The Minoans

THE MINOANS

By George Glasgow

Contents Preface

Crete the Forerunner of Greece

The Sea-Faring People of Crete

Minos and the Minotaur

Knossos

Prehistoric Engineering and Architecture

Internal Politics: the Relations of Knossos and Ph stos

Minoan Architecture and Fresco Painting

The Pottery

The Origin of Writing

Cretan Religion

Men and Women, Clothes and Customs

From Prehistoric Crete to Classical Greece

Index

Preface SIR ARTHUR EVANS' renewed campaign of excavation in Crete has again attracted considerable public attention to the remarkable disclosures of the last twenty years. Sir Arthur Evans himself is at present engaged in compiling in three big volumes the consecutive story of Minoan civilization as revealed by his own excavations. The present writer is convinced that the story of Cretan discovery is such as to appeal to the imagination of a wide public who have no specialist interest in archaeology. The story has all the interest of adventure and exploration. This book is an attempt to meet what such a public wants. I have tried to give a general picture of the world which existed in the Mediterranean four thousand years ago, and of the amazing process by which it has been revealed, so that it can be understood by those totally unacquainted with classical study, and I have tried to give it in one hour's reading. For those who want to go further I give references to other books. It must be understood that this book does not aim at an exact account of the archaeological position as it exists today. With new excavations being carried out this very year, and with new material in the hands of the excavators, as yet unpublished and undigested, any attempt to be strictly up to date would merely mean the progressive and indefinite postponement of the book. The broad lines of the discovery of Minoan civilization are clear, and in the writer's opinion, even because a new campaign of excavation is now started, ought to be presented now in a form to be easily understood. The results of the discoveries of this spring, for instance, add important details to our knowledge - some of which I have incorporated - but do not affect fundamentals. Some of the substance of the following chapters was published in 1920 and 1921 in Discovery, to the Editor of which I am grateful for permission to re-publish them. In a somewhat different form the substance was also published by me in 1914-1915 in the National Home Reading Magazine. It is to my friend Dr. Ronald Montagu Burrows that I, in common with thousands, owe my interest in Crete. He died on May 14, 1920, before his time. . . ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Windham Press is committed to bringing the lost cultural heritage of ages past into the 21st century through high-quality reproductions of original, classic printed works at affordable prices. This book has been carefully crafted to utilize the original images of antique books rather than error-prone OCR text. This also preserves the work of the original typesetters of these classics, unknown craftsmen who laid out the text, often by hand, of each and every page you will read. Their subtle art involving judgment and interaction with the text is in many ways superior and more human than the mechanical methods utilized today, and gave each book a unique, hand-crafted feel in its text that connected the reader organically to the art of bindery and book-making. We think these benefits are worth the occasional imperfection resulting from the age of these books at the time of scanning, and their vintage feel provides a connection to the past that goes beyond the mere words of the text.