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Some Impressions of Knossos.*

J. Irving Manatt

If Greek is to be saved, it must be largely for Homer's sake. The book, always the most real thing in literature, is becoming more and more an actual world. with Schliemann's revelation of the Royal Tombs at Mycenae and recovery of the Great Treasure of Troy, Homer's art notices are found to be transcripts of reality. Mycenae is in fact as in the poems rich in gold; Troy has its real houses of polished stone. Wherever the spade turns up Homeric ground it reveals .Homeric things. Last of all in Crete it has opened up a vast new area of the Homeric world and one surprisingly rich in its. contribution to our knowledge of prehistoric Greece. To this new light no student of Homer can afford to shut his eyes.

Not exactly in the Homeric foreground, Crete yet bulks large in the Poems. Idomeneus spear-famed, with his staunch liegeman Meriones, leads the men of Knossos and h{111dred-citied Crete in eighty black ships to Troy; and they give a good account of themselves in the Iliad. Idomeneus himself is close to Agamemnon (iv, 257-263). In the Teichoskopia only Odysseus and Ajax are presented before him (Ajax in a single verse) and Helen's introduction of the Cretan prince is noteworthy: among his Cretans he stands like a god and "many a time has Menelaus entertained' him in our house when he came from Crete." Homer does not know that Idomeneus' cousin Aerope was the mother of Agamemnon and Menelaus; but the traditional kinship harmonizes with the tone of the Iliad. Idomeneus has his aristeia in the Thirteenth Book, indeed. and that is outside the pale of higher criticism; but Meriones holds a post of honor in two great primary actions. It is Meriones and Menelaus who bear off the body of Patroclus out of the desperate fray while the two Ajaces act as buffers beating back the foe; and it is Meriones who is charged with. providing Patroclus' funeral pyre.

But our real source book for Homeric Crete is the Odyssey. In the Three Great Yarns Odysseus is always a Cretan: to Athene, incog. (xiii, 256ff.), a Cretan who has slain a son of Idomeneus and fled the country; to Eumaeus (xiv, 199 ff.), a Cretan Othello who has spoiled the Egyptians and been outwitted in turn by a Phoenician; finally, and for us the best of all, to Penelope (xix, 165 ff.), he is himself a brother of Idomeneus '-who had for twelve days entertained Odysseus, storm-bound on his way to Troy,--perhaps in the very palace Evans has now uncovered at Knossos. Now, as Homer distinctly tells us that Odysseus lies like the truth, we may take this fiction in its setting at least for fact.

Homer knows Crete as a "fair land and rich, sea-girt, with many men innumerable, aud ninety cities." Its people are not of one speech but of divers tongues commingled--Achaeans, Eteocretans high of heart, Kydonians, Dorians, Pelasgians. And among their cities is the mighty city Knossos wherein reigned Minos enneoros, great Zeus' confidant. In the Nekuia (Od. xi, 568f.) we see Minos, Zeus' glorious son, wielding the golden sceptre of judgment in the underworld. But the Minos of Homer, the wise and just lawgiver receiving his statutes straight from the lips of Zeus in the Dictaean cave, as did Moses from Jehovah in the Mount, has fallen into bad hands. He differs toto coelo from the cruel tyrant of the Labyrinth and the Minotaur. The secret of this duality is suggested by Plato in the 'Minos' where he quotes Homer as honoring Minos as never earth born man was honored before or since, even as the bosom friend of Zeus; and Hesiod who calls him' 'kingliest of mortal kings, ruling mightiest multitudes of men with Zeus' own sceptre." That, according to Plato, is the real Minos; the other is an invention of the Athenian stage-as unreal (he might have said) as the Socrates of the Clouds.

Is Minos, now, man or myth? I find in the Athenian caricature convincing proof of a real historical Minos, who may not only have swept the Carian corsairs out of the Aegean and set up his own sons on the thrones of the Cyclades but actually brought Athens under his yoke. For no people ever deliberately invented a tale of their own undoing, and that as discreditable to themselves as the story of the base betrayal of Androgeos and the indemnity to the Minotaur.

Let us see what new light the spade has thrown on the Homeric well as the later tradition.

Where once stood the mighty city Knossos, Evans has laid bare a palace covering some six acres. Unlike the palaces of Mycenaean Greece previously known, it has no fortress wal1s-- a fact pointing to undisputed mastery of sea as we11 as land on the part of its lords. Unlike those palaces in type, it is a vast quadrangle-some 500 feet square-built about a vast Central Court (c. 110 by 200 feet). Again, its state apartments or megara lack the central pi11ared hearth and clerestory as at Tiryns, being lighted by windows opening on light wells and warmed if at all by portable braziers. The Southeastern Quarter of the palace, containing the great rooms of state, is built in the hi11side and connected with the central court by a great quadruple stairway every step of which is now in place. Thus we have a 'three-story structure intact with foundations of a fourth story. We have also a thorough drainage and sanitation system with baths and latrines in some of the chief rooms. Adjoining the Great Western Court (which Evans identifies with the agora) runs a series of nineteen magazines with rows of close set pithoi along the wall, (as in Od. ii, 340 if.)-- a sufficient index of wealth in corn, wine, oil, and honey. Between the rows of pithoi is a series of pits, sometimes pits beneath pits; and the Gong Gallery (200 feet) upon which these magazines open is itself underlaid with 30 more large pits, a11 destined for storing more or less valuable treasure. This section is in fact a vast warehouse; as in other parts of the palace are found workshops for the stone-cutter, the potter, and various artisans, and oil-presses with runnels and pipes for carrying the oil to a reservoir provided with huge pithoi six to eight feet high. The Corridor of the Spindles--so ca11edfrom the sign of the distaff at various points-suggests a flourishing textile industry in the house as in Alkinoos' palace (Od. vii, 1O5 ff.); and indeed the place seems to have been se1f-sufficient in all the arts and crafts. Statuaries, potters, vase and fresco painters had their fabrics and ateliers-perhaps, their quarters- in the palace; and Evans is right in describing the great pile as "a town in itse1f". It is a sanctuary as well; the whole quarter between the Long Gallery and the Central Court, including the so-called Throne Room with the throne and accessories of one little shrine dumped together. is evidently dedicated to sacred uses. And here the symbol of the Double Axe is especially frequent-- the Labrys which is the symbol of the Carian Zeus. A glance at the plan of the palace, as now laid bare, with its net-work of ga11eries, corridors, magazines, chambers, suites, stairways-to say nothing of the effect of story upon story as one threads his way up and down on the spot-recalls the Labyrinth of art as it is already represented in the frescoes and as we see it on the coins of historical Knossos with the Minotaur on the obverse. No wonder Evans accepts the derivation of Labyrinth from Labrys and identifies this House of the Double Axe with the Daedalian Labyrinth, the lair of the Minotaur. Under the palace are found dungeons 25 feet deep going down to virgin soil; and (Evans thinks) the groans of captives in these Minoan dungeons may well have found an echo in the tale of Theseus.

Whoever built and maintained this stupendous pile must have had at command such wealth and power as tradition assigns to the sea-king Minos; and the evidence of close commerce with Egypt from the First Dynasty on goes to confirm that tradition. And the state of the arts at prehistoric Knossos as now revealed almost staggers belief. In architecture, sculpture, painting, the Minoan man seems to be of the Fifth rather than the Fifteenth Century before Christ. In his frescoes and carved ivory we actually behold pictures as living as Homer describes on the Shield of Achilles or the brooch of Odysseus.

But the epoch-making thing in Evans' revelations concerns the art of writing. To say nothing of pictographs on seals, of which he had made a large collection in Eastern Crete before undertaking the excavation of Knossos, he has found in the Palace some 2000 clay tablets bearing inscriptions. in linear characters written from left to right. The longest of these inscriptions consists of 24 lines. So far the key to this writing has been sought in vain. The numeral signs for units, tens, hundreds, thousands are made out and numbers as high as nineteen thousand are read in what are evidently inventories or accounts-with pictographic signs for the commodity in question. Thus, two tablets bearing the sign of an arrow and numbers summing up 8000 odd were found near a deposit of actual arrows in bundles of ten. Other tablets are evidently inventories of slaves or captives, horses, chariots, arms, herds, trees, vessels, as indicated by the sign. But many are without such signs or numerals and these may record contracts, judgments, proclamations, letters, possibly the daily doings at Court!

What promise of a key? At Praesos, one of the two Eteocretan communities which according to Herodotus (vii, 170) refused to join the fatal crusade to Sicily and so survived the general disaster, three inscriptions have been found in Greek characters but in an unknown language. The presumption is that these inscriptions, dating from the sixth to fourth centuries B. C., are in the Eteocretan tongue which Praesos preserves but writes in the new Greek alphabet. The endings and in a few cases the roots prove this to be an Aryan language; and possibly other finds may afford data for further progress in reading Eteocretan in a Greek dress. It will still remain to find values for the Knossian characters by means of a bilingual inscription or otherwise. That the key will be found soon or late is to be expected-though it may take twenty-five or fifty years as in the case of the Egyptian hieroglyphic and the Assyrian cuneiform writings.

What now is the bearing of this discovery on the "Homeric Question?" As long as writing is limited to scratching on soft clay, it would certainly be but an indifferent literary vehicle. Still, the abundance of these tablets and the increasing facility shown in their style attest large and free use of the art. But the Minoan man went farther. Evans has found two cups of plain clay from Early Minoan time with inscriptions written in what appears to be sepia ink with a reed pen; and he speaks of the writing as that of a practiced scribe who is forming a cursive style. If the Minoan scribe had come to use pen and ink on clay, why not on parchment or palm-leaf (as in old Cretan tradition) or on papyrus which they depicted so truly on their vases. In any case, it is hard to believe that five or six centuries after writing was in current use at Knossos, the great poet to whom we owe our earliest and best acconnt of Knossos was still ignorant of letters.