The evidence from Phaestos and Hagia Triada tallies with that from
Knossos. Everywhere there are the traces of fire on the walls,
and a sudden interruption of quiet and luxurious life. The very
stone lamps still stand in the rooms at Hagia Triada, and on the
stairs of the Basilica at Knossos, as they stood to lighten the
last night of the doomed Minoans. Of course there are no records,
and if there were we could not read them; but it is easy to imagine
the disastrous sea-fight off the mouth of the Kairatos River, or
elsewhere along the coast, the wrecks of the once invincible Minoan
fleet driven ashore in hopeless ruin in the shallow bay, like the
Athenian fleet at Syracuse, the swift march of the mainland conquerors
up the valley, the brief, desperate resistance of the palace guards,
and then the horrors of the sack, and the long column of flushed
victors winding down to their ships, laden with booty, and driving
with them crowds of captive women. Similar scenes must have been
enacted at Phaestos and Hagia Triada, either by other forces of
invaders, or by the same host sweeping round the island.
From this overwhelming disaster the Minoan Empire never recovered.
The palace at Knossos was never reoccupied as a palace, at least on
anything like the scale of its former magnificence. The invaders
possibly departed as swiftly as they had come, or if, as seems
more probable, they eventually established themselves as a ruling
caste among the subject Minoans, they chose for their dwellings
other sites than those of the old palaces.
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