The Sea-Kings of Crete

by James Baikie

[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' pp. 52, 53.]

That there was a huge disaster, which broke for ever the power of the Sea-Kings, is unmistakable. The Minoan kingdom did not fall from over-ripeness and decay, as was the case with so many other empires. The latest relics of its art before the catastrophe show no signs of decadence; the latest specimens of its linear writing show a marked advance on those of preceding periods. A civilization in full strength and growth was suddenly and fatally arrested. Everywhere throughout the palace at Knossos there are traces of a vast conflagration. The charred ends of beams and pillars, the very preservation of the clay tablets with their enigmatic records, a preservation due, probably, to the tremendous heat to which they were exposed by the furious blazing of the oil in the store jars of the magazines, the traces of the blackening of fire upon the walls—everything tells of an overwhelming tragedy. Nor was the catastrophe the result of an accident. There is no mistaking the significance of the fact that in the palace scarcely a trace of precious metal, and next to no trace of bronze has been discovered. Fire at Knossos was accompanied by plunder, and the plundering was thorough. A few scraps of gold-leaf, and the little deposit of bronze vessels that had been preserved from the plunderers by the fact that the floor of the room in which they were found had sunk in the ruin of the conflagration, are evidences, better than absolute barrenness would have been, to the fact that the place was pillaged with minute thoroughness, and the unfinished stone jar in the sculptor's workshop tells its own tale of a sudden summons from peaceful and happy toil to the stern realities of warfare.

The evidence from Phæstos and Hagia Triada tallies with that from Knossos. Everywhere there are the traces of fire on the walls, and a sudden interruption of quiet and luxurious life. The very stone lamps still stand in the rooms at Hagia Triada, and on the stairs of the Basilica at Knossos, as they stood to lighten the last night of the doomed Minoans. Of course there are no records, and if there were we could not read them; but it is easy to imagine the disastrous sea-fight off the mouth of the Kairatos River, or elsewhere along the coast, the wrecks of the once invincible Minoan fleet driven ashore in hopeless ruin in the shallow bay, like the Athenian fleet at Syracuse, the swift march of the mainland conquerors up the valley, the brief, desperate resistance of the palace guards, and then the horrors of the sack, and the long column of flushed victors winding down to their ships, laden with booty, and driving with them crowds of captive women. Similar scenes must have been enacted at Phæstos and Hagia Triada, either by other forces of invaders, or by the same host sweeping round the island.

From this overwhelming disaster the Minoan Empire never recovered. The palace at Knossos was never reoccupied as a palace, at least on anything like the scale of its former magnificence. The invaders possibly departed as swiftly as they had come, or if, as seems more probable, they eventually established themselves as a ruling caste among the subject Minoans, they chose for their dwellings other sites than those of the old palaces. The broken fragments of the Minoan race crept back after the sack to the blackened ruins of their holy and beautiful house, not to rebuild it, but to divide its stately rooms and those of its dependencies by rude walls into poor dwelling-houses, where they lived on—a very different life from that of the golden days before the sack.

GREAT JAR WITH PAPYRUS RELIEFS (p. [206])

In their own way they strove to continue, possibly under the modifying influence of the art tradition of their conquerors, the great story of the art of Knossos. There is no abrupt break in the style of the pottery and other articles belonging to the latest Minoan period, as compared with that of the days before the catastrophe. Technical skill is almost as great as ever; it is degeneration in the inspiration of the art that has begun. The spirit of the nation has been broken, and its art is no longer living. Though the old models are followed, it is with less complete understanding, with a perpetually increasing interval, and with less and less fidelity. 'With the inability to create new ideas of art and life,' says Dr. Mackenzie, 'is coupled the slavish adherence to inherited tradition and custom in both. Nothing new is produced, and nothing old is changed.'[*] 'For Crete the sack is Ægospotami, Late Minoan III., the long months that culminate in the surrender of Athens; the sack is Leipzig, Late Minoan III., the slow closing in on Paris that leads up to the abdication of Napoleon.'[**] Finally, even the technique fails, and the great art which gave to the world the figures of the Cup-Bearer and the King with the Peacock Plumes dies out in monstrosities.

[Footnote *: Annual of the British School at Athens, vol. xiii., p. 426.]

[Footnote **: R. M. Burrows, 'The Discoveries in Crete,' p. 100.]

The long decay was to some extent arrested by the coming of other waves of invaders, probably Achæans, to whose influence may be attributed the change in customs which begins to show itself in the post-Minoan period. Burning begins to take the place of inhumation as a means of disposing of the dead; Continental types of weapons make their appearance in the tombs; iron swords and daggers are even found. In life the men who use these weapons are clad, not with the Minoan loin-cloth, but with the garments which we associate with the Greeks of the Classical period, garments which require the use of the fibula or safety-pin to fasten them. The potter's art begins to find new motives, and to develop the use of the human form as a type of adornment in a manner almost entirely foreign to the Minoan tradition. At last, perhaps four centuries after the fall of Knossos, comes the great tidal wave of Dorian invasion, engulfing the work alike of conquerors and conquered, and blowing out all the landmarks of the ancient cultures.