THE PALACE OF MTNOS. 427 



religion, which here, as elsewhere, so eagerly availed itself of what 

 might aid its own propaganda in existing belief , seems to have dealt 

 more gently with the scenes of the lowly birth and holy sepulcher of a 

 mortal god. On the height of Juktas, on the peaks of Dicta, which 

 overlooked, one the birthplace, the other the temple of the Cretan 

 Zeus, pious hands have built chapels, the scenes of annual pilgrimage, 

 dedicated to Authentes Christos, "the Lord Christ." In his shrine at 

 Gaza the Minoan Zeus had already in pagan days received the distin- 

 guished epithet of Marnas, "the lord" 1 in its Syrian form. 



If Minos was the first lawgiver, his craftsman Daedalus was the first 

 traditional founder of what may be called a "school of art." Many 

 were the fabled works wrought by them for King Minos, some grew- 

 some, like the brass man Talos. In Knossos, the royal city, he built 

 the dancing ground, or "choros," of Ariadne, and the famous laby- 

 rinth. In its inmost maze dwelt the minotaur, or " bull of Minos," 

 fed daily with human victims, till such time as Theseus, guided by 

 Ariadne's ball of thread, penetrated to its lair, and, after slaving the 

 monster, rescued the captive youths and maidens. Such, at least, was 

 the Athenian tale. A more prosaic tradition saw in the labyrinth a 

 building of many passages, the idea of which Daedalus had taken from 

 the great Egyptian mortuary temple on the shores of Lake Moeris, to 

 which the Greeks gave the same name; and recent philological research 

 has derived the name itself from the labrys, or double ax, the emblem 

 of the Cretan and Carian Zeus. 



Mythological speculation has seen in the labyrinth, to use the words 

 of a learned German, "a thing of belief and fancy, an image of the 

 starry heaven with its infinitely winding paths, in which, nevertheless, 

 the sun and moon so surely move about." We shall see that the spade 

 has supplied a simpler solution. 



When one calls to mind these converging lines of ancient tradition 

 it becomes impossible not to feel that, without Crete, "the spring is 

 taken away" indeed from the Mycenaean world. Great as were the 

 results obtained by exploration on the sites of this ancient culture on 

 the Greek mainland and elsewhere, there was still a sense of incom- 

 pleteness. In nothing was this more striking than in the absence of 

 any written document. A few signs had, indeed, been found on a vase 

 handle, but these were set aside as mere ignorant copies of Hittite or 

 Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the volume of his monumental work which 

 deals with Mycenaean art, M. Perrot was reduced to the conclusion 

 that, " as at present advised, we can continue to affirm that for the whole 

 of this period, neither in Peloponnese nor in central Greece, no more 

 upon the buildings nor upon the thousand and one objects of domestic 

 use and luxury that have come forth from the tombs, has anything 

 been discovered that resembles any form of writing." 



But was this, indeed, the last word of scientific exploration? Was 



