OTAGO UNIVERSITY MUSEUM

Evening Star, Issue 16992, 14 March 1919, Page 7

OTAGO UNIVERSITY MUSEUM

Plaster easts of the Harvester’s Vase : and of the Phaistos Disk, which, it is hoped, may form the nucleus of a collec- 1 tion illustrating the archaeology of the*] Mediterranean region, have been presented j to the Otago University Museum by Dr ! Colquhoun. Both these relics of the Minoan civilisation of Crete may be dated about 1500 b.c. , and were discovered by the Italian acchmologiats working in the j island under the veteran Halbherr. The Harvester’s Vase is made from black steatite, and is thus described by Hall (‘ JEgean Archaeology,’ p. 62): “ The Harvester’s Vase is handleless, and has a carefully-modelled neck and lip. Probably it had no foot, but it was made in three pieces fitted into one another. The lower third of it has gone. On the middle portion of it we see in high relief a procession of rowdy villagers, all probably more or less drunk with the heady wine of Crete, stamping along in procession to the tune of a sistrum, earned by one of their number, and of their own voices, for they are shouting loudly as they go. Over their shoulders they carry flails and other agricultural implements; their coryphams, an elderly bearded countryman, has a big stick. Evidently the procession is a ‘ harvest home.’ The life of this small relief is extraordinary. Not only does one see the peasants stamping along with legs high in air in a sort of parade march (goose step), but one hears them shouting. Thii is probably the masterpiece of Minoan art, at any rate in relief sculpture. The relief is most skilfully managed; one sees sometimes three, even four, heads one behind the other. Even the best Egyptian reliefs are far surpassed by this in techTuque.” ' . Of the Disk, Hall has the following (p. 228); —“All that we can say about this clay disk, with its impressed hieroglyphic signs, which was found at Phaistos, is that it is not Cretan. Its hieroglyphs are quite different from those of the Minoan seals, and bear no relation to anything written that we know in the iEgean area. It is, however, of Minoan age, and, as Sir Arthur Evans has pointed out, it is evidently a foreign document, probably from Lycia or Caria. . . - The method of writing by impresmg stamps of certain characters on the clay is most interesting and unexpected. The writer evidently had by him a collection of the wooden types of the signs he wished to use; the Phaistos Disk is, indeed, a printed document executed by means of a type-writer! . . . The writer in tne centre and turned the disk round and round as he wrote (or, rather, stamped) his signs, which therefore unroll themselves on a path which comes to an end when the edge of the disk is Reached. This unique object is certainly the product of a culture distinct from’ that of the Minoans, the Mesopotamians, or the Hitties j and we may well ascribe it to a local civilisation, akin*- to both Minoan and Hittite, in Lycia or Caria.” , . ... Hall's remarks indicate the intrinsic interest of the casts, and they will, undoubtedly add interest to the lecture on the Minoan Age in Crete, which will form one of the series in the ethnological course to be delivered at the Museum during the coming winter.