Among the other treasures recovered by this season's work was a
quantity of fine painted pottery which had fallen from the upper
rooms into the basement when the palace floors collapsed. Some of
the fragments were of that early polychrome style known as 'Kamares
ware,' from the cave on the southern slope of Mount Ida, where it
was first discovered by Mr. J. L. Myres. Its designs are purely
conventional and largely geometric--zigzags, crosses, spirals, and
concentric semicircles--and are executed in beautiful tints of
brown, red, yellow, black, and white, the design being sometimes
in dark on a light ground, and sometimes in light upon dark. The
extraordinary thinness of the walls of these polychrome vessels,
and the fineness of the clay from which they are fabricated, show to
what a pitch the potter's craft had reached at the early period to
which they belong. Of the later pottery of Knossos, which substituted
naturalistic motives, executed in monochrome, for the conventional
polychrome designs of the Kamares period, many specimens were also
found during the excavations of this season.
The frescoes of the previous year were supplemented by the discovery
of a number of others, representing zones of human figures, about
one-third of life-size, set out on blue and yellow fields with
triple borders of black, red, and white bands.
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