KAMARES VASES FROM PHÆSTOS AND HAGIA TRIADA (pp. [120] & [197])
G. Maraghiannis
That such tablets were not the only form in which the Minoans executed the writing of their various documents is evident from the fact already noticed, that inscriptions have been found executed with a reed-pen, and, though those extant are written on clay vessels, it is obvious that the reed-pen was not a very suitable instrument for writing on such materials, and that its existence presupposes some substance more adapted to the cursive writing of a pen—parchment, possibly, or papyrus, which could be readily obtained from Egypt. Unfortunately, such materials, on which, in all probability, the real literary documents of the Minoans, if there were any such documents, would be written, can scarcely have survived the fire which destroyed the palace, or, if by any chance they escaped that, the subsequent action of the climate; so that whatever genuinely literary fragments may yet come to light must be looked for on the larger tablets, and at the best can scarcely be more than brief extracts. We cannot expect from Crete a wealth of papyri such as Egypt has preserved for the archæologist.
Into quite a different category from any of the ordinary Minoan tablets comes the disc found at Phæstos in 1908. Its general character has been already described. The long inscription which covers both of its faces is written in a form of hieroglyphics which, to some extent, resembles the Minoan pictographic system, but is not the same. The crested helmets which occur frequently as signs, the round shields, the fashion of dress of both men and women, and the style of architecture depicted in the hieroglyphic rendering of a house or pagoda, are not Minoan; and, on the whole, the evidence seems to point to the disc being the product of some allied culture, perhaps Lycian, in which a language closely akin to that of Minoan Crete was used. The inscription on the disc is carefully balanced and arranged, and each side contains exactly the same number of sign-groups, with one additional group on face A, which is separated from the preceding part of the inscription by a dash. Certain sets of sign-groups recur in the same order, as though they constituted some kind of refrain. From these indications it has been suggested that the whole inscription is a metrical composition, a short poem or hymn—perhaps one leaf of an Anatolian Book of Psalms whose other pages have perished. It is agreed that the language and religion of the western coast of Asia Minor were closely allied to those of Crete, and it is possible that when the Minoans developed their own language on somewhat different lines from the mainlanders, they maintained in parts of their religious service the old form of the speech common to themselves and their Anatolian relatives, as a kind of sacred language.[*]
[Footnote *: See Appendix, p. 264.]
Thus, it is abundantly evident that the civilization of Minoan Crete, far from being dumb, had varied and perfectly adequate means of expressing itself. The old Cretan tradition that the Phœnicians did not invent the letters of the alphabet, but only changed those already existing, is amply justified; for this seems to have been precisely what they did. The Phœnician mind, if not original, was at all events practical. The great stumbling-block in the way of the ancient scripts was their complexity—a fault which the Minoan users of the Linear Script, Class B, had evidently already begun to recognize and endeavour to amend. What the Phœnicians did was to carry the process of simplification farther still, and to appropriate for their own use out of the elements already existing around them a conveniently short and simple system of signs. The position which they came to occupy, after the Minoan empire of the sea had passed away, as the great carriers and middlemen of the Mediterranean, gave their system a spread and a utility possible to no other system of writing; and so the Phœnician alphabet gradually came to take its place as the basis of all subsequent scripts. Unquestionably it was a great and important service which was thus rendered by them; but, all the same, the beginnings of European writing must be traced not to them, but to their predecessors the Minoans, and the clay tablets of Knossos, Phæstos, and Hagia Triada are the lineal ancestors of all the written literature of Europe.
In attempting to deal with the Minoan religion we are met by the fact that it is as yet quite impossible to present any connected view of the subject. As in the case of their literature we have the actual records but cannot read them, so in the case of their religion a considerable mass of facts is apparent, but we have no means of co-ordinating them so as to arrive at any definite idea of a religious system. Some of the ritual we can see, and even understand something of the Divinity to whom it was addressed, but the theology is lacking. Accordingly, nothing more can be done than to present the fragmentary facts which are apparent.
The Minoans, it seems fairly clear, were never, like their successors the Greeks, the possessors of a well-peopled Pantheon; nor was the chief object of their adoration a male deity like the Greek Zeus. There are, indeed, traces of a male divinity, who was adopted by the Greeks when they obtained predominance in the island, as the representative of their own supreme deity, and who became the Cretan Zeus. But in Minoan times this being occupied a very subordinate place, and undoubtedly the chief object of worship was a goddess—a Nature Goddess, a Great Mother— ποτνια θηρων, the Lady of the Wild Creatures—who was the source of all life, higher and lower, its guardian during the period of its earthly existence, and its ruler in the underworld.
The functions of this great deity, it has been aptly pointed out, are substantially those claimed for herself by Artemis in Browning's poem, 'Artemis Prologizes':
'Through heaven I roll my lucid moon along;
I shed in hell o'er my pale people peace;
On earth, I, caring for the creatures, guard
Each pregnant yellow wolf and fox-bitch sleek,
And every feathered mother's callow brood,
And all that love green haunts and loneliness.'
She was a goddess alike of the air, the earth, and the underworld, and representations of her have survived in which her various attributes are expressed. As goddess of the air, she is represented by a female figure crowned with doves; as goddess of the underworld, her emblems are the snakes, which we see twined round the faïence figure at Knossos, or the terra-cotta in the Gournia shrine. Her figure is often seen upon seals and gems, standing on the top of the rock or mountain, with guardian lions in attendance, one on either side, and sometimes with a male votary in the background.