At more than
one turn rose a mighty bull, in some cases, no doubt, according
to the favourite Mycenaean motive, grappled with by a half-naked
man. The type of the Minotaur itself as a man-bull was not wanting
on the soil of prehistoric Knossos, and more than one gem found
on this site represents a monster with the lower body of a man
and the forepart of a bull.
'One may feel assured that the effect of these artistic creations
on the rude Greek settler of those days was not less than that of
the disinterred fresco on the Cretan workman of to-day. Everything
around--the dark passages, the lifelike figures surviving from an
older world, would conspire to produce a sense of the supernatural.
It was haunted ground, and then, as now, "phantasms" were about. The
later stories of the grisly King and his man-eating bull sprang,
as it were, from the soil, and the whole site called forth a
superstitious awe. It was left severely alone by the new-comers.
Another Knossos grew up on the lower slopes of the hill to the
north, and the old Palace site became "a desolation and hissing."
Gradually earth's mantle covered the ruined heaps, and by the time
of the Romans the Labyrinth had become nothing more than a tradition
and a name.'[*]
[Footnote *: _Monthly Review_, March, 1901, pp. 131, 132.]
Who, then, were the invaders who, whether they remained as a ruling
caste in the land which they had conquered, or merely destroyed
and departed, inflicted upon the Minoan civilization a blow from
which it never recovered? The Cretans of Praesos, whose story of the
Sicilian expedition of Minos has already been mentioned, stated to
Herodotus that, after that great disaster, 'to Crete, thus destitute
of inhabitants .
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