Minoan I.) come what are perhaps the highest developments of Minoan art in the shape of the steatite vases of Hagia Triada, Boxer, Harvester, and Chieftain. On the mainland the kindred culture of Mycen? was rising to its culmination, and the art represented in the Circle-Graves was almost in the fulness of its bloom. Naturalism declines in its turn, and is succeeded by the Later Palace style, more grandiose, more mannered, and less free than that which had preceded it. It was

, KNOSSOS: RE

raghi

its outlying dependencies. Within its spacious porticoes and corridors the walls glowed with the brilliant colours of innumerable frescoes and reliefs in coloured plaster. The Cup-Bearer, the Queen's Procession, the Miniature Frescoes of the Palace Sports, stood out in all their freshness. Magnificent urns in painted pottery, with reliefs like thos

e Keftian ambassadors is pictured, survived, as we know, into the reign of Amenhotep. The twenty-six years of Amenhotep II.'s reign, and the almost nine of Tahutmes IV., bring us to the accession of Amenhotep III. in 1414, and the thirty-six years of the latter take us to 1379 B.C. or thereby, when the heretic Akhenaten, whose reign was to witness the downfall of the Egyptian Empire in Syria, ascended the throne. Somewhere within these seventy years the Empire of the Minoans passed away in fire and bloodshed, and we shall probably not go far

Scripta Minoa,

eams and pillars, the very preservation of the clay tablets with their enigmatic records, a preservation due, probably, to the tremendous heat to which they were exposed by the furious blazing of the oil in the store jars of the magazines, the traces of the blackening of fire upon the walls-everything tells of an overwhelming tragedy. Nor was the catastrophe the result of an accident. There is no mistaking the significance of the fact that in the palace scarcely a trace of precious metal, and next to no trace of bronze has been discovered. Fire at Knossos was

e are no records, and if there were we could not read them; but it is easy to imagine the disastrous sea-fight off the mouth of the Kairatos River, or elsewhere along the coast, the wrecks of the once invincible Minoan fleet driven ashore in hopeless ruin in the shallow bay, like the Athenian fleet at Syracuse, the swift march of the mainland conquerors up the valley,

seems more probable, they eventually established themselves as a ruling caste among the subject Minoans, they chose for their dwellings other sites than those of the old palaces. The broken fragments of the Minoan race crept back after the sack to the bla

H PAPYRUS REL

hat has begun. The spirit of the nation has been broken, and its art is no longer living. Though the old models are followed, it is with less complete understanding, with a perpetually increasing interval, and with less and less fidelity. 'With the inability to create new ideas of art and life,' says Dr. Mackenzie, 'is coupled the slavish adherence to inherited tradition and custom in both. Nothing new is produced, and no

he British School at Ath

urrows, 'The Discover

pearance in the tombs; iron swords and daggers are even found. In life the men who use these weapons are clad, not with the Minoan loin-cloth, but with the garments which we associate with the Greeks of the Classical period, garments which require the use of the fibula or safety-pin to fasten them. The potter's art begins to find new motives

ve come down to us as legends of early Greece. '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. The name [Labyrinth] was still preserved, though the exact meaning, as supplied by the native Cretan dialect, had been probably lost. Hard by the western gate, in her royal robes, to-day but partially visible, stood Queen Ariadne herself-and might not the comely youth in front of her be the hero Theseus, a

e to produce a sense of the supernatural. It was haunted ground, and then, as now, "phantasms" were about. 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

ly Review, March,

As Mr. Hogarth has pointed out, 'the men of Pr?sos were no doubt, in the true saga spirit, foreshortening history by crystallizing a process into a single event.' It is very improbable, in view of the evidence afforded by the long survival and gradual decay of the Minoan tradition, that there was any immediate general occupation of the island on the part of the conquering race. The process which finally resulted in the island of Crete becoming 'the mixed land,' with a heterogeneous

hemselves,' and it was one of the later waves of that storm which broke itself against the armed strength of Egypt about 1200 B.C. Probably the process of migration had been going on for several generations. The rude but vigorous tribes of the North had been pressing down upon the races which had created that remarkable Bronze

chief of the ancient stock pursues his Northern assailant, has its motif reversed in the archaic Greek stele discovered by Dr. Pernier at Gortyna, where a big Northerner with round shield and greaves threatens a tiny Minoan or Mycen?an, crouching behind his figure-of-eight shield. The two rude pictures may be taken as typical of the beginning and the end of the process which resulted in the establishment of the race of Agamemnon at 'Golden Mycen?.' Pressed upon thus by the warlike Ach?ans, perhaps already forced from their homes on the mainland, the Mycen?ans of Tiryns and Mycen? were obliged to fare forth in search of new dwelling-places. Not unnaturally the emigrants

Annual of the British School at

n the wake of the Mycen?an immigrants, though their advent brought, as we have seen, important changes in customs and in art motives, the ancient native culture remained the fundamental element of the newer civilization. It has been pointed out by Mr. Hogarth that the Geometric vases of the early Iron Age in Crete exhi

ightly Review, Oct

erful monarch had been obliged to establish a special coastguard service at the mouths of the Nile to protect his trade-routes against the Lycian pirates. When the Minoan fleet was no longer in being to police the ?gean, these and other piratical races must have quickly driven the Cretan merchant marine from the seas. The purple fisheries and the oil trade would dwindle and die, and the population which had been supported by them would be driven from a land which could no longer maintain it. The colonizing movement which has left t

'Scripta Mi

a suggestion is no longer so improbable as it seemed to be in 1901, when it was still a tenable theory that the new development of Egyptian art was due to Mesopotamian influence, and came from Mitanni with Queen Tyi, the wife of Amenhotep III. Now that it is certain that Tyi was no Mitannian, but a native Egyptian, that door is closed, and we must suppose either that Egyptian art suddenly and spontaneously awakened to a new style of vision and execution, from which, again, it as suddenly departed, or else that some foreign influence was working strongly upon the rigid Egyptian convention, modifying and vivifying it. If a foreign influence, why not the influence of t

rrows, 'The Discoveri

s of Crete. One more glimpse of the dying sea-power of the Cretan race, now itself disorganized and predatory, is given us by the Golenischeff papyrus, which tells, among other adventures of the unfortunate Wen-Amon, envoy of Her-hor, the priest-King of Upper Egypt (circa 1100 B.C.), how the Egyptian ambassador was threatened with capture by eleven ships of Zakru pi

pire of the Keftians. The eleven shiploads of Zakru sea-robbers are the last degenerate representatives of the great marine which, under the Kings of the House of Minos, ha