The Minoans

Crete is the only land of the “prehistoric” Near East which has left no record of itself besides that revealed by excavation. And even the writing on the clay tablets cannot yet be read. We none the less get a vivid impression of Cretan life on its artistic side, and for this the main credit is due to the unique value of pottery in archæology. Pottery is almost indestructible. While it may decompose in soil that is damp enough, and the design may be obliterated when fire plays on it directly and when there is enough air for oxidization, yet the actual fabric, being made originally of clay baked hard by extreme heat, can never be destroyed by fire. It cannot rust. It cannot be pounded into dust, because a small sherd has a tremendous power of resistance. While the stone ruins at Knossos will one day vanish from exposure to the weather, the pottery will remain. The defects of pottery are as valuable to the archæologist as its qualities. Its brittleness led to a constant deposit of breakages. The replacing of breakages in what was a household necessity led to continuous production. Its cheapness made it valueless to looters. When palaces were raided and burnt, metal objects were “lifted” either for their actual value or their potential value in the melting-pot. The pots remained. Thousands of sherds have been found on every site in Crete. Even when fragments cannot be pieced together, they reveal the kind of clay, decoration and thickness of the original vase, and complete examples are often found in tombs, where they were placed as tributes to the dead, in accordance with an almost universal custom in early Greek civilization.

The evidence thus obtained has many uses. It shows the consecutive development of pottery as a form of art, in itself interesting, and the corresponding changes in the taste of the people. As the art progresses, we find vases, for instance, with scenes painted on them illustrating contemporary customs, methods of burial, religious rites, styles of dress and buildings. The prehistoric pottery of Crete never reached this stage, but even so, it supplies the bulk of the evidence on which the Minoan civilization is being reconstructed.

Pottery has been the chief instrument, too, in the formulation of a system of dating. By assuming a lapse of a thousand years for every yard of deposit—except in the Stone Age, when the accumulation of debris was quicker, because huts were built of ephemeral material such as mud and wickerwork—each successive layer is relatively dated according to its depth from the surface. Pots provide the nucleus for this scheme, being found in large numbers in every layer. Other objects take their place according to the type of pots they are found with. Not that the process is simple. There are complicating factors, and even pottery creates difficulties and irregularities. At Knossos, for instance, when the first palace was built, the top of the hill was levelled and a portion of the former deposit thus cut away. Obviously, too, heirlooms would belong to an earlier time than that of the layer in which they are found. Or a pot may be displaced in the earth. A safeguard, however, against mistakes is afforded by the abundance of pots, which makes the differentiation of general classes easy.

Pots, then, are found at the lowest levels, just above virgin soil, for the earliest people used them and broke them. The slowness of development in that long-drawn-out period (the Neolithic or Later Stone Age) is clearly indicated. There are some seven yards of deposit belonging to it at Knossos, and the latest ware shows little or no improvement on the first. The pottery is hand-made, the clay coarse, generally of a sooty-greyish colour and more or less burnished. The relics consist of the rims and handles of pots, rims of basins, bowls, and plates and similar fragments, too incomplete to suggest original shapes. Two interesting points, however, can be seen. The pots were hand-polished both inside and out, and incised lines, or lines simply scratched on the surface, were used as ornamentation. This primitive manifestation of an artistic impulse was later extended by the filling of the incised lines with a white substance for greater effect. Similar ware has been found at Troy and in Egypt, and Dr. Mackenzie has thought that these were an importation from the Ægean (Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xxiii, p. 159).

The irresistible impulse manifested even in primitive people to decorate their ordinary vessels is further illustrated by the fact that the polishing was gradually heightened, and the glitter thrown into relief by ripples, made with a blunt instrument, probably bone, and suggestive of the ripples on the surface of water. Among the latest Neolithic ware found at Knossos are two remarkable specimens of incised ware, the design being that of a twig with leaves. On each side of the stem is a row of small oblong punctuated points, filled in with white chalk. This, it must be remembered, in a period which ended about 3000 B.C.

The Bronze Age, which followed, and which brought with it the Minoan period at Knossos, is remarkable for the first use of paint. The transition was gradual and slow, and indeed, at the beginning of the Bronze Age, there is a falling off in the quality of the pottery. This was due to an interesting result of the discovery of metal, which turned the attention of skilled artists to the new medium, and left the fashioning of stone and clay to inferior hands. On the manufacturing side, however, it is probable that a great step forward was taken at that time. The fact that the clay is now of a terra-cotta or brick colour, as opposed to the former peaty grey of Neolithic times, has led to the surmise that the potter’s kiln was now used for baking.

The first paint invented was an almost lustreless black, which was developed gradually into a lustrous black. Even this development was at first used as a mere imitation of the Neolithic black hand-polished vases. The paint was applied all over the vase, inside as well as outside, whenever the neck was wide enough. Neolithic incisions again were imitated by white geometric patterns painted over the black background. This style was not usual till the end of the Early Minoan period (E.M.III).

It was not till the beginning of the Middle Minoan period that any serious development took place. Then, however, it came in leaps. The potter’s wheel had been introduced, probably from Egypt, at the end of Early Minoan I, and henceforth pots were “thrown” precisely as they are to-day. One can imagine the keenness with which this great if simple invention was exploited. The fashioning of clay with thumb and fingers on a rotating wheel led so easily and inevitably to fineness of technique that the potter was soon imitating the thinness of metal, and by the end of Middle Minoan II was producing “egg-shell” vases. In design the angular geometric patterns had been displaced by the end of the Early Minoan period by curves and spirals, the logical outcome of the use of a brush. Colour meanwhile became lavish and brilliant. There were two styles: either the whole pot was first painted black to provide a background for a light design, or a dark design was painted on the original light-coloured clay. It was the first of these styles that naturally lent itself to colour display, and the name “polychrome” (“many-coloured”) has been given to it. The other style (monochrome, or one-coloured) relied for its effect on a simple black-and-white contrast. In the latter case the light natural background was improved by a fine buff clay “slip” or wash. Quite naturally it was the polychrome style that mostly exercised the artists at first. Bright orange, lustreless white, yellow, red, crimson on a black background were exploited to a sometimes fantastic extent as long as the novelty of colour lasted.

The next development took place in the second Middle Minoan period (M.M.II). Relief was then introduced, which created an effect of light and shade on the black varnish. Mere blobs of colour, which constituted the original form of relief, soon developed into raised lumps and horns (the so-called “Barbotine” ware). Middle Minoan “Kamares” (so called because the first specimens were found by Professor Myres in a cave on the slope of Mount Ida above the village of Kamares), or polychrome pottery, chiefly consisted of cups, “tea-cups,” jugs, amphoræ (or two-handled jars), and fruit-stand vases. The three best specimens are here reproduced. In the Middle Minoan II period large storage jars, or “pithoi,” made their first appearance. They were as big as a man, and almost exactly like the Cretan storage jars of to-day. Two interesting features in the decoration of these jars are cunningly practical in origin. One was an imitation in relief of the coils of rope which were used in moving the jars, the other a “trickle” ornament produced by allowing splashes of paint to trickle down the side of the jar—a device which made a virtue, in anticipation, of the inevitable trickles which would result from the storage of oil in it.

Towards the end of the Middle Minoan period the exaggerated use of colour which had marked the first introduction of polychrome ware gave way to a concentration upon design. Perhaps the most remarkable specimen of this later phase is the “lily vase” found at Knossos. It stands about two feet high, and for design has a simple row of lilies painted in white on a purple ground. The shape of the vase is artistically made to serve the design by enabling the lilies to bend slightly outward and then curve in a little at the top.

POLYCHROME CUPS
From Journal of Hellenic Studies
[To face page 62

Then came a curious clash in the separate evolution of polychrome and monochrome ware. The latter had been used as an easy decoration for ordinary vessels, but towards the end of the Middle Minoan period the two styles began to coalesce in the form of a simple light design on a dark ground. Then a final resolution took place by a “volte face” into a monochrome dark on light brought about by the experience that the black varnish was a more durable colour than the lustreless colour pigments. The varnish, indeed, possessed a remarkable tenacity. It probably was the forerunner of that used in the later Attic Black Figure vases, whose secret still exercises the ingenuity of modern potters. As yet nothing further has been established than that the varnish was not a “glaze” in the modern sense. A contributing factor to the final triumph of the monochrome over polychrome rested upon simple necessity. When naturalist motives became dominant in the painter’s art, the lack of a green pigment left no satisfactory alternative to the general abandonment of variation in colour. In Late Minoan I, when the complete absorption of the polychrome into the monochrome style took place, we find a general use of a brilliantly lustrous brown-to-black “glaze” paint on a buff clay slip, carefully polished by hand on terra-cotta clay. The naturalism of plants and flowers now extends to sea-objects—fish, shells, weeds, rocks—and is marked by careful truth to life. A striking example of this style is a famous “octopus” vase found at Gournia.

As the rise of Cretan civilization had been faithfully reflected in pottery, so was its fall. One can trace in it the general decadence of Crete. In the eventful Late Minoan II period, which saw the final destruction of Knossos and the sudden end of Cretan greatness, the pottery becomes stiff and grandiose. Plants and animals are rendered in a spiritless, conventionalized manner. Degeneration was rapid, and in Late Minoan III, which represented the last stage of Minoan culture, the potter held his brush quite still and let the spinning pot do the rest. There was no decoration beyond an occasional group of horizontal bands, the mere framework of earlier designs.

There were, of course, other forms of pottery besides vases. Cretan potters, even more than those of to-day, used clay as the material for hardware. Not only bricks, drain-pipes, ornaments, but lamps, kettles, even cupboards and tables, were made of clay.