to be so. All the archæological indications point to a strong and tyrannical form of monarchy of the Oriental type. Those Cyclopean walls were built by slave labour. The common folk and soldiers are represented as almost naked. It was a commercial empire too. Those rows and rows of store-rooms, with their huge jars, formed the bank and treasury. Very probably the clay tablets will be found to contain, not prehistoric sonnets, but merely lists and inventories of stores and tribute.
We must not be carried too far by our wonder at this unexpected revelation of prehistoric culture. The later Greeks never reached such a standard as these people in writing or in engineering or in fortification or in many of the handicrafts. They could never have represented the forms of Nature with the same realism. That is true, but there is something wanting in the prehistoric Ægean art which only classical Greece could give to the world. There is little ἢθος in Ægean art, little nobility, though much beauty, no ethical ideal. How that missing something was supplied and whence it came we shall see in the next chapter.
Another question arises: How far was this culture original? How much does it owe to Assyria, Egypt, and Phœnicia? Much, but not everything. The drainage system of the palace has its original in Assyria, and some think that the laws of Minos were derived from the code of Khammurabi. The faience comes from Egypt; so do many of the lotus and lily patterns of the vases. Crete was bound to be greatly indebted to Egypt. As for Phœnicians, they are carriers and traders, but no one has yet proved that they could initiate in anything—except, perhaps, religion. But what Crete borrowed it transformed, and, as I believe, Europeanised; it rejected deliberately the Oriental tendencies to conventional stylistic imitation.
A word remains to be said about religion. In classical Greece, as everybody knows, there was a prevailing cult of state gods and goddesses, an anthropomorphic Olympian family, Zeus, Hera, Athena, Artemis, Apollo, and the rest of them. But recent students of religion have pointed out that side by side with the public worship of celestial deities there was a more mysterious but more real devotion to a quite different form of religion, a cult of Nature goddesses, with mystical rites whose origin was more than half forgotten. To this class belong the Mysteries of Eleusis, to name the most famous example, and it is seen in the many-breasted “Diana of the Ephesians.” Now Professor Ridgeway has long taught that this naturalistic worship was probably a survival from the prehistoric ages of Greece. It is at its strongest in Arcadia, the untouched primitive part of Greece. He calls it the religion of the Southern mother, retained in spite of the Northern father who would have his Zeus-Odin worshipped in public. The discoveries in Crete have confirmed this theory, and thrown some light on the naturalistic worship of later times. The principal deity of Crete was a Nature goddess, generally represented as adorned with snakes.[11] She was worshipped with orgiastic rites, ecstatic dances, shaking of rattles, ornately robed priests, and emblematical processions. Along with this worship, and probably older, as the aniconic precedes the iconic stage of religion, there are many signs of aniconic fetishes, pillar-worship, axe-worship, tree-worship, and even cross-worship. The monster forms of bull-men, dog-men, snake-men may be only heraldic signs, or they may indicate a worship of monsters such as prevailed in Egypt. Certainly there was worship of the entombed ancestor. We can see that the artistic people of prehistoric Greece were very near to the earth after all.
Clay Seal Impression with Cruciform Symbol, from Temple Repository, Cnossos
Plate 10.—Inlaid Dagger Blades.