More important, however, is the suggestion of Egyptian influence in the grouping of the figures. No one familiar with the details of the ceremony of 'opening the mouth' of the deceased, so continually represented in Egyptian funerary scenes, can fail to recognize the original inspiration of the scene on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus. The tomb in the background, the stiff swathed figure propped like a log in front of it, the leafy branch before the dead man, taking the place of the bunches of lotus-blooms, the offerings of meat, and the sacrifice of the bull—this is an Egyptian funeral with the mourners dressed in Cretan clothes. We have already seen a priest from the banks of the Nile brandishing his sistrum in the Harvest Procession; and the sarcophagus suggests that Egyptian religious influence was telling, if not on the actual views of the Cretans as to the state of man after death, at all events upon the ceremonial by means of which these views were expressed. Phæstos and Hagia Triada, we must remember, owing to their position, would be more exposed to Egyptian influence than even Knossos, where traces of it are not lacking.
The villa at Hagia Triada showed the same attentive care for sanitary arrangements which has been already noticed at Knossos. Mosso has noted an illustration of the honesty with which the work had been executed. 'One day, after a heavy downpour of rain, I was interested to find that all the drains acted perfectly, and I saw the water flow from sewers through which a man could walk upright. I doubt if there is any other instance of a drainage system acting after 4,000 years.'
The excavations at Knossos, Phæstos, and Hagia Triada have yielded, in the main, evidence of the splendour of the Minoan Kings; but other sites in the island, while presenting perhaps nothing so striking, have added largely to our knowledge of the common life of the Minoan race. At Gournia an American lady, Miss Harriet Boyd (now Mrs. Hawes), made the remarkable discovery of a whole town, mainly dating from the close of the Middle Minoan period, though the site had been occupied from the beginning of the Bronze Age. Gournia had had its modest palace, occupying an area of about half an acre, with its adaptation, on a diminutive scale, of the Knossian Theatral Area, its magazines, and its West Court, where palace and town met, as at Knossos, for business purposes. But the main interest of the little town centred in its shrine and in the houses of the burghers, with their evidences of a wonderfully even standard of comfortable and peaceful life, by no means untinged with artistic elegance.
The shrine, discovered in 1901, stood in the very heart of the town, and was reached by a much-worn paved way. The sacred enclosure was only some 12 feet square, and Mrs. Hawes is inclined to believe that its rough walls never stood more than 18 inches high, forming merely a little temenos, in which stood a sacred tree, and the small group of cult objects which were still huddled together in a corner of the shrine. 'It is true that they are very crude, made in coarse terra-cotta, with no artistic skill; nevertheless, they are eloquent, for they tell us that the Great Goddess was worshipped in the town-shrine of Gournia, as in the Palace of Knossos. Here were her images twined with snakes, her doves, the "horns of consecration," the low, three-legged altar-table, and cultus vases. To complete the list, a potsherd was found with the Double Axe moulded upon it, an indication, perhaps, that some who claimed kin with the masters of Crete paid their devotions at this unpretentious shrine.'[*] The smallness of the shrine at Gournia may be compared with the smallness of the sacred rooms at Knossos, and seems to have been characteristic of the Minoan worship.
[Footnote *: 'Crete the Forerunner of Greece,' p. 98.]
The 5-feet-broad roadways of the town, neatly paved, are conclusive evidence of the infrequent use of wheeled vehicles. Flush with their borders stand the fronts of the houses. Two-storey houses were common, some of them with a basement storey beneath the ground-floor when the slope of the hill admitted of such an arrangement. In all likelihood the general appearance of the homes was much like that of the comfortable-looking houses depicted on the faïence plaques of Knossos, already referred to. Even ordinary craftsmen's houses have six to eight rooms, while those of the wealthier burghers have perhaps twice as many. Here and there evidences of the former occupations of the inhabitants came to light—a complete set of carpenter's tools in one house, a set of loom weights in another, the block-mould in which a smith had cast his tools in a third. That the citizens of the little town were not entirely ignorant of letters was evidenced by the presence of a tablet bearing an inscription in the linear script of Knossos, Class A, and the beauty of their painted pottery shows that they were by no means lacking in refinement and artistic feeling. The town was sacked and burned about 1500 B.C., as its discoverer thinks, perhaps a century before the fall of the great palace at Knossos. Partially reoccupied, like other Cretan sites, during the Third Late Minoan period, it has since then lain tenantless, waiting the day when its ruined houses should be revealed again to testify to the quiet and peaceful prosperity that reigned under the ægis of the great sea-power of the House of Minos.
At Palaikastro another town of closely-packed houses, covering a space of more than 400 by 350 feet, has been revealed. Its existing remains are of somewhat later date than those of Gournia, and the houses are, on the whole, rather larger, but their general style is much the same. Near the town, at Petsofa, Professor J. L. Myres has unearthed, among a wealth of other votive offerings, a number of curious clay figurines, interesting as being among the earliest examples of polychrome decoration (they belong to Middle Minoan I., and are painted in a scheme of black and white, red and orange), but still more interesting—'with their open corsage, wide-standing collars, high shoe-horn hats, elaborate crinolines, and their general impression of an inaccurate attempt at representing Queen Elizabeth'—as evidence of how utterly unlike was the costume of prehistoric woman in the Ægean area to the stately and simple lines of the classic Greek dress.
The Cretan discoveries have tended as much as any work of recent years to reduce the extravagant claims which used to be put forward on behalf of the Phœnicians as originators of many of the elements of ancient civilization, and evidence is now forthcoming to show that originality in even their most famous and characteristic industry, the dyeing of robes with the renowned 'Tyrian purple,' must be denied to them and claimed for the Minoans. In 1903, Messrs. Bosanquet and Currelly found on the island of Kouphonisi (Leuke), off the south-east coast of Crete, a bank of the pounded shell of the murex from which the purple dye was obtained, associated with pottery of the Middle Minoan period; and in 1904 they discovered at Palaikastro two similar purple shell deposits, in either case associated with pottery of the same date.
(1) HALL OF THE DOUBLE AXES (p. [86])