CHAPTER V

THE PALACE OF 'BROAD KNOSSOS' (continued)

The discoveries of 1900, important as they were, were evidently far from having exhausted the hidden treasures of the House of Minos; but even the explorer himself, who spoke of his task as being 'barely half completed' by the first year's work, had no conception of the magnitude of the task which yet lay before him, or of the richness of the results which it was destined to produce. The early work in the second year led to a further disclosure of the large area of the Western Court of the palace, which seems to have formed the meeting-place between the citizens of Knossos and their royal masters. Here probably all the business between the town and the palace-folk was transacted; stores were brought up, received and paid for by the palace stewards, and passed into the great magazines; and here, perhaps, the ancients of the Knossian Assembly gathered in council to discuss affairs, as the men of the Greek host gathered in the Iliad, while the King sat in state in the Western Portico, presiding over their deliberations. The Portico itself, with its wooden central pillar, 16 feet in height, must have been a sufficiently imposing structure, while the great court on which it opened, more than 160 feet in length, must have formed a stately meeting-place for the citizens. Whether as market-place or open-air council-room, this West Court must have presented a gay and animated spectacle when the prosperity of the Minoan Empire was at its height. Along the outer wall of the palace fronting the court ran a projecting base, which served as a seat where merchants or suppliants might wait, sheltered from the sun by the shadow of the vast building at their backs, till their business fell to be disposed of ([Plate XV. 1]). Meanwhile they could beguile the time by watching the ever-changing picture in front of them, where gay courtier figures, with gold and jewels on neck and arm, mingled with grave citizens of substance from the town, or gathered round some Egyptian visitor, newly arrived on board one of the Keftiu ships, to discuss some matter of trade—a clean-cut and austere-looking figure, in his garb of pure white linen, beside the more gaudily clothed Minoans. When their eyes wearied of the glare of sunlight on the red cement pavement and the brilliant crowd, they could turn to the wall behind them, where above their heads ran a broad zone of paintings in fresco—shrines with scenes of religion, conventional decorations, and lifelike representations of the great bulls which played so conspicuous, and sometimes so tragic, a part in the Minoan economy.

But the main discoveries of the season were to lie on the opposite side of the building from the Western Court. The Central Court, instead of being, as it had seemed at first, the boundary of the building on the eastern side, was now found to have been the focus of the inner life of the palace. For on its eastern margin, as the excavations progressed, there came to light a mass of building, fully equal in importance to that on the western side, and perhaps of even greater interest. Here the slope of the ground had been such that storey had been piled above storey, even before the level of the Central Court had been reached, so that on this side it was not only the basement of the building that had been preserved, but a whole complex of rooms going down from the central area to different levels, and connected with one another by a great staircase, which, in the course of this and subsequent seasons' excavations, was found to have had no fewer than five flights of steps. Of this staircase, thirty-eight steps are still preserved, and good fortune had so brought it about that at the destruction of the palace some of the upper chambers had fallen in such a manner that their débris actually propped up the staircase and some of the upper floorings, and kept them in place; and thus it has been possible to reconstruct a large part of the arrangement of the various rooms and floors in this quarter of the building ([Plate XVI. 1]). Far down below the level of the Central Court lay a fine Colonnaded Hall about 26 feet square, from which the great staircase, with pillars and balustrades, led to the upper quarter ([Plate XVII. 2]), while adjoining it was a stately and finely-proportioned hall—the Hall of the Double Axes—about 80 feet in length by 26 feet in breadth, and divided transversely by a row of square-sided pillars ([Plate XVII. 1]). In this part of the building, and especially in the Colonnaded Hall, the conflagration in which the glories of Knossos found their close had been extremely severe, and the evidences of fierce burning were everywhere. In a small room in an upper storey, whose floor was near the present surface of the ground, there came to light also evidence which suggested that the catastrophe of the palace, in whatever form it may have come, came suddenly and unexpectedly. The room had evidently been a sculptor's workshop, and the artist who used it had been employed in the fabrication of those splendid vessels of carved stone in which the Minoan magnates delighted. One of them still stood in the room, finished and ready for transport. It was carved from a veined limestone approaching to marble in texture, and was of noble proportions, standing 27¼ inches in height, while its girth was 6 feet 8¾ inches, and its weight such that it took eleven men to carry it from the room where it had waited so long for its resurrection. Its workmanship was superb. The upper rim was decorated with a spiral band, while round the bulging shoulder ran another spiral, whose central coils rose up in bold relief into forms like the shell of a snail, and its three handles bore another spiral design. But beside it stood another amphora, smaller than its neighbour, and giving unmistakable proof that the artist's work had been suddenly interrupted, for it had only been roughed out, and its decoration had not been begun. The skilful hand that should have finished it had perhaps to grasp sword or spear in the last vain attempt to repel the assault of the invader, and we can only wonder over his half-done work, and imagine what untoward fate befell the worker, and for what unknown master, if he survived the sack, he may have exercised the skill that once gratified the refined taste of his Minoan lord.

Not far from the sculptor's workshop, and in the same quarter of the palace, was found a splendid and convincing proof of the magnificence of the appointments of the House of Minos in its palmy days. This was a board which had evidently been designed for use in some game, perhaps resembling draughts or chess, in which men were moved to and fro from opposite ends. The board was over a yard in length, and rather more than half a yard in breadth. Its framework was of ivory, which had originally been overlaid with thin gold plate, and it was covered with a mosaic of strips and discs of rock-crystal, which in their turn had been backed alternately with silver and blue enamel paste. Round its margin ran a border of marguerites whose central bosses were convex discs of rock-crystal which had probably been set originally in a blue paste background. At the top of the board were four beautiful reliefs representing nautilus shells, set round with crystal plaques, and bossed with crystal. Below them came four large medallions, set among crystal bars backed with silver plate, and then eleven bars of ribbed crystal and ivory, alternating with one another. Eight shorter bars of crystal backed with blue enamel fill spaces on either side of the topmost section in the lower part of the board, which consists of a two-winged compartment with ten circular openings, the medallions of which have been broken out, but were probably of crystal backed with silver. The remaining space of the board was filled with flat bars of gold-plated ivory alternating with bars of crystal on the blue enamel setting. The mere summary of its decoration conveys no idea of the splendour of a piece of work which, as Professor Burrows says, 'defies description, with its blaze of gold and silver, ivory and crystal.' The Late Minoan monarch who used it—for so gorgeous a piece of workmanship can scarcely have been designed for anyone but a King—must have been as splendid in his amusements as in all the other appointments of his royalty ([Plate XVIII.]).

The gaming-board suggested the lighter and more innocent side of the palace life. A darker and more tragic aspect of it was hinted at by the fresco which was found in the following season among débris fallen from a chamber overlooking the so-called Court of the Olive Spout. This was a picture of those sports of the arena in which the Minoan and Mycenæan monarchs evidently took such delight, and in which the main figures were great bulls and toreadors. In this case the picture is one of three toreadors, two girls and a boy, with a single bull. The girls are distinguished by their white skins, their more vari-coloured costumes, their blue and red diadems, and their curlier hair, but are otherwise dressed like their male companion. In the centre of the picture the great bull is seen in full charge. The boy toreador has succeeded in catching the monster's horns and turning a clean somersault over his back, while one of the girls holds out her hands to catch his as he comes to the ground. But the other girl, standing in front of the bull, is just at the critical moment of the cruel sport. The great horns are almost passing under her arms, and it looks almost an even chance whether she will be able to catch them and vault, as her companion has done, over the bull's back, or whether she will fail and be gored to death. With such a sport, in which life or death depended upon an instant, in which a slip of the foot, a misjudgment of distance, or a wavering of hand or eye meant horrible destruction, we may be sure that the tragedies of the Minoan bull-ring were many and terrible, and that the fair dames of the Knossian Palace, modern in costume and appearance as they seem to us, were as habituated to scenes of cruel bloodshed as any Roman lady who watched the sports of the Colosseum, and saw gladiators hack one another to pieces for her pleasure.

That the sport of the bull-ring, and particularly this exciting and dangerous game of bull-grappling, or τανροκαθαψια, was an established and habitual form of Minoan sport is proved by the multitude of representations of it which have survived. The charging bull of Tiryns, the first to be discovered, was a mystery so long as it stood alone; but it is only one of a succession of such pictures—painted upon walls, engraved upon gems, and stamped on seal impressions—which show that the Cretans and Mycenæans were as fond of their bull-fights as a modern Spaniard of his.

Where did they get the toreadors, male and female, whose lives were to be devoted to such a terrible sport—a sport practically bound to end fatally sooner or later? We may be fairly sure, at all events, that bull-grappling was not taken up voluntarily even by the male, and still less by the female, toreadors; and one of the discoveries made in the excavations of 1901, and followed up later, gave its own suggestion of an explanation. Not very far from the North Entrance of the palace, beneath the room where, the year before, had been found the fresco of the Little Boy Blue gathering crocuses—an innocent figure to cover so grim a revelation—there came to light the walls of two deep pits, going right down, nearly 25 feet, to the virgin soil. The pits were lined with stone-work faced with smooth cement, and it seems most probable that these were the dungeons of the palace, in which we may imagine that the miserable captives brought back by the great King's fleet from its voyages of conquest and plunder, and the human tribute paid by the conquered states, dragged out their existence until the time came for them either to be trained for the cruel sport to which they were devoted, or actually to take their places in the bull-ring. If it be so, then the dungeons of Minos would keep their captives securely enough; escape from the deep pits, with their smooth and slippery walls, must have been practically impossible, save by connivance on the part of the guards, or by the intervention of some tender-hearted Ariadne.

If those dark walls could only reveal the story of the doomed lives which they once imprisoned, we should probably be able to realize, even more fully than we do, the shadowed side of all the glittering splendour of Knossos, and the grim element of barbaric cruelty which mingled with a refined artistic taste and a delight in all forms of beauty. In none of these great civilizations of the ancient world were splendour and cruelty separated by any great interval from one another, nor was a very remarkable degree of refinement inconsistent with a carelessness of life, and even such a thirst for blood, as we would consider more natural in a savage state; but it is seldom that the evidences of the two things lie so close to one another as where at Knossos the innocent figure of the crocus-gatherer almost covers the very mouth of the horrible pit in which the captives of Minos waited for the day when their lives were to be staked on the hazard of the arena.

Among the other treasures recovered by this season's work was a quantity of fine painted pottery which had fallen from the upper rooms into the basement when the palace floors collapsed. Some of the fragments were of that early polychrome style known as 'Kamares ware,' from the cave on the southern slope of Mount Ida, where it was first discovered by Mr. J. L. Myres. Its designs are purely conventional and largely geometric—zigzags, crosses, spirals, and concentric semicircles—and are executed in beautiful tints of brown, red, yellow, black, and white, the design being sometimes in dark on a light ground, and sometimes in light upon dark. The extraordinary thinness of the walls of these polychrome vessels, and the fineness of the clay from which they are fabricated, show to what a pitch the potter's craft had reached at the early period to which they belong. Of the later pottery of Knossos, which substituted naturalistic motives, executed in monochrome, for the conventional polychrome designs of the Kamares period, many specimens were also found during the excavations of this season.