And through all these changes, and ever since, the ruined House of Minos remained absolutely deserted, until, more than 3,000 years after the sack, its echoes were wakened by the spades and picks of Dr. Evans's workmen. Around the ruins grim and cruel legends swiftly grew up. The old traditions, dimly surviving in the minds of the native Cretans, of the bull-fight and the prize-ring, and the tribute of toreadors from the conquered nations, seemed to be corroborated by the very decorations of the palace walls, still visible amidst the ruins, and around them were woven the stories which have come down to us as legends of early Greece. 'Let us place ourselves for a moment,' says Dr. Evans, 'in the position of the first Dorian colonists of Knossos after the great overthrow, when features now laboriously uncovered by the spade were still perceptible amid the mass of ruins. The name [Labyrinth] was still preserved, though the exact meaning, as supplied by the native Cretan dialect, had been probably lost. Hard by the western gate, in her royal robes, to-day but partially visible, stood Queen Ariadne herself—and might not the comely youth in front of her be the hero Theseus, about to receive the coil of thread for his errand of liberation down the mazy galleries beyond? Within, fresh and beautiful on the walls of the inmost chambers, were the captive boys and maidens locked up here by the tyrant of old. At more than one turn rose a mighty bull, in some cases, no doubt, according to the favourite Mycenæan motive, grappled with by a half-naked man. The type of the Minotaur itself as a man-bull was not wanting on the soil of prehistoric Knossos, and more than one gem found on this site represents a monster with the lower body of a man and the forepart of a bull.
'One may feel assured that the effect of these artistic creations on the rude Greek settler of those days was not less than that of the disinterred fresco on the Cretan workman of to-day. Everything around—the dark passages, the lifelike figures surviving from an older world, would conspire to produce a sense of the supernatural. It was haunted ground, and then, as now, "phantasms" were about. The later stories of the grisly King and his man-eating bull sprang, as it were, from the soil, and the whole site called forth a superstitious awe. It was left severely alone by the new-comers. Another Knossos grew up on the lower slopes of the hill to the north, and the old Palace site became "a desolation and hissing." Gradually earth's mantle covered the ruined heaps, and by the time of the Romans the Labyrinth had become nothing more than a tradition and a name.'[*]
[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, pp. 131, 132.]
Who, then, were the invaders who, whether they remained as a ruling caste in the land which they had conquered, or merely destroyed and departed, inflicted upon the Minoan civilization a blow from which it never recovered? The Cretans of Præsos, whose story of the Sicilian expedition of Minos has already been mentioned, stated to Herodotus that, after that great disaster, 'to Crete, thus destitute of inhabitants ... other men, and especially the Grecians, went, and settled there.' As Mr. Hogarth has pointed out, 'the men of Præsos were no doubt, in the true saga spirit, foreshortening history by crystallizing a process into a single event.' It is very improbable, in view of the evidence afforded by the long survival and gradual decay of the Minoan tradition, that there was any immediate general occupation of the island on the part of the conquering race. The process which finally resulted in the island of Crete becoming 'the mixed land,' with a heterogeneous population of Pelasgians, Dorians, Achæans, and other tribes, must have been a gradual one, extending, in all probability, over several centuries. Any large influx of foreign elements was impossible so long as Crete was dominated by a great and warlike central power; but once that power was broken by the catastrophe in which the Palaces of Knossos and Phæstos were overthrown, there was nothing to hinder the gradual drifting in of the wandering tribes of the Ægean and of the North.
How that catastrophe came about we can see, not with any certainty of detail, but with some amount of probability as to its general outlines, from that echo of a period of wandering and strife in the Mediterranean area which comes to us from the records of Ramses III. at Medinet Habu. 'The isles were restless, disturbed among themselves,' and it was one of the later waves of that storm which broke itself against the armed strength of Egypt about 1200 B.C. Probably the process of migration had been going on for several generations. The rude but vigorous tribes of the North had been pressing down upon the races which had created that remarkable Bronze Age civilization of the Danubian area, whose relics have been coming to light of late years; and these in their turn, under the pressure from the North, had been moving down towards the Mediterranean, driving before them the peoples, probably of kindred stock to themselves, who had occupied the lands of the Mycenæan civilization.
We know that long before the Homeric poems took shape the Achæans had established themselves as the ruling caste in the Argolid, in Laconia, and elsewhere; and that the pressure had begun even while Mycenæ was at the height of its power is suggested by the figures on one of the steles of the Circle-Graves, where a Mycenæan chieftain in his chariot is pursuing an enemy whose leaf-shaped sword shows that he was one of the Danubian race. The Mycenæan was the victor in the first shock; but the steady pressure of the tribes from the North was not to be permanently resisted, and the end was the establishment of an alien race in power at Mycenæ. The Mycenæan stele, where the chief of the ancient stock pursues his Northern assailant, has its motif reversed in the archaic Greek stele discovered by Dr. Pernier at Gortyna, where a big Northerner with round shield and greaves threatens a tiny Minoan or Mycenæan, crouching behind his figure-of-eight shield. The two rude pictures may be taken as typical of the beginning and the end of the process which resulted in the establishment of the race of Agamemnon at 'Golden Mycenæ.' Pressed upon thus by the warlike Achæans, perhaps already forced from their homes on the mainland, the Mycenæans of Tiryns and Mycenæ were obliged to fare forth in search of new dwelling-places. Not unnaturally the emigrants may have turned to the land from which their civilization had originally sprung, in the expectation that the Cretans would not refuse a welcome and a home to men of their own stock. Seemingly they were disappointed in their expectation. The Minoans, or, at least, the Minoan rulers, were not prepared to admit peacefully the incursion of this new element into their kingdom; and the wanderers, under the spur of desperate need, took by force what was denied to them as suppliants. So, in all probability, the glory of the Minoan Empire was destroyed by the hands of its own children, the descendants of men whom Knossos herself had sent forth to hold her mainland colonies.[*]
[Footnote *: Cf. Dr. Mackenzie, Annual of the British School at Athens, vol. xiii., pp. 424, 425.]
In such circumstances there would be no sudden eclipse of the ancient culture. Modified slightly, if at all, by the influx of what, after all, was a kindred element, it would persist, as the evidence shows it persisted, until it perished of natural decay. Even when the Achæans, and, later still, the Dorians, followed in the wake of the Mycenæan immigrants, though their advent brought, as we have seen, important changes in customs and in art motives, the ancient native culture remained the fundamental element of the newer civilization. It has been pointed out by Mr. Hogarth that the Geometric vases of the early Iron Age in Crete exhibit in their decoration merely stylized Minoan motives, while 'the shields and other bronzes of the Idæan Cave, the latest of which come down probably to the ninth or even the eighth century, are artistic descendants of Minoan masterpieces modified by some element of uncouthness which was probably of Northern origin.'[*]
[Footnote *: Fortnightly Review, October, 1908, p. 602.]
Thus in slow decay, after the great catastrophe, passed away the great civilization of the Minoan Empire. Not all of the tribes which had owned the dominion of the House of Minos were content, however, to remain as subjects to the mainland conquerors. The destruction of the central power at Knossos must have involved, as Dr. Evans has suggested,[*] the collapse of much of the commerce on which the island of the Hundred Cities depended for the support of its great population. Already in the reign of Amenhotep III. of Egypt, that powerful monarch had been obliged to establish a special coastguard service at the mouths of the Nile to protect his trade-routes against the Lycian pirates. When the Minoan fleet was no longer in being to police the Ægean, these and other piratical races must have quickly driven the Cretan merchant marine from the seas. The purple fisheries and the oil trade would dwindle and die, and the population which had been supported by them would be driven from a land which could no longer maintain it. The colonizing movement which has left traces of Minoan culture in Anatolia, in Palestine, in Sicily, and even in Spain, began, no doubt, at an earlier period, when the Empire of the Sea-Kings was in its full strength; but it probably received a considerable impulse at this time of forced emigration. The sudden introduction of the same culture into Cyprus at some period after 1400 B.C. has been referred to conquest by men of the Ægean race, who may very well have been the men of Knossos driven forth by the pressure of altered conditions to find a new home for themselves.