468 HEPORT— 1902. 



characters, and two cups with inscriptions written within them in a kind 

 of ink, supply wholly new classes of written documents. Great numbers 

 of clay seal-impressions were also brought out, including a fragment of 

 one stamped by a late Babylonian cylinder. In magazines below the 

 later palace level, and belonging therefore to an earlier building, occurred 

 seal-impressions with pictographic signs, a striking evidence of the 

 anteriority of this system of writing on the pa.lace-site of Knossos. 

 Interesting new materials have also accumulated bearing on the metric 

 systems employed, and even, it would seem, on the origin of coinage. 



Among the finds of smaller objects two stand out respectively as of 

 first-rate importance in the history of architecture and sculpture. One 

 of these was the discovery of parts of a large mosaic consisting of 

 porcelain plaques, a series of which represent the fronts of houses of 

 two or three storeys. Fragmentary as most of these were, it was possible 

 to reconstitute a fair number with absolute cei'tainty, and thus to recover 

 an almost perfect picture of a street of Miiaoan Knossos in the middle of 

 the second millennium before our era. The different parts of the con- 

 struction — masonry, woodwork, and plaster — are clearly reproduced, and 

 the houses, some of them with two doorways, with windows of four and six 

 panes — oiled parchment being possibly used for glass — are astonishingly 

 modern in their appearance. Other plaques found with them show 

 warriors and various animals, a tree, a vine, and flowing water, so that 

 the whole seems to have been part of a large design analogous to that of 

 Achilles' shield. The other find — made towards the close of the excava- 

 tion — which throws a new light on ' the art of Daedalos,' is the discovery 

 of remains of ivory figurines. These are carved in the round, the limbs 

 being jointed together, and seem to have represented youths in the act of 

 springing, like the cowboys of the frescoes. The life and balance of 

 the whole, the modelling of the limbs, and the exquisite rendering of 

 details, such as the muscles and even the veins, raise these ivory statuettes 

 beyond the level of any known sculpture of the kind of the period to 

 which they belong. The hair was curiously indicated by means of spiral 

 bronze wires, and the amount of gold foil found with them suggests that 

 they had been originally, in part at least, coated with gold — in which 

 case they would have been early examples of the chryselephantine 

 process. Some beautiful examples of goldsmiths' work were also found — 

 a small gold duck with filigree work, a miniature gold fish exquisitely 

 chased, and a spray resembling fern-leaves. 



The new materials bearing on the local religion are extraordinarily 

 rich. Remains of a miniature temple of jDainted terra-cotta, with doves 

 perched above the capitals of columns, occurred in a stratum belonging to 

 the pre-Mycenwan building. In the later palace a series of finds illus- 

 trated the ' btetylic ' cult of the Double Axe and its associated divinities. 

 A gem showed a female figure — apparently a goddess — bearing this 

 sacred emblem. But more important still was the discovery of an actual 

 shrine belonging to the latest Mycentean period of the palace, with the 

 tripod and other vessels-of-offering still in position before a base upon 

 which rested the actual cult objects, including a small double axe of 

 steatite, sacred horns of stucco with sockets between them for the wooden 

 shafts of other axes, terra-cotta figures — cylindrical below — of a goddess, 

 in one case with a dove perched on her head, and of a male votary 

 oflfering a dove. 



The actual discovery, within the palace walls, of a shrine of the Double 



