Page:History of Art in Primitive Greece - Mycenian Art Vol 1.djvu/466

The Islands of the ^Egean. 439 languages. There are the Achaeans and the high-souled Eteo- cretae, the Dorians with waving crests, and the Kydonians, as well as the divine Pelasgians. The most important city is Cnosus, where Minos ruled for nine years ; Minos, the friend of great Zeus.'*^ In 1878, Minos Kalokaerinos, a merchant of Heraclion, cleared, on the site of Cnosus, the foundations of a building which, to judge from the masonry and the pottery collected there, seems to belong to high antiquity. It stands on the side of a hill which rises to the westward of a streamlet called Makritochos, ancient Kaeratos, and which with its valley formerly fenced in Cnosus on the west.^ The summit of the mound has been rounded and levelled out. The east and south sides fall precipitously down to the stream forty metres or thereabouts below ; the gradual rise of the northern and western sides merges into the lower mass of the plateau upon which the town was built. On the summit of this insulated height trenches were sunk, and two metres below the ground they met walls striking out in every direction. At the time, no one thought of these fragmental walls in reference ^ Homer, Odyssey, There has been found at Prsesos, in the district ruled to have been inhabited by the Eteocretae, a fragmental inscription which has defied all attempt at decipherment. The letters are derived from the Phoenician alphabet, and the shape of some of them is very near their Semitic prototypes. Comparetti, who has examined the text, declares that it has nothing to do with Greek, In that case Homer was right when he said, aWij t ahXinv yXiiaaa fitfiiyfiirrj. - The modem name of the locality is tov rereXc^v h «0nAa, ** the head of the lord." These excavations have been briefly adverted to by Haussoullier in the Bulletin de correspondance helienique. The paper, however, is mainly concerned with the pottery which was collected in the course of the excavations. On the other hand, the aspect and arrangement of this ruinous building are very well described in a letter published by the Archaeological Institute of America, in the Appendix of the Second Annual Report of the Executive Committee^ 1 880-1 881, written by Still- mann, then American consul at Canea. He is the first who has made drawings of the place, and our Figs. 172 and 174 are taken from him. With strange wrong- headedness, against which he ought to have put him on his guard, by his mistake in regard to Schliemann's discoveries at Mycenae and Tiryns, he persists in identifying these partition-walls with the fabulous Labyrinth. Fabricius did not visit the sites explored by Kalokaerinos until 1 886, e, g, when the trenches were already half filled up ; but the excavations at Tiryns and Mycenae helped him to grasp what he saw before him. The far-reaching imi)ortance of this discovery is gathered from his narrative, Alterthilmer auf Kreta, IV., Funde der mykenceischcn Epoche in Knossos, Schlicmann and Dorpfeld also visited the site of Cnosus in 1886, and the remains of the building were recognized by them as " prehistoric." But they were not minded to continue the work.