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Show View cf Candla, One of the Chief Ports of Crete. 4 - (Prepared by the National Geographic i Society, Washington, r. C.) THE severe earthquake which visited Crete recently was shaking shak-ing at the literal foundation stones of European culture, for it was in that island across the mouth of the Aegean sea, rather than in Greece proper, that the earliest non-Asiatic non-Asiatic and non-African civilization had its beginnings. The present generation has witnessed wit-nessed remarkable . discoveries in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, but neither neith-er Nippur nor Abydos disclosed a world so entirely new and unexpected as that which lias been revealed by the work at .Troy, Mycenae and Tiryns, and in Crete. 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, em-body, 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 repre-senting a credible tradition, though, of course, their pictures of advanced civilization were more or less imaginative imagi-native projections upon the past , of the culture of the writer's own period or periods. Beyond that lay the great waste land of legend, in which gods and godlike heroes moved and enacted their romances among "Gorgons and Hydras and Chimeras dire." The position of Crete "a half-way house between three continents, flanked by the great Libyan promontory, promon-tory, and linked by smaller island stepping-stones to the Peloponnese and the mainland of Anatolia" marks it out as designed by nature to be a center of development in the culture of the early Aegean race, and in point of fact ancient traditions unanimously pointed to the great island as being the birthplace of Grjeek civilization. It was the surprising claim of the Cretans to possess the burial place of the supreme God of Hellas which first attached to them the unenviable reputation rep-utation for falsehood which clung to them throughout the classical period, and was crystallized by Callimachus in the form adopted by St. Paul in the Epistle to Titus "The Cretans are always liars." ends and the Greece of the earliest historic period there has always been a great ul of darkness. On the one side a land of seemingly fabulous kings and heroes and monsters, of fabulous palaces and cities; on the other side, Greece as we know it in the infant stages of its development, with a totally different state of so-ciety, so-ciety, a totally different organization and culture; and In the interval no one could say how many generations, concerning which and their conditions and developments, there was nothing but blank ignorance. So that it seemed as though the marvelous fabric of Greek civilization as we know it were indeed something unexampled, rising almost at once out of nothing to its height of splendor, as the walls of II Hum were fabled to have risen beneath be-neath the hands of their divine builders. But a great civilization can never be accounted for in this miraculous fashion. The origins of even Egyptian culture have begun to yield themselves them-selves to patient research, and It Is not permissible to believe that the Greek nation was born in a day into its great inheritance, or that it derived de-rived nothing from earlier ages and races. Most of these traditions clustered round Knossos, the famous capital of Minos, where once stood the Labyrinth, Laby-rinth, and near to which was Mount Juktas, the traditional burying place of Zeus. Dr. A. J. Evans, the chief of Cretan explorers, discovered the site of the Great Palace of Minos, at Knossos, near modern Candia, and has "uncovered "uncov-ered it to the world. The palace Is an enormous building, rivaling in size and magnificence the greatest palaces of ancient days. But the discovery which will doubtless doubt-less prove in the end to be of greater importance than any other, though as yet the main part of its value is latent, was that of large numbers of clay tablets incised with inscriptions in the unknown script of the Minoans. Over a thousand have been collected from various deposits in the palace. Of these deposits, one contained tablets tab-lets written in hieroglyphic ; but the rest were in the linear script, "a high-. high-. ly developed form, with regular divisions divi-sions between the words and for elegance ele-gance scarcely surpassed by any later form of writing." Minos and the Minotaur. It is round Minos, the son of Zeus and Europa, that the bulk of the Cretan Cre-tan legends gather. The Minos who is most familiar to us in Greek story is not so much the lawgiver and priest of God as the great sea-king and tyrant, ty-rant, the overlord of the Aegean, whose vengeance was defeated by the bravery of the Athenian hero, Theseus. From this point of view, Minos was the first of men who recognized the Importance of sea-power, and used it to establish the supremacy of his island is-land kingdom. But the great king was by no means so fortunate in his domestic relationships relation-ships as in his foreign adventures. I The domestic skeleton in his case was the composite monster, the Minotaur, half-man, half-bull, fabled to have been the fruit of a monstrous passion on the part of the king's wife, Pusi-phae. Pusi-phae. This monster was kept shut up within a vast and intricate building build-ing called the Labyrinth, contrived for Minos by his renowned artificer, Daedalus. Further, when his own sen, Androgeos, had gone to Athens to , contend in the Panatheuaic games and overcome all the other Greeks in the The Minoan Tablets. , The tablets vary in shape and size, some being flat, elongated bars from ; two to seven and a half inches In length, while others are squarer, ranging rang-ing up to small octavo. Some of them, . along with the linear writing, supply illustrations of the objects to which the inscriptions refer. There are human figures, chariots and horses, cuirasses and axes, houses and barns, and ingots followed by a balance, and accompanied by numerals numer-als which probably indicate their value val-ue In Minoan talents. It looks as though these were documents referring refer-ring to the royal arsenals and treasuries. treas-uries. The tablets had been stored in coffers cof-fers of wood, clay, or gypsum. The wooden coffers had perished in the great conflagration which destroyed the palace, and only their charred Jraginents remained ; but the destroying destroy-ing fire had probably contributed to the preservation of the precious writ- A" ings within by baking more thoroughly thorough-ly the clay of which they were composed. com-posed. As yet, in spite of all efforts, it has not proved possible to decinher the I sports, he fell a victim to the sus-j sus-j picion of Aegeus, the king of Alliens, I who caused him to be slawi, either by j waylaying him on the road to Thebes or by sending him against the Mara-thonian Mara-thonian bull. In his sorrow and righteous anger, Minos raised a great fleet and levied war upon Athens; and, having wasted Attica with fire and sword, he at length reduced the land to such straits that King Aegeus and his Athenians were glad to submit to the hard terms which were asked of them. The demand of Minos was that every ninth year Athens -should send him as tribute seven youths and seven maidens. These were selected by lot, or according to another version of the legend, chosen by Minos himself, and on. their arrival In Crete were cast Into the Labyrinth, to become the prey of the monstrous Minotaur. This lasted until Theseus, unacknowledged unac-knowledged son of the Athenian king, offered himself as one of the youths; sew the monster, and took his companions com-panions safely back home. Between the Greece of such lee- Inscriptions, for there has so far been no such good fortune as the discovery dis-covery of a bilingual inscription to do for Minoan what the Kosetta stone did for Egyptian hieroglyphics. But it is not beyond the bounds of probability probabil-ity that there may yet come to light some treaty between Crete and Egypt which may put the key into the eager searcher's hands. Even as it Is, the discovery of these tablets has altered the whole conception con-ception of the relative ages of the various early beginnings of writing in the eastern Mediterranean area. The Hellenic script is seen to have been In all likelihood no late-born child of the Phoenician, but to have had an ancestor an-cestor of its own race. It Is not till some live centuries later than the date of the Mlnoau script, that we And the first dated examples ex-amples of Phoenician writing. The old Cretan tradition that the Phoenicians did not Invent the letters of the alphabet, alpha-bet, but only changed those already existing, is thus amply Justified, for this seems to have been precisely what tliey did. |