Читать книгу How to Study Architecture - Charles H. Caffin - Страница 21

Table of Contents

So far our study of ancient civilisation and architecture has been fairly consecutive. We have now to break the continuity of the story and take a leap back into a remote past and explore the origins of a civilisation which was a forerunner of that of Greece. This civilisation had been called “Mycenæan” because its existence was first brought to modern knowledge by Schliemann’s discoveries in Mycenæ. But subsequent exploration has proved that the civilisation was far spread and that Mycenæ was not even the centre of it.

One of the most astonishing results of recent exploration is the knowledge of a civilisation that developed without break from the polished stone age and reached its highest point contemporaneously with the New Empire in Egypt; ending, that is to say, about 1000 B.C. Not the least interesting feature of the discovery is that it throws a new light on the civilisation of prehistoric Greece.

The classical writers of Greece pointed to Mycenæ and Tiryns in Argolis as being the principal evidence of a prehistoric civilisation, which was assumed to belong to the Homeric period or even farther back to a rude heroic beginning of Hellenic civilisation. This opinion continued to be held by scholars until A.D. 1876. In this year, however, Dr. Schliemann, opening up the graves which are just inside the Lion Gateway of the citadel at Mycenæ, came upon a quantity of objects which proved the high state of civilisation to which the prehistoric inhabitants of the city had attained. Furthermore, they corresponded in character to the vases and gold, silver, and bronze objects which, three years earlier, he had dug from the ruins of the “Burnt City” (Troy) at Hissarlik in the Troad. These objects from the peninsula of Peloponnesus and the mainland of Asia Minor were not only similar in character but also of a fabric and decoration which differed from those of any known art. But a relation between the objects of art described by Homer and these “Mycenæan” treasures was generally allowed.

In 1884-1885 Schliemann and Dörpfeld, exploring the ruins of Tiryns, came upon a building which offers the most complete example in Greece of a palace of the “Mycenæan” age, belonging to a period probably between 1400 and 1200 B.C. During the subsequent years of the nineteenth century, when exploration was extended to other parts of the Peloponnesus and Northern parts of Greece, dome or beehive tombs, such as had been found at Mycenæ, were discovered in Attica, Thessaly, and elsewhere. By degrees, exploration was carried beyond the mainland of Greece to the Ionian Islands and the islands of the Ægean, particularly to Cyprus and Crete and the mainland of Asia Minor. This resulted in further discoveries of objects, related in a common family, distinct from that of any other art division. Meanwhile, objects of similar character were met with in Egypt, Italy, Sicily, Sardinia, and Spain.

Finally, the culmination of all this mass of corroborative evidence was reached by the explorations of Dr. A. J. Evans, at Cnossus in Crete, which have been followed up by explorations in Phæstus, and other Cretan sites. The net result is to establish the knowledge that Crete was the centre of a civilisation which had dealings with Egypt and Mesopotamia and extended to the sea-coast of Asia Minor and Phœnicia, the other islands of the Ægean Archipelago, the Ionian Islands, and the mainland of Greece and spread its offshoots along the west shores of the Adriatic, into Sardinia and Spain and took deep root in Sicily. To the far-extending ramifications of this civilisation has been given the comprehensive name of Minoan or Ægean.

In a most remarkable way the discoveries in Crete have corroborated the Greek legends of the Cretan King Minos. It is conjectured that a Minos may have been the founder of a dynasty and that the name passed into a title of all the rulers, corresponding to the title, Pharaoh, in Egypt. Scholars, therefore, have given the name Minoan to the civilisation of Crete; dividing it into Early, Middle, and Late Minoan.

In the Early Minoan Period, represented in the contents of early tombs and dwellings and such objects as stone vases and seal-stones, there is evidence that the Cretans had already reached considerable cultivation and had opened up communications with the Nile Valley. The date of this period is conjectured to have centred around 2500 B.C., and to have corresponded, roughly speaking, with the earlier of the Egyptian dynasties. Most remarkable of Dr. Evans’s discoveries was the finding in 1900 of whole archives of clay tablets in the palace of Cnossus, which prove that the Cretans had a highly developed system of hieroglyphics and lineal script 2000 years before the time when the Phœnicians introduced writing into Greece. Incidentally, this knowledge corroborates the statement of the historian Diodorus, that the Phœnicians did not invent letters, but only altered their forms.

The Middle Minoan Period centres round 2000-1850 B.C., and corresponds with the Twelfth Dynasty in Egypt. It was the age of the earliest palace building. Already appears the beginning of a school of wall-painting, while a manufactory of fine faience was attached to the palace at Cnossus.

The Late Minoan Period covers the period of the Hyksos usurpation in Egypt and reached its own culmination about the time of the Eighteenth Dynasty when the New Egyptian Empire or Second Theban Monarchy commenced. We have already noted the appearance in Egypt of this Cretan influence, inducing a habit of naturalistic representation in place of the old conventionalised forms of sculpture and painting. To this late Minoan period belongs the greatest development of palace building, as seen at Cnossus, Phæstus, and Tiryns, while the painting on walls and vases becomes more free and animated than anything of the kind in Egypt.

Toward 1400 B.C. a period of decline becomes apparent in Cretan art, which is reflected all over the Ægean area. The conclusion is that the islands and mainland of Greece had been invaded by less civilised conquerors, who, having no cultivation of their own, adopted the art they found and spoiled it. Probably they came from the North of Greece and were precursors of the later “Hellenes.”

Finally, about 1000 B.C., the palace at Cnossus was again destroyed, never again to be rebuilt; and at the same time the “Bronze Age” of Minoan and Mycenæan civilisation came to an end. It fell before a nation, barbarous, but possessed of iron weapons; probably the tribes which later Greek tradition and Homer knew as Dorians. Then followed a period of several centuries of unrest, as, successively, Achaæn, Æolian, and Doric migrations came from the North through the mainland of Greece and the islands of the Ægean, while an Ionian migration from Armenia spread to the west shore of Asia Minor. Finally, when the Ægean area emerges into history, it is dominated by Hellenes.

The Ægean Archipelago has been called the ancient bridge between the civilisations of the East and West, and the imagination pictures Crete at the southern end of it, within easy distance of three continents and engaged in peaceful intercourse with all; the head of a maritime confederacy of sea-rovers who planted their trading stations throughout the Mediterranean, their art everywhere following their trade. She herself was protected from aggression by her island walls; while the outposts of culture on the mainland of Greece—Mycenæ and Tiryns—were compelled to erect their palaces within citadels.

From the fact that no remains of Minoan and Mycenæan temples have been found, but only shrines within the precincts of the palaces, it has been concluded that, as in Assyria and Babylonia, the monarchs were also priests. Evidence points to the principal Minoan divinity being a kind of Earth Mother, who was associated with a satellite god. One part of her religious attributes survived in the later Aphrodite, the other in Rhea, the mother of the Olympian Zeus. While images of the deity were made as early as 2000 B.C. the principal objects of worship, or fetishes, in the Minoan age were natural objects: rocks and mountain peaks, trees, and curiously shaped stones, and even artificial pillars of wood and stone. Sometimes, as in the famous instance of the Lion Gate at Mycenæ, the fetish object—here a pillar—was guarded by animals.

A special form of fetish for the two principal divinities was that of the double axes: one double-headed axe above another on the same handle. “It has been discovered,” says the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition), “that the great Minoan foundation at Cnossus was at once a palace and a sanctuary of the Double Axe. We can hardly any longer hesitate to recognise in this vast building, with its winding corridors and subterranean ducts, the Labyrinth of later tradition. It is difficult, also, not to connect the repeated wall-paintings and reliefs of the palace, illustrating the cruel bull sports of the Minoan arena, in which girls as well as youths took part, with the legend of the Minotaur, or Bull of Minos, for whose grisly meals Athens was forced to pay annual tribute of her own sons and daughters.” Actual figures of a monster with a bull’s head and man’s body have been found on seals in Crete, and evidence points to these bull sports being part of a religious ceremony.

Even the smaller houses were of stone, plastered within, while the palaces suggest a luxurious mode of living; being richly decorated, with separate sleeping apartments and large halls, fine stairways, bath-chambers, windows, folding and sliding doors, and remarkably modern arrangements for water supply and drainage. The furniture included thrones, tables, seats, constructed of stone or plastered terra-cotta; a great variety of cooking utensils and vessels of all sorts from stone wine jars, ten feet high, to the tiniest ointment-holders.

Ladies, in curiously modern costumes, formed a favourite subject both for wall-decoration and miniature painting; many of the latter showing groups with architectural and landscape surroundings, done with remarkable spirit and naturalness.

The clay tablets are almost exclusively concerned with inventories and business transactions, and prove that a decimal system of numeration was used.

Next to Cnossus the most important sources of knowledge concerning this ancient civilisation have been Hissarlik, Mycenæ, Phæstus, Hagia Triada, and Tiryns.