The Sea-Kings of Crete

by James Baikie

THE LONG GALLERY, KNOSSOS (p. [68])

Following up his excavations at Mycenæ, Schliemann, in 1880-81, excavated at Orchomenos in Bœotia the so-called 'Treasury of Minyas,' discovering in its square side-chamber a beautiful ceiling formed of slabs of slate sculptured with an exquisite pattern of rosettes and spirals, which shows very distinct traces of Egyptian artistic influence (unless, as Mr. H. R. Hall has now come to believe, we are to trace the origin of the spiral as a decorative motive, not to Egypt, but to the Minoans of Crete). At Tiryns, Schliemann began in 1884 another series of excavations which laid bare the whole ground-plan of the citadel palace of that ancient fortress town with its halls and separate apartments for men and women, and the colossal enclosing wall, in some parts 57 feet thick, with its towers and galleries and chambers constructed in the thickness of the wall ([Plate V. 1]). The palace revealed evidences of considerable skill in the decorative arts. A beautiful frieze of alabaster carved in rosettes and palmettes, inlaid with blue paste, made plain what Homer meant when he wrote of the Palace of Alcinous: 'Brazen were the walls which ran this way and that from the threshold to the inmost chamber, and round them was a frieze of blue' (kuanos); while fresco paintings in several of the rooms exhibited the spiral and rosette decoration of Orchomenos and Egypt. But perhaps the most interesting find was the remains of a great wall-painting in which a mighty bull is represented charging at full speed, while an athlete, clinging to the monster's horn with one hand, vaults over his back—a picture which is the first important example of the now well-known and numerous set of similar representations which have given us a clue to something of the meaning of the old legend of the man-destroying Minotaur and his tribute of human victims.

Schliemann's discoveries, notwithstanding all the incredulity aroused by his sometimes rather headlong enthusiasm, created an extraordinary amount of interest among scholars and students of early European culture. It was felt at once that he had brought the world face to face with facts which must profoundly modify all opinions hitherto held as to the origins of Greek civilization; for the advanced and fully ripened art which was disclosed, especially in the wonderful finds from the Shaft- or Circle-Graves, stood on an entirely different plane from any art which had hitherto been associated with the early age of Greece; and it was evident, not only that the date at which civilization began to reveal itself in Hellas must be pushed back several centuries, but also that the great differences between the mature Mycenæan art and the infant art of Greece required explanation. To the discoverer himself, the supreme interest of his finds always lay in the thought that they were the direct prototypes, if not the actual originals, of the civilization described in the Homeric poems; but to the question whether this was so or not, a question interesting in itself, but largely academic, there succeeded a much more important one. Here was proof of the existence of a civilization, obviously great and long-enduring, whose products could not be identified with those of any other art known to exist. To what race of men were the achievements of this early culture to be ascribed, and what relation did they hold to the Hellenes of history?

The work of Schliemann was continued and extended by successors such as Dörpfeld, Tsountas, Mackenzie, and others, and by the end of the nineteenth century it had become apparent that the culture of which the first important traces had been found at Mycenæ had extended to some extent over all Hellas, but chiefly over the south-eastern portion of the mainland and over the Cyclades. The principal find-spots in Greece proper were in the Argolid and in Attica; but, besides these, abundant material was discovered at Enkomi (Cyprus) and at Phylâkopi (Melos), while from Vaphio, near Amyklæ in Laconia, there came, among other treasures, a pair of most wonderful gold cups, whose workmanship surpassed anything that could have been imagined of such an early period, and is only to be matched by the goldsmith work of the Renaissance. Hissarlik, under Dr. Dörpfeld's hands, yielded from the Sixth City the evidence of an Asiatic civilization truly contemporaneous with that of Mycenæ. Even before the end of the century it became apparent that Crete was destined to prove a focus of this early culture, and the promise, as we shall see later, has been more than fulfilled. In Egypt Professor Petrie found deposits of prehistoric Ægean pottery in the Delta, the Fayum, and even in Middle Egypt, proving that this civilization, whatever its origin, had been in contact with the ancient civilization of the Nile Valley, while even in the Western Mediterranean, in Sicily particularly, in Italy, Sardinia, and Spain, finds, less plentiful, but quite unmistakable, bore witness to the wide diffusion of Mycenæan culture.

Roughly, the result came to this: 'that before the epoch at which we are used to place the beginnings of Greek civilization—that is, the opening centuries of the last millennial period B.C.—we must allow for an immensely long record of human artistic productivity, going back into the Neolithic Age, and culminating towards the close of the age of Bronze in a culture more fecund and more refined than any we are to find again in the same lands till the age of Iron was far advanced. Man in Hellas was more highly civilized before history than when history begins to record his state; and there existed human society in the Hellenic area, organized and productive, to a period so remote that its origins were more distant from the age of Pericles than that age is from our own. We have probably to deal with a total period of civilization in the Ægean not much shorter than in the Nile Valley.[*]

[Footnote *: Hogarth, 'Authority and Archæology,' p. 230.]

The estimate in Hogarth's last sentence, which was published in 1899, before Evans's great discoveries in Crete, was one that must have seemed extravagant to those who, while familiar with the great antiquity of Mesopotamian and Egyptian culture, had been accustomed to think of Greek civilization as having its beginning not so very long before the First Olympiad. It has been fully justified, however, by the event, and it may now be accepted as an established fact that the earliest civilization of Greece meets the two great ancient civilizations of Babylon and Egypt on substantially equal terms. In antiquity it appears to be practically contemporary with them; in artistic merit it need not shrink from comparison with either of them.

In the earlier stages of the discussion which followed on the discoveries, it was assumed, perhaps somewhat hastily, that such a culture could not have been indigenous, resemblances to Egyptian and Mesopotamian work were pointed out, and it was suggested that the impulse and the skill which gave rise to the art of Mycenæ were not native but borrowed, the Phœnicians being generally held to be the medium through which the influence of the East had filtered into the Ægean area. As time has gone on, however, the Phœnicians have gradually come to bulk less and less in the view of students of the Ægean problem. It is no longer held that they contributed anything original to the development of Mycenæan culture, and even as middlemen the tendency is to allow them an influence far smaller than was once held to be theirs. It has become manifest that, in at least the case of Crete and Egypt, communication need not have been through Phœnician media at all, but was far more probably direct. And with regard to the whole question of the debt owed to the East by this early European civilization, it is probable that the Ægean gave quite as much as it borrowed, and that its artists were sufficiently great to have originated their own culture. Mycenæan, and still more the great Minoan art of which Mycenæan has proved to be only a decadent phase, needed no Oriental crutches. With regard to Egypt, the obligations of the two cultures were certainly mutual; each influenced the other; it was not a case of master and scholar, but of two contemporary civilizations, each fully inspired with a native spirit, each ready to use whatever seemed good to it in the work of the other, but both perfectly original in their genius.

The question which was of such supreme interest to Schliemann still survives, however, though in a wider and more important form than that in which he conceived of it. It is no longer a question of whether the graves which he found were actually those of Agamemnon and his fellow-victims in the dark tragedy of Mycenæ, but of whether the people and the civilization whose remains have been brought to light are, or are not, the people and the civilization from which the Homeric bards drew the whole setting of their poems. Were the Mycenæans the Greeks of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and was it their culture that is depicted for us in these great poems?