Sir Arthur Evans’ renewed campaign of excavation in Crete has again attracted considerable public attention to the remarkable disclosures of the last twenty years. Sir Arthur Evans himself is at present engaged in compiling in three big volumes the consecutive story of Minoan civilization as revealed by his own excavations. The present writer is convinced that the story of Cretan discovery is such as to appeal to the imagination of a wide public who have no specialist interest in archæology. The

Mr. Veniselos was brought up in Crete. It is not the first time in history that Crete has passed on her products to Greece and to Europe. Four thousand years ago the very foundations of Greek and of European civilization were laid in Crete, which was then mistress of the sea and the dominant factor in the Ægean. Yet we none of us were aware of this until Sir Arthur Evans, a few years ago, began digging in Crete. When Mr. Veniselos was a boy the very existence of a prehistoric Cretan civilization

The primitive Ægean people played a great part in the activities of the Near East. They existed for several thousand years, and there are traces of their activity on every shore of the Eastern Mediterranean. Crete, as Homer says, was the land “in the midst of the wine-dark ocean, fair and rich, with the waters all around” (“Odyssey,” xix. 172). It was the natural centre towards which the mainlands of Greece, Asia Minor, and Egypt converged, especially as its irregular coast afforded good harbour

If the nine Minoan periods into which Sir Arthur Evans has divided the Bronze Age in Crete are primarily a fanciful play upon the “nine seasons” of King Minos’s reign in Knossos, the system of dating itself is by no means fanciful. It rests on a solid basis. It has been made possible mainly by the fact that the ancient Cretans were sea-farers. Cretan products were exported to Egypt, and have been found there alongside Egyptian deposits of more or less known date. Hence a system of sequence-datin

“And in Crete is Knossos, a great city, and in it Minos ruled for nine seasons, the bosom friend of mighty Zeus” (Homer, “Odyssey,” xix. 178-179). Those “nine seasons” were long periods of varied activity. Ancient Crete was the home of an artistic, commercial and imperial people—there was a Minoan Empire—and Knossos, the capital of Crete, held the palace of Minos. The Palace at Knossos was built on the slope of a low hill—the hill now known as “tou tselebe he kephala” or the Gentleman’s Head—whi

The plan of the palace of Knossos is at first sight rather confusing, especially when one reflects that it represents only the ground floor of the original building and that one has to imagine, in some places two, and in others perhaps three storeys of rooms above it. If this is the old labyrinth of legend, no wonder, you think, that Theseus needed his Ariadne to show him a way out of it; and that Dædalus, who built it, could himself find no other means of escape but by flying straight up into t

On the other side of the island, at Phæstos, there was another great palace, which has been excavated by the Italian Archæological Mission. In many ways this palace was as magnificent as that of Knossos. Like Knossos, it was built on a hill on a foundation formed by levelling the buildings that had existed on the site from the Neolithic Age; and, like Knossos, though on a smaller scale, it consisted roughly of a system of buildings grouped round a central court. Some of the remains are in a bett

Perhaps the most vivid traces of the ancient civilization of Crete are the remains of the buildings which have been found in the soil. Here you have the rooms that were lived in, and the appeal to the imagination is direct. The relics of buildings are more extensive than those of any other kind, and they were the first discovered by the excavator, just as they are the first points of interest to the visitors who nowadays go to the island. The buildings of the Stone Age have left hardly a trace o

“Exceeding lightly, as when some potter sits and tries the wheel, well fitting in his hands, to see if it will run.”— Homer. Crete is the only land of the “prehistoric” Near East which has left no record of itself besides that revealed by excavation. And even the writing on the clay tablets cannot yet be read. We none the less get a vivid impression of Cretan life on its artistic side, and for this the main credit is due to the unique value of pottery in archæology. Pottery is almost indestructi

The Cretans had a system of writing as long ago as 2500 B.C. The language therein embodied is still a mystery to us, in spite of Sir Arthur Evans’s monumental work Scripta Minoa (1909). The hope is that Sir Arthur will find a clue to the mystery, but up to the present the fact is that there is no starting-point for any attempt at interpretation. If a bilingual inscription could be found—a Cretan document, that is, side by side with a translation in some known language such as Egyptian—a start co

Cretan religion differed from that of classical Greece in that the chief deity worshipped was a goddess, Mother Nature or Earth-Mother, some at least of whose characteristics we find embodied in the Rhea of Greek mythology. Matriarchal religion seems to have been specially characteristic of very early times; through it primitive man expressed his veneration of womanhood. The Cretan Mother Goddess held an exalted position. She had supreme power over all Nature; was associated with doves, which sy

When Knossos fell, Crete ceased to be the pre-eminent power in the Near East. The island itself was overrun by military or naval adventurers, and the centre of Mediterranean life shifted over to the mainland of Greece, whence, indeed, those adventurers came. The interesting thing, however, was that Cretan culture went with it, and neither for the last, nor probably for the first, time “the captive led captive her savage conqueror,” as Horace wrote centuries afterwards. Crete stooped to conquer G

Towards the end of the Minoan Age Cretan culture began to spread generally over the Ægean, and extended to the mainland. Cretan vases are found as far north as Bœotia, and the many Cretan relics discovered in Mycenæan tombs were not all war-souvenirs; some of them, belonging to times before the fall of Knossos, were the peaceful product of Cretan workmen who had been induced by the Lords of Mycenæ to emigrate. The men from the North who finally overthrew what we call the Minoan civilization, bec