The Sea-Kings of Crete. James Baikie

The object aimed at in the following pages has been to offer to the general reader a plain account of the wonderful investigations which have revolutionized all ideas as to the antiquity and the level of the earliest European culture, and to endeavour to make intelligible the bearing and significance of the results of these investigations. In the hope that the extraordinary resurrection of the first European civilization may appeal to a more extended constituency than that of professed students of ancient origins, the book has been kept as free as possible from technicalities and the discussion of controverted points; and throughout I have endeavoured to write for those who, while from their school days they have loved the noble and romantic story of Ancient Greece, have been denied the opportunity of a more thorough study of it than comes within the limits of an ordinary education.

In the first chapter this standpoint may seem to have been unduly emphasized, and the retelling of the ancient legends may be accounted mere surplusage. Such, no doubt, it will be to some readers, but perhaps they may be balanced by others whose recollection of the great stories of Classic Greece has grown a little faint with the lapse of years, and who are not unwilling to have it prompted again. Reference to the legends was in any case unavoidable, since one of the most remarkable results of the explorations has been the disclosure of the solid basis of historic fact on which they rested; and, if the book was to accomplish its purpose for the readers for whom it was designed, reference seemed almost necessarily to involve retelling.

I have to acknowledge extensive obligations to the writings and reports of the various investigators who have accomplished so wonderful a resurrection of this ancient world. My debt to the works of Dr. A. J. Evans will be manifest to all who have any acquaintance with the subject; but to such authors as Mrs. H. B. Hawes, Dr. Mackenzie, Professors Burrows, Murray, and Browne, and Messrs. D. G. Hogarth and H. R. Hall, to name only a few among many, my obligations are only less than to the acknowledged chief of Cretan explorers.

To the Rev. James Kennedy, D.D., librarian of the New College, Edinburgh, and to the Rev. C. J. M. Middleton, M.A., Crailing, my thanks are due for invaluable help afforded in the collection of material, and I have been not less indebted to Mr. A. Brown, Galashiels, and to Messrs. C. H. Brown and C. R. A. Howden, Edinburgh, and others, for their assistance in the preparation of the illustrations. To Mr. A. Brown in particular are due plates II., III., IV., V., IX., X., XV., XVI., XX., XXIII., XXIV., and XXV.; and to Messrs. C. H. Brown and C. R. A. Howden Plates I., VII., VIII., XI., XII., XVII. (I), and XXI. I have to record my hearty thanks to the Council of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies for the use of Plates XXIX. and XXX., reproduced by their permission from the Journal of Hellenic Studies; to the Committee of the British School at Athens for the use of Plate XIX. and the plan of Knossos from their Annual; and to Dr. A. J. Evans and Mr. John Murray for Plates VI., XIII., and XIV., from the Monthly Review, March, 1901. For the redrawing and adaptation of the plan of Knossos I am indebted to Mr. H. Baikie, B.Sc., Edinburgh, and for the sketch-map of Crete to my wife.

CHAPTER I

Table of Contents

THE LEGENDS

The resurrection of the prehistoric age of Greece, and the disclosure of the astonishing standard of civilization which had been attained on the mainland and in the isles of the Ægean at a period at least 2,000 years earlier than that at which Greek history, as hitherto understood, begins, may be reckoned as among the most interesting results of modern research into the relics of the life of past ages. The present generation has witnessed remarkable discoveries in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, but neither Niffur nor Abydos disclosed a world so entirely new and unexpected as that which has been revealed by the work of Schliemann and his successors at Troy, Mycenæ, and Tiryns, and by that of Evans and the other explorers—Italian, British, and American—in Crete. The Mesopotamian and Egyptian discoveries traced back a little farther streams which had already been followed far up their course; those of Schliemann and Evans revealed the reality of one which, so to speak, had hitherto been believed to flow only through the dreamland of legend. It was obvious that mighty men must have existed before Agamemnon, but what manner of men they were, and in what manner of world they lived, were matters absolutely unknown, and, to all appearance, likely to remain so. An abundant wealth of legend told of great Kings and heroes, of stately palaces, and mighty armies, and powerful fleets, and the whole material of an advanced civilization. But the legends were manifestly largely imaginative—deities and demi-gods, men and fabulous monsters, were mingled in them on the same plane—and it seemed impossible that we should ever get back to the solid ground, if solid ground had ever existed, on which these ancient stories first rested.

For the historian of the middle of the nineteenth century Greek history began with the First Olympiad in 776 B.C. Before that the story of the return of the Herakleids and the Dorian conquest of the men of the Bronze Age might very probably embody, in a fanciful form, a genuine historical fact; the Homeric poems were to be treated with respect, not only on account of their supreme poetical merit, but as possibly representing a credible tradition, though, of course, their pictures of advanced civilization were more

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