RELICS OF ANCIENT CRETE

Otago Witness, Issue 3396, 16 April 1919, Page 66

RELICS OF ANCIENT CRETE

Plaster casts of the Harvester's Vase and of the Phaistos Disk, • which it- is hoped may forin the nucleus of a collection illustrating the archaeology of the Mediterranean region, have been presented to the Otago University Museum by Dr Colquhoun. Both thesd relics of the Minolta civilisation of Crete may be dated about 1500 8.C.;. and were discovered by the Italian archaeologists working in the island under the veteran Halbherr. The Harvester's Vase is made from black steatite, and is thus described by Hall Archaeology," p. 62): "The Harvester's Vase is handleless, > and has a carefullymodelled 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 id the tune of a sistrum, carried 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 coryphaeus, 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. This 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 fax surpassed bv this in technique." 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 JEge&n area. It is, how.ever, 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 impressing 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 typewriter' . . . The writer began in the 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 i-eached. This unique object is certainly the product of a culture distinct from that of the Minoans, the Mesopotamians. or the Hittites; and wo 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 lectures in the ethnological course to be delivered at the Museum during the coming winter.