CHAPTER V

THE MINOANS IN CRETE

Those, then, were the two great powers on land in the very old days of the story of mankind. There was Egypt along the Nile, and Babylonia--for a thousand and more years, rather to be called Assyria--along the Euphrates and Tigris.

But there was also yet a third power, very great, very ancient, and highly civilised, a sea-power, with its capital in the big island, which you will sec on the map, lying to the south of Greece, Crete.

You will observe, perhaps, that it quite agrees with all that we find in the later story of mankind, that a nation living on an island should be powerful at sea. To-day you see the great sea-powers, ourselves and Japan. We live on islands that are small when compared with the lands of Germany, France, America, Russia, China; but we have more power in ships and seamen. Perhaps America is going to have a greater power than Japan, but at the time that I am writing she has not.

It is only of rather recent years that we have come to know much about this very ancient Cretan civilisation, and chiefly it is owing to the work of a great antiquary, Sir Arthur Evans, that we have discovered the story. It must be very interesting to be an antiquary and to dig--or to order a gang of diggers to {77} dig under your directions--and not to know what you may be going to turn up next: now a gold ear-ring, now a bronze sword, now the edge of a worked stone that may be the corner-stone of a building which more digging may prove to be one of the greatest and most marvellous buildings in the world!

[Sidenote: Knossos]

It sounds like a fairy story; but it was a fairy story which Sir Arthur Evans made come true at a place in Crete where the ancient city of Knossos used to be. He found wonderful things--an immense palace, a place which inscriptions, also there discovered, show to have been a temple of the gods as well. The king, it is evident, was high-priest as well as king: we have seen that union of the two offices, the king's and the priest's, before, both in Egypt and in Babylonia. (When I say before, I mean that I wrote of it earlier in the story. I do not mean that it came any earlier in the time of its actual happening.) There is evidence to show that the Cretan people were civilised, could make fine works of art and so on, right back to the very earliest date at which the evidences from the peoples living along the river-courses have anything to show us. Maybe the Cretans acquired their civilisation even earlier than the others.

We cannot be sure of that. What we can be sure of is that an enormous number of years ago they were marvellous engineers and architects, as well as workers of ornaments, and of fine pottery and glazed ware. The palace at Knossos is an immense place, with great columns, walls, halls. We wonder as much at the splendid imagination of the architect who could plan buildings on such a grand scale so very long ago as we do at the engineer's power to work and lift into position such huge stones as we find were used in the building. And {78} the delicacy of the finish is wonderful too. It is not only the vastness of the size that amazes us. That is the chief wonder of the Egyptian pyramids. But the buildings and other remains in Crete are more wonderful still.

This Cretan civilisation at so very early a date makes an extraordinary chapter in the world's story. It would still have been a story very extraordinary if it had been only just the story of what happened in the island of Crete, and did not spread beyond it. But, as a matter of fact, it did spread very far beyond that island. It spread out north, east, south, and west--up into Greece, across to Syria, down to Egypt, and away to Sicily.

In your books you are likely to read about all this as "the Minoan civilisation." Probably there really was some great king of old in Crete whose name was Minos. It is possible that there were many of the name, and that all the kings of his dynasty were called Minos, with some other name besides to distinguish them. However that may be, the Cretan legendary story was that Minos was a very great king, half divine, who gave laws and the arts of civilisation to his people, rather as Khammurabi was supposed to have given laws to the Babylonians. And, again like Khammurabi, Minos was supposed to have received these laws from a deity, the greatest deity that the Minoans, as they were called, knew. But this deity of theirs was supposed to be female, a goddess, the goddess Ishtar of the Babylonians--the Ashtaroth of the Bible. The Cretans, however, made her the chief of all the gods. The Babylonians held her in second place, as spouse of the chief god Shamash, the sun-god.

These splendid buildings of the Minoans, as they {79} have been discovered for us by the digger, have a much more modern, a much less strange, appearance than those either of Babylonia or of Egypt. The Babylonian buildings especially look to us, as we make pictures of them in our minds, like palaces of some great ogre. The supports at each side of the doors and gates are very often in the form of huge winged bulls. Human heads and figures of colossal size are to be seen everywhere. And the human heads have generally great beards, and perhaps the rest of the hair worked up into a square pattern, with curls, so that they look horrible. All the insides of the Babylonian palaces seem to have been adorned with enormous hunting scenes, worked in a kind of gypsum which was found in the country. I think we should feel terribly afraid if we suddenly found ourselves in an ancient Babylonian palace or even an Egyptian one.

But I believe that we should feel very much happier and more at home if we could be transported suddenly into one of the old Minoan palaces. And I believe that I can make a guess why that is so.

[Sidenote: Cretan architecture]

The Babylonian and the Egyptian style of building was found in these two countries, but neither Babylonians nor Egyptians went much across the sea--the Mediterranean Sea. But these Cretans, as I have said, were great sea-goers. They were the great naval power in the Mediterranean. So they went, and carried with them their ideas and their ways of building, everywhere. The effect of that is seen most of all perhaps at the site of an old Greek city on the mainland of Greece, Mycenæ, where great excavations have been made. But the effect is found in many other places too. So it has come down through the Greeks and through the Romans, and has been in the minds {80} and in the eyes of later builders, although the builders were generally, as we may suppose, not at all aware that they owed anything to these builders of so many thousands of years ago.

It is a curious thing that in Egypt, in Babylonia, and also in Crete, some of the very oldest buildings and some of the very oldest works of art are the best. We have a comfortable idea in our minds that we--that is to say, mankind--have been making progress, have been improving, all through the story; but unfortunately there are some things in which we do not seem to have improved--some kinds of work in which the oldest is the best.

And as I have said that the ancient buildings found in Crete are of a style that does not look nearly so strange to us as the ancient buildings of the countries on the mainland, so the Minoan engravings show us the people of that very far-off time dressed in a fashion that seems almost familiar to us. They do not look nearly so strange as the people that we see pictured and graven on the walls of those other palaces and tombs and temples.

We find many evidences, and evidences of many different kinds, of the sea-faring habits of the ancient Cretans, and of their great power. We find Minoan works of art in the tombs of Egyptian kings, and Egyptian ornaments in the Minoan palaces. We find, as I have said, the Minoan bronze work as far to the west as Sicily. Athens, the great Athens of Greece, seems to have been subject to the Minoans and to have paid tribute to them. And a very cruel form some of that tribute took. According to the old historians, they had to send seven maidens and seven youths each year to Crete; and we seem to be able to guess the purpose for which they were sent.

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The legend is that they had to be sent each year to be devoured by, or be sacrificed to, a Cretan monster called the Minotaur. The name Minotaur is from Minos and tauros, meaning a bull. It was figured as a half human, half bull-like monster.

[Sidenote: The Labyrinth]

One of the most famous of the buildings discovered by the diggers in Crete is the Labyrinth, a building of an immense number of passages in which you were almost certain to lose your way if you did not know it. You would be lost, and never come back, and the Minotaur was supposed to live in this Labyrinth, and you would wander about there till he came upon you and killed you.

[Illustration: COIN OF KNOSSOS (SHOWING LABYRINTH).]

This legend of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth is particularly worth attending to because it shows us so well how the unreal stories grew up out of the real, and how we are sometimes able to find out the real truth under the unreal story.

There was this real Labyrinth in Crete; and this tribute of seven maids and seven youths was, we may be tolerably sure, demanded of the Athenians. One or more of the drawings on the Minoan palace walls show bull-fights going on, and in the bull-ring are not only men, but also maidens, fighting the bull. One does not know whether all the Athenian maidens and youths were intended for this bull-fighting, but it is exceedingly likely that many of them were condemned to it, just as prisoners of war and others were made to fight lions in the amphitheatre at Rome. And out of this fact, of the maidens and youths in the bull-ring, might very easily grow the story of the Minotaur--the bull-monster of Minos--and his victim.

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How Theseus slew the Minotaur and found his way out of the Labyrinth by a clue given him by Ariadne, the king's daughter, who had fallen in love with him, is all a further fancy that grew up out of the solid facts of the Labyrinth and the bull-fighting.

It is very wonderful that these ancient people should have been able to make their power felt so far from their home island, because of the difficulty in crossing the open seas. Their ships were propelled by the oars of rowers and by the wind in the sails when the wind was in their favour--that is to say, was blowing in the direction in which they wanted to go. The sails of modern sailing vessels are so arranged that our ships can sail up into the wind, as it is called. They can go in a direction at right angles to the direction of the wind very easily, and even when it is a little opposed to them, by means of setting the sails so as to catch the wind side-ways. But there is no evidence that the Minoans were able to do this, and we know that in far later days of our story no such device was used. They had a squarish-shaped sail attached to the mast, more like our lug-sail than any other kind of rigging that is used now. And yet, with these poor appliances, they went to Egypt, to Syria, and to Sicily, and no doubt farther west again. And they went in numbers, for otherwise they would not have been able to subjugate the native people as we know that they did at Athens.

[Sidenote: The pirates]

We may suppose that they went for a double purpose--for trade and also for piracy, to take forcible possession of what they wanted wherever they found it. In those days, and for a long time afterwards, it does not seem as if they had any idea that it was contrary to what was right and just to take anything that they were able to take from another nation. Any {83} idea of what we call international justice was very little thought of, if thought of at all. They could, and they did, make laws among themselves which surprise us by their justice, but these laws were for each nation itself. We have seen the idea of a single god, supreme over a whole nation, held at times by them, but even that did not mean that they had an idea of a single god supreme over the whole of the world. He was a national god only, and if the idea of the divine law was thus national only, it was not likely that they would have the idea that any laws made by man were to be obeyed beyond the limits of the nation by which they were made.

So we may be sure that these ancient Minoans were what we should call pirates. They swept the sea in their ships attacking and capturing the ships of other peoples wherever they found them, and landing and making forays on the mainland much as the Vikings of Norway did around our own shores at a far later date. And this state of things in the Mediterranean is worth particular attention because these pirates, of one nation or another, will be found actively at work all through the pages of this great story of mankind. The Mediterranean was not freed from them until a very recent date.

Now, that piracy, together with the style of architecture and the making of smaller works of art which they practised, are the two great facts to remember about this wonderful civilisation of the ancient Minoans. For just about the year 1500 B.C., at which we left the story of Egypt, or a little later, some terrible catastrophe overtook the Minoans. What happened we do not know. It has been guessed that they suffered an invasion and a complete overthrow {84} by the Dorians, a people who had come down from the north and had taken possession of that southern part of Greece which is called the Peloponnese. But nothing is certainly known, except that the Minoans did suffer a very complete overthrow, that their power was shattered, their splendid buildings were destroyed, and they seem to vanish out of the story altogether. Their conquerors were evidently a people far less civilised and accomplished than they. Antiquaries tell us that there were at least two distinct stages in the making of buildings and works of art under the Minoans before this last catastrophe, but after that there is no building, no art work, worth accounting for. It all went.

But they had left the mark of their genius in the buildings at Mycenæ and elsewhere, and they had established the habit of piracy in the seas about their island.

So now, I think, we have the frame set in which we may place the picture. We have these ancient Egyptians leading the kind of life that I have tried to show you. We have the Babylonians and Assyrians along those other river-courses established as a great power in the east, and we have the Minoans, very shortly to be overthrown and to disappear, scouring the seas in their ships and having all the power along the coasts. And between them, in the very midst, is that country of Syria and Palestine which--especially Palestine, because it is south of Syria--lies right in the course which the great empires must traverse when they come to grips with each other. Palestine is the country through which they must pass whether for trade or for war with each other. You can imagine what a terrible position that must have been. Syria {85} and Palestine, as you know, were peopled by Semitic tribes, to which race the Babylonians also belonged originally. But the divisions and differences, both between the Babylonians and the others, and between these others, among themselves, were many and of various kinds. Some must have regarded each other as almost of the same kindred. Others must have seemed quite strange and foreign. It was a great mixture.

And for the moment, in or about 1500 B.C., the Israelites as a nation are not in Palestine at all. They are in the land of Goshen, undergoing that oppression of which you know. Within 300 years or so they will make their Exodus and begin their forty years of wandering in the wilderness, to re-appear in the story, under the leadership of Joshua; conquering the Canaanites and so establishing themselves right in the most dangerous position of all, in Palestine, on the highway between the two great empires.

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