The Middle Minoan Period centres round 2000-1850 B.C., and corresponds with the Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt. It was the age of the earliest palace building. Already appears the beginning of a school of wall-painting, while a manufactory of fine faience was attached to the palace at Cnossus.
The Late Minoan Period covers the period of the Hyksos usurpation in Egypt and reached its own culmination about the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty when the New Egyptian Empire or Second Theban Monarchy commenced. We have already noted the appearance in Egypt of this Cretan influence, inducing a habit of naturalistic representation in place of the old conventionalised forms of sculpture and painting. To this late Minoan period belongs the greatest development of palace building, as seen at Cnossus, Phæstus, and Tiryns, while the painting on walls and vases becomes more free and animated than anything of the kind in Egypt.
Toward 1400 B.C. a period of decline becomes apparent in Cretan art, which is reflected all over the Ægean area. The conclusion is that the islands and mainland of Greece had been invaded by less civilised conquerors, who, having no cultivation of their own, adopted the art they found and spoiled it. Probably they came from the North of Greece and were precursors of the later “Hellenes.”
Finally, about 1000 B.C., the palace at Cnossus was again destroyed, never again to be rebuilt; and at the same time the “Bronze Age” of Minoan and Mycenæan civilisation came to an end. It fell before a nation, barbarous, but possessed of iron weapons; probably the tribes which later Greek tradition and Homer knew as Dorians. Then followed a period of several centuries of unrest, as, successively, Achaæn, Æolian, and Doric migrations came from the North through the mainland of Greece and the islands of the Ægean, while an Ionian migration from Armenia spread to the west shore of Asia Minor. Finally, when the Ægean area emerges into history, it is dominated by Hellenes.
The Ægean Archipelago has been called the ancient bridge between the civilisations of the East and West, and the imagination pictures Crete at the southern end of it, within easy distance of three continents and engaged in peaceful intercourse with all; the head of a maritime confederacy of sea-rovers who planted their trading stations throughout the Mediterranean, their art everywhere following their trade. She herself was protected from aggression by her island walls; while the outposts of culture on the mainland of Greece—Mycenæ and Tiryns—were compelled to erect their palaces within citadels.
From the fact that no remains of Minoan and Mycenæan temples have been found, but only shrines within the precincts of the palaces, it has been concluded that, as in Assyria and Babylonia, the monarchs were also priests. Evidence points to the principal Minoan divinity being a kind of Earth Mother, who was associated with a satellite god. One part of her religious attributes survived in the later Aphrodite, the other in Rhea, the mother of the Olympian Zeus. While images of the deity were made as early as 2000 B.C. the principal objects of worship, or fetishes, in the Minoan age were natural objects: rocks and mountain peaks, trees, and curiously shaped stones, and even artificial pillars of wood and stone. Sometimes, as in the famous instance of the Lion Gate at Mycenæ, the fetish object—here a pillar—was guarded by animals.
A special form of fetish for the two principal divinities was that of the double axes: one double-headed axe above another on the same handle. “It has been discovered,” says the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition), “that the great Minoan foundation at Cnossus was at once a palace and a sanctuary of the Double Axe. We can hardly any longer hesitate to recognise in this vast building, with its winding corridors and subterranean ducts, the Labyrinth of later tradition. It is difficult, also, not to connect the repeated wall-paintings and reliefs of the palace, illustrating the cruel bull sports of the Minoan arena, in which girls as well as youths took part, with the legend of the Minotaur, or Bull of Minos, for whose grisly meals Athens was forced to pay annual tribute of her own sons and daughters.” Actual figures of a monster with a bull’s head and man’s body have been found on seals in Crete, and evidence points to these bull sports being part of a religious ceremony.
Even the smaller houses were of stone, plastered within, while the palaces suggest a luxurious mode of living; being richly decorated, with separate sleeping apartments and large halls, fine stairways, bath-chambers, windows, folding and sliding doors, and remarkably modern arrangements for water supply and drainage. The furniture included thrones, tables, seats, constructed of stone or plastered terra-cotta; a great variety of cooking utensils and vessels of all sorts from stone wine jars, ten feet high, to the tiniest ointment-holders.
Ladies, in curiously modern costumes, formed a favourite subject both for wall-decoration and miniature painting; many of the latter showing groups with architectural and landscape surroundings, done with remarkable spirit and naturalness.
The clay tablets are almost exclusively concerned with inventories and business transactions, and prove that a decimal system of numeration was used.