During this period intercourse between Crete and Egypt must have been frequent and close. It is not only indicated by the evidence of the Sen-mut and Rekh-ma-ra tombs, but by the parallelism in the styles of art in the two countries. The art of each remains truly national, but the frescoes of Knossos and Hagia Triada and those of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Egypt are inspired by the same spirit, though in either case the result is modified by national characteristics.
THE HARVESTER VASE, HAGIA TRIADA (p. [124])
G. Maraghiannis
Late Minoan III.—This, the last period of the Minoan civilization, commences with the destruction of the palace of Knossost somewhere before 1400 B.C., and presents no definite line of termination. The great style of art represented by the preceding period does not at once degenerate into barbarism. If, as seems probable, the men who destroyed the Cretan palaces were Mycenæans of the mainland, more or less of the same stock as the Cretan representatives of the Minoan tradition, we can see how the catastrophe of the palaces need not have been followed by any immediate catastrophe of the art of Crete. At the same time the true spirit of the Minoan race had been destroyed, and degeneration of the standard of art naturally followed. The level of artistic work in the earlier part of the period is still high—in fact, it is that of what is considered the best Mycenæan art—the technical skill which produced the masterpieces of the Palace period still survives, but the inspiration which gave it life is gone. Originality in design vanishes first, and is gradually followed by skill in execution; the old types are reproduced in more and more slovenly fashion, and at last even the material employed follows the example of degeneration. This period of gradual decadence is, however, the period of greatest diffusion of the products of Minoan, or, rather, as we may now call it, of Mycenæan art. At Ialysos in Rhodes, and in the lower town of Mycenæ, types parallel with the work of Crete are found, and Tell-el-Amarna furnishes specimens of pottery whose degeneracy from the type of the Palace period declares them to belong to these days of decadence. Specimens of Late Minoan III. work are found at Tarentum, and the island of Torcello, near Venice, and even as far west as Spain. One of the characteristic features of the period is the fact that the stirrup-vase, found at Hagia Triada and Gournia in Late Minoan I., but almost totally wanting in Late Minoan II., now becomes common.
Towards the close of the period the site of the palace at Knossos was partially reoccupied by a humbler race of men, who used the rooms that had once witnessed the pride of the Minoan Sovereigns, dividing them up by flimsy partition-walls to suit their smaller needs. An age of transition succeeded, during which the character of the Cretan population was gradually modified by successive waves of invasion from the mainland, until Crete assumed the guise of 'the mixed land,' under which Homer knew it; and finally came the great invasion of the Dorians, which brought in for Crete, as for the rest of Greece, the dark age which preceded the dawn of the true Hellenic culture.
CHAPTER X
LIFE UNDER THE SEA-KINGS
What manner of men were the people who developed the Bronze Age civilization of Crete? Can we form any idea of their physical characteristics, of their homes and social conditions, of the general aspect of their daily life, and of the occupations in which they were engaged? Such questions can only be answered more or less generally in the absence of written material, or, rather, in our lack of understanding of the written material that exists; but, still, a considerable mass of evidence is in existence from which some broad outlines may be deduced with moderate certainty, and the object of this chapter is to present these outlines.
First, as to the physical characteristics of the race. Two lines of evidence are here available. On the one hand, there is that afforded by the actual remains of the bodies of men and women of the Minoan race which have been exhumed from ossuaries of the Bronze Age, and studied by anthropologists. Generally speaking, the result of their investigations has been to show that the Minoans belonged to the southernmost of the three great racial belts into which the ancient peoples of Europe may be divided—the so-called Mediterranean race. That is to say, they were a people of the long-headed type, dark in colouring and small in stature. The average height, estimated from the bones which have been measured, is somewhat under 5 feet 4 inches, which is about 2 inches less than the average of the modern Cretans, and corresponds more to the stature of the Sardinians and Sicilians of the present time. A few skulls of the broad-headed type appear among the general long-headedness, and probably point to some intermixture of race; but, as a whole, the people were long-headed. The shortness of stature indicated by the bones is a feature which one would scarcely have inferred from the other line of evidence available—the actual representations of men and women of their own race which the Minoans have left in their fresco-paintings; but allowance must, of course, be made for the artistic convention which tended to accentuate slenderness of figure, and therefore to increase apparent height.
Judging from the surviving pictures, the Minoan men were bronzed, with dark hair and beardless faces; their figures were slender, and their slenderness was made all the more conspicuous by the fashion which prevailed of drawing in the waist by a tightly fastened belt, which seems, in some cases at least, to have had metal edges; but muscularly they were well developed, and the pictures suggest litheness and agility in a high degree. 'One would say a small-boned race, relying more on quickness of limb and brain than on weight and size.' The hair of the men was worn in a somewhat elaborate fashion, being done up in three coils on the top of the head, while the ends of it fell in three long curls upon the shoulders. On the other hand, their dress was extremely simple, consisting normally of nothing but a loin-cloth, girt by the broad belt already mentioned, the material of which the loincloth was made being frequently gaily coloured or patterned, as in the case of the Cup-Bearer, whose garment is adorned with a dainty quatre-foil design. That more elaborate robes were worn on certain occasions of importance is shown by the sarcophagus at Hagia Triada ([Plate XXVIII.]), where the lyre player wears a long robe coming down to the ankles and bordered with lines of colour, while the other men in the scene wear tucked robes reaching a little below the knees (or possibly baggy Turkish trousers); and also by the Harvester Vase, where the chief figure in the procession is clad in a stiff garment, which has been variously interpreted as a wadded cuirass, or as a cope of some stiff fabric.