The latest excavation has at last established beyond all cavil that the civilisation which was capable of such splendid artistic achievement was not without a system of written communication. Thousands of clay tablets (many being evidently labels) and a few inscriptions on pottery from the palace at Knossos have confirmed Mr. A. J. Evans’ previous deduction, based on gems, masons’ and potters’ marks, and one short inscription on stone found in the Dictæan cave, that more than one script was in use in the period. Most of the Knossos tablets are written in an upright linear alphabetic or syllabic character, often with the addition of ideographs, and showing an intelligible system of decimal numeration. Since many of the same characters have been found in use as potters’ marks on sherds in Melos, which are of earlier date than the Mycenæan period, the later civilisation cannot be credited with their invention. Other clay objects found at Knossos, as well as gems from the east of Crete, show a different system more strictly pictographic. This seems native to the island, and to have survived almost to historic times; but the origin of the linear system is more doubtful. No such tablets or sealings have yet been found outside Crete, and their writing remains undeciphered. The affinities of the linear script seem to be with the Asianic systems, Cypriote and Hittite, and perhaps with later Greek. The characters are obviously not derived from the Phœnician.
This Mycenæan civilisation, as we know it from its remains, belongs to the Ægean area (i.e., roughly the Greek), and to no other area with which we are at present acquainted. It is apparently not the product of any of the elder races which developed culture in the civilised areas to the east or southeast, much as it owed to those races. It would be easy to add to the singular vase-forms, script, lustrous paint, idols, gems, types of house and tomb, and so forth, already mentioned, a long list of Mycenæan decorative schemes which, even if their remote source lies in Egypt, Babylonia, or inner Anatolia, are absolutely peculiar in their treatment. But style is conclusive. From first to last the persistent influence of a true artistic ideal differentiates Mycenæan objects from the hieratic or stylised products of Egypt or Phœnicia. A constant effort to attain symmetry and decorative effect for its own sake inspires the geometric designs. Those taken from organic life show continual reference to the model and a “naturalistic grasp of the whole situation,” which resists convention and often ignores decorative propriety. The human form is fearlessly subjected to experiment, the better to attain lightness, life, and movement in its portrayal. A foreign motive is handled with a breadth and vitality which renders its new expression practically independent. The conventional bull of an Assyrian relief was referred to the image of a living bull by the Knossian artist, and made to express his emotions of fear or wrath by the Vaphio goldsmith, the Cypriote worker in ivory mirror handles, or the “island-gem” cutter.
Exterior View of the Treasury of Atreus
Since we have a continuous series of links by which the development of the characteristic Mycenæan products can be traced within the area back to very primitive forms, we can fearlessly assert that not only did the full flower of the Mycenæan civilisation proper belong to the Ægean area, but also its essential origin. That it came to have intimate relations with other contemporary civilisations, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, perhaps “Hittite,” and early began to contract a huge debt, especially to Egypt, is equally certain. Not to mention the certainly imported Nilotic objects found on Mycenæan sites, and bearing hieroglyphic inscriptions and cartouches of Pharaonic personages, the later Ægean culture is deeply indebted to the Nile for forms and decorative motives.
At what epoch did Ægean civilisation reach its full development? It is little use to ask when it arose. A terminus a quo in the Neolithic Age can be dated only less vaguely than a geological stratum. But it is known within fairly definite limits when it ceased to be a dominant civilisation. Nothing but derived products of sub-Mycenæan style falls within the full Iron Age in the Ægean. Bronze, among useful metals, accompanies almost alone the genuine Mycenæan objects, at Enkomi in Cyprus, as at Mycenæ. This fact supplies a terminus ad quem, to which a date may be assigned at least as precise as scholars assign to the Homeric lays. For these represent a civilisation spread over the same area and in process of transition from bronze to iron, and if they fall in the ninth century B.C., then the Mycenæan period proper ends a little earlier, at any rate in the West. It is possible, indeed probable, that in Asia Minor and Cyprus, where the descent of northern tribes about 1000 B.C., remembered by the Greeks as the “Dorian Invasion,” did not have any direct effect, the Mycenæan culture survived longer in something like purity, and passed by an uninterrupted process of development into the Hellenic; and even in Crete, where there was certainly a cataclysm, and in the Argolid, where art was temporarily eclipsed about the tenth century, earlier influence survived and came once more to the surface when peace was restored. Persistence of artistic influence under a new order, and differences in the artistic history of different districts widely sundered, have to be taken into account. The appearance, e.g., of late Mycenæan objects in Cyprus, does not necessarily falsify the received Mycenæan dates in mainland Greece.
For the main fact, however, viz., the age of greatest florescence all over the area, a singular coincidence of testimony points to the period of the XVIIIth Pharaonic Dynasty in Egypt. To this dynasty refer all the scarabs or other objects inscribed with royal cartouches (except an alabaster lid from Knossos, bearing the name of the earlier “Shepherd King,” Khyan), as yet actually found with true Mycenæan objects, even in Cyprus. In a tomb of this period at Thebes was found a bronze patera of fine Mycenæan style. At Tel-el-Amarna, the site of a capital city which existed only in the reign of Amenhotep IV, have been unearthed by far the most numerous fragments of true “Ægean” pottery found in Egypt; and of that singular style which characterises Tel-el-Amarna art, the art of the Knossian frescoes is irresistibly suggestive. To the XVIIIth and two succeeding dynasties belong the tomb-paintings which represent vases of Ægean form; and to these same dynasties Mr. Petrie’s latest comparisons between the fabrics, forms, and decorative motives of Egypt and Mycenæ have led him. The lapse of time between the eighteenth and the tenth centuries is by no means too long, in the opinion of most competent authorities, to account for the changes which take place in Mycenæan art.
The question of race, which derives a special interest from the possibility of a family relation between the Mycenæan and the subsequent Hellenic stocks, is a controversial matter as yet. The light recently thrown on Mycenæan cult does not go far to settle the racial problem. The aniconic ritual, involving tree and pillar symbols of divinity, which prevailed at one period, also prevailed widely elsewhere than in the Ægean, and we are not sure of the divinity symbolised. Even if sure that it was the Father God, whose symbol alike in Crete and Caria is the labrys or double axe, we could not say if Caria or Crete were prior, and whether the Father be Aryan or Semitic or neither.