[Footnote *: 'Scripta Minoa,' p. 59.]
The Mycenæan pottery found at Tell-el-Amarna shows that there was still an opening in Egypt for the products of Ægean art at least as late as the reign of Akhenaten; and it is more than probable that in Egypt many of the émigrés of the Minoan débâcle found a home. The art of the reign of Akhenaten is characterized by the somewhat sudden outburst of a naturalistic style almost entirely foreign to the Egyptian tradition; and, as Mr. Hall foresaw eleven years ago, it has been suggested[*] that the naturalism of Tell-el-Amarna owes some of its inspiration to the influence of the fugitives who brought with them from Crete the traditions of the great art of Knossos. Such a suggestion is no longer so improbable as it seemed to be in 1901, when it was still a tenable theory that the new development of Egyptian art was due to Mesopotamian influence, and came from Mitanni with Queen Tyi, the wife of Amenhotep III. Now that it is certain that Tyi was no Mitannian, but a native Egyptian, that door is closed, and we must suppose either that Egyptian art suddenly and spontaneously awakened to a new style of vision and execution, from which, again, it as suddenly departed, or else that some foreign influence was working strongly upon the rigid Egyptian convention, modifying and vivifying it. If a foreign influence, why not the influence of the Minoan émigrés, whose art we at least know to have been capable of such an effect? Of course, it is, after all, matter of surmise, and perhaps the chances are rather in favour of the new art of Akhenaten's time having been a genuinely native growth, influenced and inspired by the new ideas with which the heretic King was seeking to leaven the national life; but it is certainly far from unlikely that the break-up of the Minoan Empire did influence the art of Egypt, and perhaps that or other nations, in a manner something similar to, though on a smaller scale than, that in which the capture of Constantinople influenced the culture of Europe in the fifteenth century.
[Footnote *: R. M. Burrows, 'The Discoveries in Crete,' p. 96.]
We have already seen the evidence for the migration of Minoan tribes of a later age in the assault of the Zakkaru and Pulosathu upon Egypt 200 years after the fall of Knossos, and the establishment of the latter tribe as an independent power upon the coast of Palestine—events which may have been due to the advance of another wave of Northern colonists upon the shores of Crete. One more glimpse of the dying sea-power of the Cretan race, now itself disorganized and predatory, is given us by the Golenischeff papyrus, which tells, among other adventures of the unfortunate Wen-Amon, envoy of Her-hor, the priest-King of Upper Egypt (circa 1100 B.C.), how the Egyptian ambassador was threatened with capture by eleven ships of Zakru pirates, who put into Byblos when he was about to sail thence. Whether these were genuine Minoans or not, it is impossible to tell; their immediate connection was apparently with Dor, on the coast of Palestine; but their name suggests the town of Zakro, in Eastern Crete, and it is not unlikely that they belonged to the same race as the Zakkaru of the time of Ramses III.
Thereafter the Egyptian records are silent as to the scattered tribes of Crete, just as they had been silent since the rise of the Nineteenth Dynasty as to the organized Empire of the Keftians. The eleven shiploads of Zakru sea-robbers are the last degenerate representatives of the great marine which, under the Kings of the House of Minos, had once held the undisputed Empire of the Ægean. The ring of Minos was destined to lie for long ages beneath the waves before the descendants of Theseus brought it up again.
CHAPTER IX
THE PERIODS OF MINOAN CULTURE
We must now endeavour to form some idea of the various periods into which the long enduring culture of the Minoan Empire more or less naturally falls, and to note some of the characteristic features of each period. The chief aid in the formation of such an idea is given by the remains of the pottery which have survived from each period, and it is largely from the classification of the pottery at Knossos and other sites that the scheme adopted by Dr. Evans and other workers has been derived. The deposit left by Neolithic man on the hill of Kephala averages about 6 metres in thickness below the later deposit which marks the occupation of the site by the post-Neolithic culture. We are thus led to an almost fabulous antiquity for the first occupation of the site. In the earliest beginnings of human development, progress, with its consequent accumulation, is slow, and if we allow a rate of 3 feet of deposit for each thousand years, we shall probably not be very far wrong. Such an allowance brings us to about 10,000 B.C. as the time when Neolithic man began his first settlement on the hill of Knossos.
Neolithic Age.—The remains found in the deposit of this period are naturally of a very simple and primitive character. They consist of pottery, handmade without any use of the wheel, and hand-burnished, black in colour, and, in the latest specimens, adorned with incised ornament, which is sometimes filled in with a white chalky substance. While this description is characteristic of the deposit generally, a gradual progress in the potter's art is traceable from the virgin soil upwards. In the earliest stratum, immediately above the depositless virgin soil, the pottery, for the depth of the first metre, was entirely plain, unfired, polished within and without, with no appearance of narrowed necks or moulded bases. The next metre shows the beginning of incised ornament, but in almost inappreciable quantity, and the third and fourth metres show the gradual, but extremely slow, growth of this species of decoration, the proportion of incised vases in the fourth metre only reaching 3 per cent. The fifth metre deposit, however, discloses one important innovation. The proportion of incised vases is scarcely greater than in the preceding stratum, but almost all of them have the incisions filled in with the white chalky substance already alluded to, forming a geometric design of white upon black. Along with this new development of the incised ware goes a development of the unincised, whose surface is now not only polished to the highest degree of lustre, but is thereafter rippled in vertical lines by the pressure of some blunt instrument, so as to produce an undulating effect, like that of the ripple marks on sand. The rippling of the unincised pottery continues along with the chalk filling of the incised through the remainder of the Neolithic series, and, in fact, appears to have enjoyed an even superior popularity. In the sixth metre from the virgin soil indications begin to present themselves of the fact that the Neolithic period is about to draw to a close, for some of the pottery is beginning to assume the shapes which are characteristic of the painted ware of the earliest Minoan period, and in the following metre paint begins to make its appearance as a means of decoration in rivalry with the incision and rippling of the earlier strata. From this point, then, we begin to get into touch with the genuine Minoan periods, of which, according to Dr. Evans's classification, there are three—Early, Middle, and Late Minoan—each in its turn subdivided into three sub-periods.
Early Minoan I.—The pottery of this period takes over in great part the style of the primitive hand-burnished black ware inherited from the preceding age. But though this supplies the greater proportion of the material, it is not the characteristic feature. This is supplied by the fact that the potter now begins to use paint as a means for producing the lustrous black surface which his Neolithic predecessor produced by hand-burnishing. A lustrous black glaze medium is spread as a slip over the surface of the clay, so as to produce an effect generally similar to that of the hand-polished ware, and on this lustrous slip the decoration is painted, generally in white, more rarely in vermilion. Thus we have painted vases, with light design upon a dark ground.