The Minoan people, then, formed part of the Mediterranean race. Their dress was much simpler than that of the classical Greeks. The men wore a short pair of drawers or a loin-cloth, the upper part of the body being bare, as in the cupbearer picture, a style emanating, as did the men themselves, from the warm lands south of the Mediterranean. Egyptian fresco-paintings reveal an almost exact analogy of type in the clothing and appearance of the Egyptians. Those who have a keen eye for the persistence of type may compare some of the forms of loin-cloth, as depicted on seal stones, with the “brakais,” or baggy breeches, still worn in Crete. Elders and officials apparently wore flowing cloaks for their greater dignity. High-topped boots—again suggestive of those worn to-day—were in general use. Men wore their hair long as did the women, plaited and coiled up on the top of the head, thereby forming the only headdress that was used.
Minoan war-equipment was limited. Their only weapons were a long sword and a dagger, the latter of which is shown by pictures of clay figurines to have been carried inside the belt at the front. Their only defensive armour was a big shield of leather and a leather conical helmet. The shield was framed in a metal band, but had no handle or central boss; it was big enough to cover the body from head to foot, and it could be bent so as to protect both sides. It is represented in certain pictures in a curious 8-shape, pinched-in in the middle. The origin of this may have been that it was the practice to sling it over the left shoulder suspended by a strap, and for this purpose the figure-of-eight shape may have been convenient.
Horses were apparently used both for war and for hunting, although we have no pictures of them being ridden. The available evidence shows them only in the shafts of two-wheeled chariots. This accords well with Professor Sir William Ridgeway’s observation (made far back in the ’eighties of last century) that in Homer the horse was driven only, and was no bigger than our donkey. There is reason for thinking that the horses were imported, and imaginative people have recognized evidence of this in the fact that a seal stone has been found which shows a horse on board ship. Whether intentionally or merely from crudity of draughtsmanship, one is left in little doubt as to what mostly occupied the artist’s mind when he fashioned this stone, for the horse covers three-quarters of the ship’s length, and towers high above it, while the crew stand as high as the horse’s knees. On the fascinating subject of the history of the horse, the reader should consult Sir W. Ridgeway’s Origin of the Thoroughbred Horse (Cambridge University Press, 1905).
The women are readily distinguishable from the men in Cretan pictures by reason of their white skin, suggestive of a more secluded indoor life. They wore large shady hats, close-fitting, puffed-sleeved blouses, cut very low in front, and projecting upwards into a sort of peak at the back of the neck. They wore wide-flounced, richly-embroidered skirts like crinolines, and had belts like the men’s. It was on first seeing some of the pictures of them that a French scholar compared the women of Knossos with those of Paris.
Minoan women enjoyed a far more “advanced” status than did other primitive women. In the art of their day they are represented as appearing in public and unveiled; they took part in the bull-fighting at Knossos, and their apartments in the palace were marked out by their special luxury. The greatest glory for an Athenian woman of a later age was to be “as little mentioned as possible among men.” Not so for the women of Crete. There may be some special significance in the fact that the Lycians of Asia Minor, who were colonists from Crete, made a practice of calling children by the mother’s, not the father’s, name (Herodotus, i. 73). If this was the case also in Minoan Crete itself, it may afford a possible explanation of the freedom enjoyed by Cretan women, for the practice of naming children after their mother instead of after their father is connected with states of society which have not yet evolved any definite ideas of marriage, and in which, as Herbert Spencer says, “The connection between mother and child is always certain, whereas the connection between father and child would sometimes be only inferable.”
Chapter 12: From Prehistoric Crete to Classical Greece
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, became to some extent the repositories of Cretan tradition. They carried on a less splendid phase of Cretan civilization, a phase which was distinguished by the name “Mycenæan.” They had come to Greece from lands still further north, whence they had themselves been driven to seek new homes. They came down in successive waves of invasion, the men who formed the first wave being known as the “Achæans,” the “yellow-haired Achæans” of Homer. It was they—so at least some authorities hold—who sacked Knossos, and who afterwards, during the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.C., wandering about in search of adventure, became the terror of the whole Ægean. An Egyptian inscription of those times says: “The Isles were restless: disturbed among themselves.”
Egypt herself felt the effect of the disturbances. From the “isles in the midst of the Great Green Sea” there no longer came the peaceful Minoans to pay friendly tribute to the King of Egypt; instead there came the Achæans, on an unpeaceful mission. Two raids were made—according to the students of Egyptian records—one about 1230 B.C., another about 1200 B.C. (See H. R. Hall, The Ancient History of the Near East, p. 70. Methuen, 1913.) Mr. Hall gives the more definite date of c. 1196 for the second invasion. Not long after we find the Achæans, in Agamemnon’s famous expedition, fighting against the Trojans in Asia Minor. They took the city at last in 1184 B.C., if we accept the date which Greek tradition pointed to. It is their deeds in the latter war that were sung by Homer. Two generations after the Trojan war, shortly before 1100 B.C., Greece was overrun by the Dorians, who formed the second great wave of Northern invaders. After that came the Dark Age, out of which about 800 B.C. emerged classical Greece.
Classical Greece was the fusion of the two main elements of prehistoric times, the artistic Mediterranean people on the one hand, and the robust Northern invaders on the other. Just as the fusion was probably consummated in the Dark Age, so the first poet of classical Greece, Homer, whether one person or the embodiment of many, heralded their new life in poems which seemed to take their subject from that Dark Age. What Homer wrote was probably less legendary than historical. Whether the traditions of the Minoan Age in Crete were kept alive through the Dark Age in Ionia, whither it is thought that they were carried by Achæan refugees at the time of the Dorian invasion, which extended to Crete, or whether they remained dormant in Crete itself, and in the Mycenæan centres of the mainland of Greece, it is in either case certain that they were well preserved, for their traces are plainly to be seen throughout Greek civilization. From the Greek writers they descended to the poets of Rome, and so to the art and literature of Europe.