42fi THE PALACE OF MINOS. 



^gesin vases were finding their way into the Nile Valley. By the 

 great dsiya of tlie eighteenth dynasty, in the sixteenth and succeeding 

 centuries B. C, this intercourse was of such a kind that Mycenaean 

 art, now in its full maturity of l>loom, was reacting on that of the con- 

 temporary Pharaohs and infusing a living European element into the 

 old conventional style of the land of the Pyramids and the Sphinx. 



But the picture was still very incomplete. Nay, it might even be 

 said that its central figure was not 3'et filled in. In all these excava- 

 tions and researches the very land to which ancient tradition unani- 

 mously pointed as the cradle of Greek civilization had been left out of 

 count. To adapt the words applied by Gelon to slighted Sicily and 

 Syracuse, "The spring was wanting from the year" of that earlier 

 Hellas. Yet Crete, the central island — a half-way house between three 

 continents — flanked by the great Libyan promontory and linked by 

 smaller island stepping stones to the Peloponnese and the mainland of 

 Anatolia, was called upon by nature to play a leading part in the devel- 

 opment of the early ^gean culture. 



Here, in his royal city of Knossos, ruled Minos, or whatever historic 

 personage is covered by that name, and founded the first sea empire of 

 Greece, extending his dominion far and wide over the ^gean isles and 

 coast lands. Athens paid to him its human tribute of youths and maidens. 

 His colonial plantations extended east and west along the Mediterranean 

 basin till Gaza worshipped the Cretan Zeus and a Minoan city rose in 

 western Sicily. But it is as the first lawgiver of Greece that he achieved 

 his greatest renown, and the code of Minos became the source of all 

 later legislation. As the wise ruler and inspired lawgiver there is 

 something altogether biblical in his legendary character. He is the 

 Cretan Moses, who every nine years repaired to the cave of Zeus, 

 whether on the Cretan Ida or on Dicta, and received from the god of 

 the mountain the laws for his people. Like Abraham, he is described 

 as the "friend of God." Na}-, in some accounts, the mythical being of 

 Minos has a tendency to blend with that of his native Zeus. 



This Cretan Zeus, the god of the mountain, whose animal figure was 

 the Imll and whose sjaiibol was the double ax, had indeed himself a 

 human side, which distinguishes him from his more ethereal namesake 

 of classical Greece. In the great cave of Mount Dicta, whose inmost 

 shrine, adorned with natural pillars of gleaming .stalactite, leads deep 

 down to the waters of an unnavigated pool, Zeus himself was said to 

 have been born and fed with honey and goat's milk by the nj^mph 

 Amaltheia. On the conical height immediately above the site of 

 Minos's city — now known as Mount Juktas — and still surrounded by a 

 Cyclopean inclosure, was pointed out his tomb. Classical Greece 

 scoffed at this primitive legend, and for this particular reason first 

 gave currency to the proverb that "the Cretans are always liars." 

 St. Paul, too, adopted this hard saying, but in Crete itself the new 



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