The greatest story in the world, period 1 (of 3)

by Horace G. Hutchinson

But there was also yet a third power, very great, very ancient, and highly civilised, a sea-power, with its capital in the big island, which you will sec on the map, lying to the south of Greece, Crete.

You will observe, perhaps, that it quite agrees with all that we find in the later story of mankind, that a nation living on an island should be powerful at sea. To-day you see the great sea-powers, ourselves and Japan. We live on islands that are small when compared with the lands of Germany, France, America, Russia, China; but we have more power in ships and seamen. Perhaps America is going to have a greater power than Japan, but at the time that I am writing she has not.

It is only of rather recent years that we have come to know much about this very ancient Cretan civilisation, and chiefly it is owing to the work of a great antiquary, Sir Arthur Evans, that we have discovered the story. It must be very interesting to be an antiquary and to dig—or to order a gang of diggers to dig under your directions—and not to know what you may be going to turn up next: now a gold ear-ring, now a bronze sword, now the edge of a worked stone that may be the corner-stone of a building which more digging may prove to be one of the greatest and most marvellous buildings in the world!

Knossos

It sounds like a fairy story; but it was a fairy story which Sir Arthur Evans made come true at a place in Crete where the ancient city of Knossos used to be. He found wonderful things—an immense palace, a place which inscriptions, also there discovered, show to have been a temple of the gods as well. The king, it is evident, was high-priest as well as king: we have seen that union of the two offices, the king's and the priest's, before, both in Egypt and in Babylonia. (When I say before, I mean that I wrote of it earlier in the story. I do not mean that it came any earlier in the time of its actual happening.) There is evidence to show that the Cretan people were civilised, could make fine works of art and so on, right back to the very earliest date at which the evidences from the peoples living along the river-courses have anything to show us. Maybe the Cretans acquired their civilisation even earlier than the others.

We cannot be sure of that. What we can be sure of is that an enormous number of years ago they were marvellous engineers and architects, as well as workers of ornaments, and of fine pottery and glazed ware. The palace at Knossos is an immense place, with great columns, walls, halls. We wonder as much at the splendid imagination of the architect who could plan buildings on such a grand scale so very long ago as we do at the engineer's power to work and lift into position such huge stones as we find were used in the building. And the delicacy of the finish is wonderful too. It is not only the vastness of the size that amazes us. That is the chief wonder of the Egyptian pyramids. But the buildings and other remains in Crete are more wonderful still.

This Cretan civilisation at so very early a date makes an extraordinary chapter in the world's story. It would still have been a story very extraordinary if it had been only just the story of what happened in the island of Crete, and did not spread beyond it. But, as a matter of fact, it did spread very far beyond that island. It spread out north, east, south, and west—up into Greece, across to Syria, down to Egypt, and away to Sicily.

In your books you are likely to read about all this as "the Minoan civilisation." Probably there really was some great king of old in Crete whose name was Minos. It is possible that there were many of the name, and that all the kings of his dynasty were called Minos, with some other name besides to distinguish them. However that may be, the Cretan legendary story was that Minos was a very great king, half divine, who gave laws and the arts of civilisation to his people, rather as Khammurabi was supposed to have given laws to the Babylonians. And, again like Khammurabi, Minos was supposed to have received these laws from a deity, the greatest deity that the Minoans, as they were called, knew. But this deity of theirs was supposed to be female, a goddess, the goddess Ishtar of the Babylonians—the Ashtaroth of the Bible. The Cretans, however, made her the chief of all the gods. The Babylonians held her in second place, as spouse of the chief god Shamash, the sun-god.

These splendid buildings of the Minoans, as they have been discovered for us by the digger, have a much more modern, a much less strange, appearance than those either of Babylonia or of Egypt. The Babylonian buildings especially look to us, as we make pictures of them in our minds, like palaces of some great ogre. The supports at each side of the doors and gates are very often in the form of huge winged bulls. Human heads and figures of colossal size are to be seen everywhere. And the human heads have generally great beards, and perhaps the rest of the hair worked up into a square pattern, with curls, so that they look horrible. All the insides of the Babylonian palaces seem to have been adorned with enormous hunting scenes, worked in a kind of gypsum which was found in the country. I think we should feel terribly afraid if we suddenly found ourselves in an ancient Babylonian palace or even an Egyptian one.

But I believe that we should feel very much happier and more at home if we could be transported suddenly into one of the old Minoan palaces. And I believe that I can make a guess why that is so.