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PLATE VII.

Figs. 12 & 13. AMPHORÆ OF THE PALACE STYLE FROM KNOSSOS.

are the oldest instance of this fact. The imported vases of the six graves are distributed over the whole of the first Late Minoan (early Mycenean) period, containing late specimens of Kamares style and early specimens of the Palace style: but the bulk of the ‘varnish’ vases found on the mainland belong to the succeeding period.

The second Late Minoan period of vase production in Crete, the so-called Palace style (Figs. 12 and 13) is not so sharply divided from the first, as the latter is from the Kamares style. Both phases are connected by several transitional forms and run parallel for a time. An important difference is that the last traces of the Kamares technique (the imposition of white, red and orange on a black ground) disappear: there is simply painting in black on light clay (Mycenean technique). The decoration neglects the neck and foot of the vessel and emphasizes the shoulder, particularly with the characteristic half-branches. The animated reproductions of nature in the preceding style are treated in a fanciful way; they become fixed and are changed into ornaments and patterns for filling; the significant unity of the design is interrupted by foreign elements; the marine and plant ornamentation now never covers the whole vase but retires into a single band. In short, the naturalistic style gives place to a tectonic style, the representations are not the chief thing aimed at, which is the filling of the space. Beside the ornaments produced by the schematizing of living natural forms come new ones, which often look like a borrowing of architectural forms; moreover, the juxtaposition and combination of the ornaments show the same spirit, and also the emphasis now laid on the shape of the vase, in which the structure and the swinging contour reach their highest form of elegance, as can be seen most plainly in the amphorae.

This art had a wide influence outside Crete. To the beginning of the period, the transition from the first to the second Late Minoan style, belong many mainland finds, especially from domed tombs, in Peloponnese (Vaphio, Argos, Mycenae, Old Pylos), in Attica (Athens, Thorikos, Spata), in Boeotia (Thebes, Orchomenos) and in Thessaly (Volo). The finds continue during the period of the developed Palace style. The majority of these ‘varnish’ vases seem not to have been imported from Crete but made by Cretan artizans in the country. The Mycenean local princes, who from their lofty citadels controlled the surrounding country, surrounded themselves more and more with the splendour of this southern civilization, ordered weapons, ornaments, precious vases from Crete, used them in life, gave them to the dead in graves; they also took into their service foreign artists, and gave employment to Cretan masons, painters and potters.

The islands too acquire Cretan vases: they were exported as far as Aegina, Melos, distant Cyprus, and the sixth city of Troy.

About the end of the second Late Minoan period the Cretan palaces of Phaistos, Knossos, and Hagia Triada are destroyed, and with the destruction of these and other sites the Palace style decays.

The pottery of the Late Mycenean (or third Late Minoan) period (Fig. 14-17) is very inferior to that of the Palace style. The technique is at first neat but afterwards falls off: the smooth yellowish clay takes a green tinge, the brilliant glaze colour, often burnt red, becomes a lustreless black. The ornamentation consists of the last remains of the naturalistic decoration, now become quite lifeless and poor, with which are associated purely geometrical patterns of the simplest kind, wavy lines, spirals, concentric circles. Rectilinear patterns (groups of strokes, hatched triangles) become ever more prominent. The decoration is generally

PLATE VIII.

Fig. 14. LATE MYCENEAN CUP FROM RHODES.

Fig. 15. LATE MYCENEAN STIRRUP-VASE FROM RHODES.

very loose, emphasizes the shoulder band, and usually puts on the lower half of the vase only a few stripes: vertical division of the field into ‘metopes’ is common.

But, on the other hand, figured representations are not unusual on late Mycenean vases. Two classes can be distinguished off-hand:—(a) animal representations, in traditional ornamental style and very ‘geometrical’ in treatment, particularly birds with cross-hatched bodies, certainly continuations of the old lustreless painting (cp. Fig. 4 with 15); and (b) larger compositions taken over from wall-painting, often provided with ornaments to fill the field, like the chariot-race on the krater from Rhodes (Fig. 17). The best-known example is the Warrior vase from Mycenae representing the departure for the battle-field.

Apart from these figured representations, one may say that Cretan vase-painting, after its brilliant achievements in the Kamares, shaft grave, and Palace styles, sinks down to that primitive level from which it started: it becomes once more a geometrical style.

The area over which we find this pottery is enormous, being practically the whole Mediterranean basin, Crete, Egypt, the Cyclades, the coast of Asia Minor (sixth city of Troy) and its adjacent islands (e.g. Rhodes), Cyprus (where the Mycenean supersedes an old and plentiful pottery akin to that of Troy), Phoenicia, Italy, Sicily, and especially all important sites of the Greek mainland. In many places, where the ‘varnish’ painting did not enter earlier, it now comes into contact with the old indigenous technique, with the monochrome, incised and lustreless vases: many backward settlements, like Olympia, seem to have had practically no acquaintance with the Mycenean style.

Here again the Egyptian finds give us a date: they last from about the end of the 15th down into the 12th century. But since it is not conceivable that we should date the Geometrical period, which followed the Mycenean, back into the second millennium, the late Mycenean style must have lasted at least four centuries; the rate of development, which in the time of great achievements had been very rapid, must have become considerably slower.

To arrange the huge mass of late Mycenean vases in this long development is impossible, until the material has been sifted and worked through. But one thing already can be said with certainty, that it was not merely exported from Crete; indeed it is more than questionable, whether Crete played the leading part. In this period the native seat of the brilliant Minoan civilization is no longer in the foreground; the centre of gravity has shifted to the mainland, in particular the Argolid. Even in the period of the shaft graves we see the Peloponnesians eagerly adopting Cretan civilization; in the following period the mainland vies with Crete in the production of Mycenean vases, and finally must have wrested the lead from the southern outpost. This applies not merely to civilization but to political conditions. A hypothesis, in favour of which there is much to be said, connects the destruction of the Cretan palaces with the invasion of conquering ‘Achaeans,’ the name Homer applies to the lords of the mainland. Just as the wall-painting originally borrowed from Crete was still flourishing on the mainland, when it had died out at home, so the late Mycenean pottery must have been produced mainly in continental Greece, and the new style must have been formed by the Peloponnesians. Thus we can explain the non-Minoan elements, the strong geometrical influence on the decoration, and the taking over of figured scenes from wall-painting, which was rejected by the old Cretans.

So it was probably the ‘Achaeans’ who spread the late Mycenean pottery all over the Mediterranean.

PLATE IX.

Figs. 16 & 17. LATE MYCENEAN VASES FROM RHODES.

They had become a seafaring nation on a great scale. Of their entry into Crete we have just spoken, of their united campaigns of conquest in Asia Minor, in which the Cretan king has the Argive Agamemnon as his overlord, the Homeric poems tell us, and of their colonizing expansion in the Mediterranean the vase finds among other things give evidence, as they justify conclusions about new localities of manufacture (Troy, Rhodes, Cyprus, etc.).

In the beginning of the first millennium the scene is totally altered. On the coast of Asia Minor and the islands are settled Hellenic races, among which the Aeolians and Ionians are probably descendants of the emigrated Achaeans, while the Dorians represent a new tribe come in from the north, which subdued the Peloponnese and Crete and extended to the south of the Aegean Sea.

These shiftings of population, the so-called Dorian invasion, with which Greek historians begin the history of their country, mark the end of the Bronze Age and of the Mycenean civilization. Iron weapons, only sporadically to be found in the late Mycenean age, take the place of bronze; the Mycenean vase style vanishes all along the line, and gives way to a new style, the Geometric.