THE MINOANS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23045, 23 November 1936, Page 11

THE MINOANS

HIGH CIVILISATION TRUTH BEHIND A FABLE A good many years ago a party of English antiquarians excavated a British burial ground or " barrow," concerning which a persistent local tradition asserted that it was haunted by the ghost of a knight in golden armour (writes F. S. Burnell in the Sydney Morning Herald). Within it were found the bones of a chieftain in bronze armour which must have gleamed like gold itself when the dead man was laid in his grave some 12 centuries or so before the present era. Incredible as it seems, local tradition was apparently based on an actual folkmemory extending back to the bronze age of prehistoric Britain—about 3000 years ago—a direct link with those who actually witnessed the burial of the dead chieftain. Local tradition is far from being always so solidly authenticated as this, but it is never safe entirely to disregard it. Nine times out of ten there is a certain basis qf fact at the bottom of it. if it can only be reached; it may have become rather defaced and overgrown with barnacles, so to speak, after its long submersion, but with patience one can generally make out the original shape of it pretty well. There is no better example than the well-known Greek legend of Theseaus and the Minotaur. Regarded simply as a fairy tale it is delightful, and nobodv, practically speaking, ever treated it as anything else until a new light was thrown on the matter by the discoveries of Heinrich Schliemann, from 1870 onwards, at Troy, Mycenae, and other places. The result of his excavations was that the existence of an entirely unknown and undreamed-of civilisation was established in the Eastern Mediterranean; a civilisation of an astonishingly high order, not only long antecedent to the Greeks, but which the Greeks had themselves helped to destroy and to which they owed many of their oldest legends and

FOUND IN CRETE To discover the mother country from which this great and long-lost culture had originally proceeded was a long task, for various reasons, but it eventually turned out to be none other than Crete, where the excavations carried out by Sir Arthur Evans for the last 30 years and more on the site of Knossos prove that the ancient fairy tale of Theseus and the Minotaur has a surprisingly substantial backing of solid fact behind it. To begin with, there is no doubt that Minos actually existed; indeed, the name appears to have been a dynastic title, like that of the Pharaohs. The very throne on which he sat in his dual capacity as King and priest—there is a cast of it in the Nicholson Museum —still stands in its accustomed place in the vast palace of Knossus. where the visitor to-day may explore its courts and corridors: descend the magnificent stairway down which once swept the great royal and religious processions; stand in the splendid pillared hall where the Minos feasted in state, or sit in the Queen's own drawing room, with its wonderful marine frescoes, almost as fresh in colour as when they were first painted some 1500 years before 7 Christ. Though we cannot yet read the Minoan language, we know that in many respects life in the great palace was astonishingly modern: its inhabitants drank out of cups almost indistinguishable from those of to-day, they wrote with metal pens, decorated their apartments with flowers placed in exquisite vases, and wore jewellery of which a Parisian jeweller might well be proud; their bathrooms and lavatories and their system of sanitation generally were of a type otherwise unknown till nine-teenth-century England. LIKE VICTORIAN AGE The dresses of their ladies, with certain modifications, might almost have been copied from mid-Victorian fashion-plates, while their carvings, paintings, and reliefs have been com-

pared to the art of the Japanese. A supreme evidence of the luxury which ruled in the palace is a gaming-board which can hardly have belonged to any but the King; it is made of ivory, inlaid with gold, silver, and deep-blue paste. This magnificent object was found lying in one of the palace corridors—dropped, doubtless, by one of the raiders plundering the palace when Knossos was sacked and destroyed nearly 3400 years ago. What, however, of the Labyrinth? The Labyrinth was simply the palace itself. It was the "House of the Labyrs"—that is to say, of the Double Axe, a symbol of the Minoan MotherGoddess, which is found everywhere incised on the walls and pillars of the palace—at once the principal shrine of the goddess and the royal dwelling of her arch-representative, the Minos. That human victims were offered to her may well have been an invention, or perhaps a misunderstanding, on the part bf the Greeks, but there is good reason to believe that the supposed monster was nothing but the son of the Minos in his sacrificial capacity, wearing a black bull-mask to represent the Divine Bull, whose tossing horns, then as now, were a frequent cause of earthquakes in the island, and which it was consequently highly desirable to conciliate. Bull sports were held in which young men and women of high birth, wearing only a loincloth, caught the furious animal by the horns as it charged, somersaulted over its head on to its back, and thence leaped safely to the ground behind it. Knossos, the capital, with its population of about 100,000 people and its incredibly modern-looking houses, was linked up with the other cities in the island by a network of stone-paved roads. These roads were rather narrow, since there were no horses, and, therefore, no wheeled vehicles; litters

and palanquins were used instead. The great palace was a centre of pilgrimage, like Lourdes or Loreto; accommodation was provided for some of the wealthier class by a sort of hostel near by, complete with living rooms, restaurant, and hot and cold bathing facilities. So life went on in Crete till about the year 1450 8.C., when disaster fell upon Knossos, and the city and palace were sacked and set on fire. Plutarch, who is probably quoting an ancient tradilon, says that Theseus descended on Knossos with an army while Minos was absent in Sicily in the spring. •

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