president's address. 21 



before our era, flourished for some two thousand years, eventually 

 dominating the ^gean and a large part of the Mediterranean basin. 

 To the civilisation as a whole I ventured, from the name of the legendary 

 King and law-giver of Crete, to apply the name of ' Minoan,' which has 

 received general acceptance ; and it has been possible now to divide its 

 course into three Ages— Early, Middle, and Late, answering roughly to 

 the successive Egyptian Kingdoms, and each in turn with a triple sub- 

 division. 



It is difficult indeed in a few words to do adequate justice to this 

 earliest of European civilisations. Its achievements are too manifold. 

 The many-storeyed palaces of the Minoan priest-kings in their great 

 days, by their ingenious planning, their successful combination of the 

 useful with the beautiful and stately, and, last but not least, by their 

 scientific sanitary arrangements, far outdid the similar works, on 

 however vast a scale, of Egyptian or Babylonian builders. What is 

 more, the same skilful and commodious construction recurs in a whole 

 series of private mansions and smaller dwellings throughout the island. 

 Outside ' broad Knossos ' itself, flourishing towns sprang up far and 

 wide on the country sides. New and refined crafts were developed, 

 some of them, like that of the inlaid metal-work, unsurpassed in any 

 age or country. Artistic skill, of course, reached its acme in the 

 great palaces themselves, the corridors, landings, and porticoes of 

 which were decked with wall paintings and high reliefs, showing in the 

 treatment of animal life not only an extraordinary grasp of Nature, 

 but a grandiose power of composition such as the world had never seen 

 before. Such were the great bull-grappling reliefs of the Sea Gate at 

 Knossos and the agonistic scenes of the great Palace hall. 



The modernness of much of the Hfe here revealed to us is astonish- 

 ing. The elaboration of the domestic arrangements, the staircases 

 storey above storey, the front places given to the ladies at shows, their 

 fashionable flounced robes and jackets, the gloves sometimes seen on 

 their hands or hanging from their folding chairs, their very mannerisms 

 as seen on the frescoes, pointing their conversation with animated 

 gestures— how strangely out of place would it all appear in a classical 

 design! Nowhere, not even at Pompeii, have more living pictures 

 of ancient life been called up for us than in the Minoan Palace 

 of Knossos. The touches supplied by its closing scene are singularly 

 'dramatic— the little bath-room opening out of the Queen's parlour, 

 with its painted clay bath, the royal draught-board flung down in the 

 court, the vessels for anointing and the oil-jar for their filling ready 

 to hand by the throne of the Priest-King, with the benches of his 

 Consistory round and the sacral griffins on either side. Eeligion, 

 indeed, entered in at every turn. The palaces were also temples, the 

 tomb a shrine of the Great Mother. It was perhaps owing to the 



