254 



DISCOVERY 



Shackleton, in the Yelcho, a steel vessel belonging to the 

 Chilian Government, rescued them on August 30, 191b. 

 They were down to their last Bovril ration and had 

 scarcely four days' food in hand ; ice-floes were rapidly 

 closing in on the island, and in another few days it might 

 have been necessary, with almost undoubtedly dis- 

 astrous results, to have postponed the work of rescue 

 till the next year. 



***** 



Archaeological work in the Mediterranean and the 

 Near East is being attended with remarkable results. 

 The finding of Tutankhamon's tomb in Egypt last 

 autumn has been followed this year by the successful 

 excavation of the ancient Chaldean temple of the 

 Moon-god in the sand-covered mounds in Mesopotamia, 

 which mark the site where five thousand years ago 

 flourished the great city of Ur, and by some extremely 

 interesting discoveries made by Sir Arthur Evans 

 at Knossos, in Crete. The recent excavations at Ur are 

 described by Messrs. Hall and Woolley, whose efforts 

 have been largely responsible for their success, in this 

 number of Discovery. Sir Arthur Evans has de- 

 scribed the results of his excavations in Crete in articles 

 in The Times of August 28 and zq. 



***** 



Our readers may remember that we reviewed last 

 month an excellent little book on the results of Sir 

 Arthur Evans's and other archjeologists' excavations in 

 Crete, and emphasised the fact that our knowledge of 

 the commercial and cultural relations between Egypt 

 and Crete were still very scanty. Crete, we have to 

 bear in mind, was the stepping-stone in the Mediter- 

 ranean for the ancient Egyptian civilisation that 

 penetrated into Europe through Greece. Any new 

 evidence, therefore, that can be obtained of the 

 relations between Egypt and Crete goes to the recon- 

 struction of a most important page in the history of 

 early civilisation. Sir Arthur Evans's researches in 

 Crete this year have provided a goodly number of bricks 

 for such a reconstruction. 



***** 



In the first place, he has succeeded in tracing a pre- 

 historic road across the island from Knossos on the 

 north coast to Phaestos on the south coast — a road 

 which he believes formed part of the route used to 

 hnk Knossos with, the Libyan coasts, the remainder 

 of the route being, of course, maritime. Another piece 

 of evidence of trade between Egypt and Crete was 

 revealed in the discovery of an early dynastic porphyry 

 bowl. More remarkable still was the finding of a house 

 of frescoes at Knossos which, in Sir Arthur's words, 

 constituted " a unique illustration of the painter's 

 art as it existed in the Golden Age of Minoan Crete." 

 These frescoes are of an age not later than 1,600 b.c. 



The scenes in these mural decorations, he says, " are 

 laid amidst rocks with flowering plants or sometimes 

 marine growths ; the rocks being vividly veined and 

 banded so as to resemble cut sections of such stones as 

 agate, sardonyx, or malachite. Their outlines show 

 an extraordinary feeling for the ' grotesque ' in art, and 

 their borders were at times flung by the artist across 

 the carefully executed and many-banded frames, as if 

 the artist gloried in the defiance of artificial control. . . . 

 " Besides olive sprays, there are seen impressionist 

 designs of branches bearing what look like egg-shaped 

 plums, red and yellow." 



***** 



Part of the frescoes show monkeys fairly easily 

 identifiable as of the Cercopithecus variety, which were 

 possibly imported by the Minoan priest-kings from the 

 Sudan or were received by them as gifts from the 

 Pharaohs of Egypt. Some small fragments of painted 

 stucco frieze show a picture of a Minoan captain, 

 with his men, whose skin is coal-black. " So the 

 historic secret is out," writes Sir Arthur. "Minos 

 employed negro mercenaries." 



One is tempted to ask whether there is any common 

 cause for the widely separated disasters due to dis- J 

 turbances beneath the earth during the last twelve 

 months. First there came the great tidal wave on 

 the west coast of South America, destroying several 

 seaboard towns ; this was followed early this year by 

 earthquakes in Kamchatka, later by the eruption of 

 Etna, the most severe for many years, by volcanic 

 disturbances in the China Sea, and finally the Japanese 

 earthquake, which we believe is the most disastrous in 

 recorded history. There is not yet any agreement as 

 to the cause of earthquakes, in fact it is probable that 

 several causes may be operative on different occasions. 

 Humboldt, the great scientist and traveller, wrote 

 nearly a century ago that in South America there was 

 a constant relationship between earthquake and 

 volcano ; he thought that volcanoes were a safety- 

 valve, and noticed that when in a volcanic country 

 eruptions grew less frequent, earthquakes were to be 

 feared. This opinion is at least as old as the ancient 

 Greek and Roman writers, and the researches of Pro- 

 fessor John Milne in 1895 showed that in Central Japan, 

 where volcanoes are many, earthquakes are rare, and 

 that by the sea-coast, especially in the east, the reverse 

 is the case. Sometimes great volcanic eruptions and 

 devastating earthquakes occur in close connection ; this 

 was the case in Hawaii in 1868. In other cases, how- 

 ever, volcanic eruptions of exceptional severity have 

 taken place without any earthquake, perhaps because 

 the " safety-valve " action has been efficient. It is 

 probable that in many cases where no activity has been 



