Knossos. Summary Report of the Excavations in 1900 III. Notes on the Pottery

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Knossos. Summary Report of the Excavations in 1900: III. Notes on the Pottery

Author(s): F. B. WelchReviewed work(s):Source: The Annual of the British School at Athens, Vol. 6 (1899/1900), pp. 85-92Published by: British School at AthensStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30096252 .

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Knossos 85skeletons were found lying one upon another loose in the earth close tothe surface. The only object associated with them was a bronze knife-blade.

As the southern slope of the hill, in which these tombs lie, was found,when tested at various points, to contain no graves, and the Roman cemeteryat point 17 lies just below it, the circle is complete. I can offer no moreevidence as to the probable situation of the earlier cemeteries. If theylie within the Roman circumvallation in the northern part of the citysite, which has not been explored, they must be covered by laterbuildings, and will probably be found entirely rifled and partly, if notwholly, destroyed. In the circular belt, explored by me, the only likelysituation is near the western Metochi, where I found later structures andno sign of graves, but an underlying stratum of Mycenaean sherds (suprap. 81); but there again they could hardly have escaped destruction. Royaltholi may yet be found by Mr. Evans on Kephala, though no indication oftheir presence has been observed. The native diggers seem never tohave found graves earlier than Geometric; and after a two months' searchI fear I leave the solution of the Knossian cemetery problem but littleadvanced.

III.NOTES ON THE POTTERY.

BY F. B. WELCH.

THE pottery found during the course of excavations this spring on thesite of Knossos falls naturally into two groups, of which the larger andearlier, extending from Neolithic to Mycenaean times, came fromKephala and the houses south and south-west of the Kephila mound;while the smaller and less important group was found in tombs ofGeometric date, discovered about a mile north of Kephila. Most of thefinds belong to a few well-defined groups, and specimens of trans-itional periods are conspicuous by their absence.

Taking the pottery in chronological order, the earliest types come from


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86 THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ATHENS. [1899-1900goothe Neolithic settlement, underlying the Mycenaean palace and thewestern houses on Kephila, and bear a general resemblance to theproduct of other Neolithic sites in south-east Europe, e.g. Butmir. Theclay, of which the ware is formed, is very dark grey with highly polishedsurface of a brown or dark black colour, in which simple linear designsare incised, consisting chiefly of hatched triangles, and other geometriccombinations. These incised patterns are usually filled in with whitegypsum. From the fragments found, it would appear that the commonestshape was a flattish bowl from six to eight inches in diameter, with smallknob-like handle, pierced horizontally, or else a handle shaped like thewishbone of a fowl. In one of the trial pits on the east slope of Kephailaa small steatopygous female figure, with incised design, was found,showing a well-known Neolithic type (v. supra p. 6): she is representedin a sitting attitude like some of the well-known figures at Hagiar Kimin Malta. A few fragments of pottery show a stage intermediate betweenthis primitive polished ware and the Kamires ware, inasmuch as in thesethe potter has learnt to apply a slip over the clay surface, before polishing,though no use is yet made of paint, and otherwise these fragmentsresemble the earlier specimens.From this early Neolithic class we pass to the Kamairespottery, so-calledafter the Kamires cave on the south of Mount Ida, whence came the firstpublished specimens. One of the chief results of the present excavationshas been to show that this was the common pre-Mycenaean ware of Crete,where it seems to have flourished exceedingly till driven out by Mycenaeanfabrics of the fully developed type, which came in presumably as intrudersfrom the islands of the Archipelago, especially perhaps Melos. The onlyspecimen, yet found on Keph~ila, is a large and rather coarse jar, whichappeared in a trial shaft sunk below the level of the Mycenaean palace, filledwith smaller vases of the same class. The bulk of the finds came from thehouses. Here the Mycenaean invaders (? of a different race), on theirarrival, seem to have found the representatives of the Kamaires cultureinhabiting the site in well-built houses, and using Kamaires vases. Thesenatives the Mycenaeans proceeded to evict, and their pottery wasthrown into large rubbish pits outside the houses, or heaped up in thecorners of the rooms. Fortunately a fair proportion of specimens survivedthis treatment, and these far surpass any previously published vases of thisclass (v. supra fig. 24, p. 80). The technique is the same as that of already


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KNossos. 87known specimens in which a black glaze is applied, seemingly direct, on thefine reddish-coloured clay: the designs are painted in a dull powdery whiteor red, and frequently a thick dull creamy paint is used to cover the wholeupper half or third of a vase. In addition to paint, the surface is oftenornamented with ridges and moulded designs, or zones of a curious pattern,produced by dotting the surface over with finger marks, which gives it astrange blistered appearance. The shapes represented are not numerous:by far the commonest are small cups and bowls, obviously based onmetallic prototypes, and reproducing their sharp angles and thin sides; onthese the designs usually consist of broad and narrow bands disposedobliquely, and formed by various combinations of red and white ; and oftenthe sides and lips of cups are fluted. Several types of "Schnabelkanne "turned up, either very tall and slender on a high foot, or else short andsquat: one of these has a curious moulded design, apparently representingthree ears of barley, or bunches of grapes: another has the upper halfdivided vertically into metopes, which are ornamented alternately with thefinger pattern, mentioned before, and with a zigzag device in two shades ofred. This is the finest vase of this class yet found. Another verycommon shape is a tall thin jar with squat neck and lip pinched in betweentwo handles, placed high up on the shoulder. Besides these shapes werefound three "fruit dish" vases on tall pedestals such as occurred in a proto-Mycenaean ware at Phylakopl, and also "hole-mouth" vases with spoutand two nearly vertical handles, a type already published and verycommon in this technique. On turning to the patterns used, we find theyare comparatively few and simple: perhaps the commonest device of thepainter was to cover the whole vase, or zones of it, with small white dots. Aclass of small squat "Schnabelkanne" has well-drawn naturalisticvegetable designs, such as are so common on proto-Mycenaean vases, butthe artist chiefly took his patterns from the range of simple geometricschemes, such as triangles one inside the other, long zigzags running roundthe body of the vase, degenerate cable patterns, and strange systems ofdots. The festoon seems to have been a favourite, but the spiral occurscomparatively rarely. Very few of these patterns were taken on by theMycenaean potters, though a few re-appear in Geometric times.

No specimens were found which could be called degenerate Kam~resware, though such probably exists in parts of the island less subjected toMycenaean influence. On the other hand extremely few instances of


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88 THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ATHENS. [1899-1900ooanythingapproachinghe earlierstagesof Mycenaeanwareappearedhere-a notable contrastto the productsof Melos. Coarseroughspecimensdidof courseoccur at Knossos,but they seem only to be representativesof thecommon ware used in everyday life, such as was necessaryto supplementthe fine,fragile,polishedware. The only really definitelyproto-Mycenaeanspecimenswere a few fragments (one broken but completevase was foundin a tomb) formed of a fine grey-green clay, with dull surfaceof the samecolour, on which a spiral design was carelessly painted in light brown ; thesevases had been wheel-made, but were of irregular shape, and closelyresembledspecimensof one of the proto-Mycenaeanclasses of Phylakopi;a few similar pieces occurred in a much thicker,coarserware,but other-wise none of the earlier stages of Mycenaean pottery were represented.Possibly this grey-green ware was imported from elsewhere, perhapsMelos, in return for Kamires ware,since there scarcely seems room forthe development of another technique, side by side with the perfectedKamares type. With the exception of these few fragments,nine-tenthsof the finds consisted of pieces of the best Mycenaean ware, belonging toFurtwanglerand L6schke's third class of Firnissmalerei. Unfortunatelythis seems to have sufferedstill more severely than its predecessors. Theabsence of anything later points to an abandonmentof the site duringthefull bloom of the Mycenaean culture,and the second groupof invaders,whether Hellenes from the mainland, or Cretan aborigines, who hadregained the upper hand, treated the pottery even worse than the"Mycenaeans." Hence it now chiefly exists in the shape of small frag-ments, the numberof whole vases being not above ten or twelve.One of the firstpoints to be noticed in these fragments s the existenceof two or three types of vase, such as do not occur largelyelsewhere,andwhich are probablyvarieties peculiar to the island,and largely influencedby the early Kamairesware. The first type of vase, which is also one ofthe commonest in the Kamairesperiod,is a small cup with thin, straightsides, risingsharply from the flat base, and usuallyprovidedwith a broadflat handle ; this type is clearly based on a metallic prototype of the shapeof the Vaphio gold cups, or of the cups carried by the Kefti. The secondtype is a flattish bowl, on which a zone is painted with narrow, parallel,oblique lines, or with horizontal, parallel, wavy lines, the remaining surfacebeing covered with broad and narrow horizontal bands. In this class thepaint seems to have been laid on the unbaked surface, since it runs from


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KNossos. 89one line into the next, giving a very effective appearance. The chiefpeculiarity, however, of both these classes is that the broad bands of varnishare almost invariably covered with one or more narrow lines of dull whitepaint, which is often laid on in very narrow grooves; occasionally thesestraight white lines are replaced by wavy lines. Now of these two typesthe cups seem to be represented elsewhere only by one or two specimensat Phylakopi, while the bowls are found nowhere outside Crete as yet;and hence we may be justified in claiming them as local varieties ofMycenaean ware, made in the island by potters strongly influenced bythe older Kamaires ware, or perhaps by native potters, working out theirold ideas in the new Mycenaean technique. The same abundant use ofwhite paint is also found at Psychr6, where in one case, on the blackvarnish of an otherwise purely Mycenaean fragment, was painted in whitea very naturalistic flower or grass, exactly resembling the designs on thesquat "Schnabelkanne" of the Kamires period at Knossos. Again wefind this frequent use of white paint on another shape of vase, which wastransmitted from the Kamaires culture to its successor, viz. the tall jarswith lip pinched in between two short handles high up on the shoulder, asbefore described. But this variety does not seem to be so purely localCretan as the former two, since it occurs at least twice at Mycenae in thefourth and sixth shaft-graves, though it may be noticed that in the fourthgrave was also found a piece of a vase with a zone of parallel oblique lines,such as occurs on the peculiarly Cretan bowls of our second class. Theuse of white paint also extends to a few other common Mycenaeanshapes.The place of manufacture of the majority of the Mycenaean fragmentsfound at Knossos is a more doubtful question. From their shatteredcondition it has been impossible to recover any new shapes, but as con-trasted with other finds of the same epoch from the Greek mainland andelsewhere, the Cretan fragments seem to have a very homogeneouscharacter, which may be peculiar to the whole island, about nine-tenths ofthe patterns being either purely vegetable designs, or else degraded andstylized forms of the same. Very few are adopted from the Kamiresware, and there are not many specimens of the later class of Mycenaeanware, which under incoming Geometric influence developed a system ofvertical metope divisions, and similar ideas foreign to the true Mycenaeanspirit. Here at Knossos the spiral is rare, in comparison with other


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90 THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ATHENS. [1899-19ooMycenaean localities, while marine animals, such as the octopus and"murex," so common at Mycenae, are distinctly uncommon, though thelatter, when it does appear, is represented as a real shell, and not as ameaningless form. Among the designs taken from the plant world, wefind two main classes. In the first the chief element is a species of grassor grass-like plant, stalks of which are usually depicted vertically parallelto each other in a zone round the body of the vase. This type seems adirect descendant of one of the proto-Mycenaean classes of Phylakopi.The second and larger class is based on a sort of lily, which underwent aseries of degradations very similar to those experienced by the lotus flowerin Egypt. Usually the designs are more stylized, and less naturalisticthan in the earlier class. These are the two main divisions of the patterns,though other plants frequently occur, such as the ivy, and sundry ratherindefinite small plants. On one fragment we have what seems to be alotus, judging from the fact that the flower has a central spike; if this beso, it will probably be unique in Mycenaean pottery. With this singleexception, the Knossos fragments are extraordinarily free from any foreigninfluence, a fact which is all the more noticeable, when we consider theoverpowering Egyptian influence on other parts of the finds. SeeminglyMycenaean potters had nothing to learn from Egypt, and developed intheir own peculiar line. Among the designs are several, which disappearon the break up of the Mycenaean civilization in Greece, vanish for a while,and then reappear chiefly as " Fiillornamente," or subsidiary decorations inorientalizing wares of early Ionia, having presumably lived on in themeanwhile in the sub-Mycenaean art of western Asia Minor to reappearlater, strengthened by a fresh wave of Eastern influence.One or two pieces may be called pseudo-Mycenaean, being imitationsof the genuine ware in a reddish clay with very white opaque slip and dullred designs. Similar fragments occurred on the Acropolis at Athens.At the same time, though these may be imitations, yet the peculiar char-acter of the genuinely Mycenaean fragments makes it probable that mostof them were made in Crete itself, or perhaps in some other island not fardistant; they certainly seem to come from quite different ateliers to thespecimens found at Mycenae itself; and the many points of contactbetween Crete and Melos might be taken to show the existence of a localbranch of Mycenaean art, embracing the southern Cyclades and Crete.

Along with this finer and more delicate ware a number of fragments


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KNossos. 91were turned up, representing a very coarse Mycenaean technique: theywere chiefly pieces of large wiOot0nd "Bigelkanne " with spiral, vegetableand octopod designs, freely drawn in poor, thin brown varnish on a reddishor buff-coloured surface. This is evidently the coarse household stuff,which existed side by side with the more delicate ware.The bulk of this pottery came from the town site: very little wasfound on Kephila, and it would seem that the inhabitants of the palacehad reached such a stage of luxury, that even the best Mycenaean vaseswere nothing accounted of in the days of Minos. Such pieces as didoccur, were mostly fragments of large, rather coarse jars, of the samegeneral type as the rest of the find.Other objects in Mycenaean ware included a small well-mouldedfemale bust, unfortunately broken, and a cow's head: not a single idol ofthe usual crescent-shaped Mycenaean type turned up.The group of tombs, which supplied the Geometric vases found,occurred in a hill side about one mile north of Kephaila, and consisted ofirregularly shaped chambers with short, more or less horizontal 8p6/Iotleading to them. They were all, but one, certainly of Geometric date(v. supra, p. 82). The Geometric pottery was extremely poor and carelesslymade, and closely resembled that found at Milato and Kav'isi; the artisticand technical skill displayed is infinitely inferior to that of the oldKam~ires or Mycenaean potters. In most cases a dull black or brownpaint is applied on a poor reddish or yellowish wash, covering a coarselumpy clay, and common Geometric shapes occurred such as kraters andamphorae. As to the designs, a few seem to be taken on from the twoearlier classes of pottery, but the majority seem to be creations of localpotters, and are chiefly remarkable for their grotesqueness. Two groupsof these vases are shown in Figs. 25, 26. The most obvious connections, asis only natural, are with the pre-Milesian pottery of Rhodes from Kameiros.The same shapes, and the same device of covering the whole vase withdark paint, leaving only small panels for the patterns, occur in both areas,both of which likewise produce large jars with a degenerate S-shapedspiral on the shoulder. Another class represented largely in Crete consistsof small vases of much better make, with globular bodies, short necks, andbroad flat lips: this type commonly occurs about this date in greatnumbers in Syria, Palestine and Cyprus, in which island it reaches itshighest development; it also appears in Rhodes, Crete and Argos, and


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92 THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ATHENS. [1899-1900in a debased form in Sardinia: hence it would seem to be of Phoenicianorigin, being found chiefly in lands, which at this period are certainly withinthe Phoenician sphere of influence. Another class which occurred atKnossos, and also at Kavuisi,may be due to the same people: it consists offlattish bowls, painted in dull black, on which are drawn designs in dullwhite, running in concentric circles round the centre of the bowl, which isusually occupied by a rosette. The designs mostly consist of lines of dotsand of the cable pattern, and it is possible that this class of vases mayhave been affected by the metal bowls of Phoenicia, which influenced sostrongly the bowls and other metallic objects found in the Idaean cave. Ifwe except these last two classes, which probably are not of native origin,we can say that the Geometric ware of Crete so far appears to be certainlythe poorest found in any Greek lands, and to be of a peculiarly localcharacter, as we might expect from a people who were always outside thecurrent of ordinary Greek life and politics.

IV.A LATIN INSCRIPTION.

By D. G. HOGARTH.

I SUBJOINhere a Latin inscription of some interest, copied at Knossos.It is rather coarsely cut on a stela unearthed no one knows where someyears ago, and first seen by us in the garden adjoining the house of SaidBey Barakakis. The dimensions of the stone are 99 cm. x 38 cm. x 24 cm.,and the lettering varies from 5 to 3 cm. in height. The stone is muchworn on the right and towards the bottom.

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Nero] Cl[a]udiu[sCaesar Aug.GermanicusAesculapio ju-

5 gera quinque

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Knossos. Summary Report of the Excavations in 1900 III. Notes on the Pottery