DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.9804#0157
THE PALACE OF KNOSSOS THE LABYRINTH 131
of secondary interest whether the Minoans called it
specifically by that name. Whether the word in the
Minoan language meant " place of the double axe,"
or " place of passages," or something else, it may have
been applied to other places as well as to Knossos. The
Carian Labraunda may in Minoan have been exactly
the same form, and the Labyrinths at Lemnos and
Clusium, for all we know, may be a genuine tradition.
If further evidence should prove this to be the case, it
would disturb the foregoing argument not at all. Con-
stantinople was the " City " to the Byzantines only in
the secondary sense that London is "Town" to us.
In the famous song of the last days of the Empire—
They have taken the city, they have taken it, they have
taken Salonica,
it was Thessalonica, and Thessalonica alone, that was
referred to. If it was intelligible at the time—and we
must surely assume that it was—the word " city " must
have struck the ear without conveying the suggestion
that it was Constantinople whose capture was being
sung.1 None the less there are few derivations of place
names so certain as that which derives Stamboul, the
Turks' name for Constantinople, from the quickly-
uttered " stempol " ! which they heard the Greeks saying
when they were going " to the city." Stamboul is not
only an example of an expression of position losing its
force, just as the old locatives Athenai and Thebai
became the nominatives that survive in our plural
1 Passow, T.R. cxciv-cxcvi. Thessalonica, whose Cathedral was
called St. Sophia as well as that of Constantinople (Bury, L.R.E.
vol. ii. p. 52), was taken in 1430. It is possible that some of
the lines which arc usually printed as part of the same poem
were written about the taking of Constantinople itself twenty-
four years later, but Professor J. B. Bury assures me that I am
right in referring the line to Thessalonica only.
'ft Tijv ttuKiv.
of secondary interest whether the Minoans called it
specifically by that name. Whether the word in the
Minoan language meant " place of the double axe,"
or " place of passages," or something else, it may have
been applied to other places as well as to Knossos. The
Carian Labraunda may in Minoan have been exactly
the same form, and the Labyrinths at Lemnos and
Clusium, for all we know, may be a genuine tradition.
If further evidence should prove this to be the case, it
would disturb the foregoing argument not at all. Con-
stantinople was the " City " to the Byzantines only in
the secondary sense that London is "Town" to us.
In the famous song of the last days of the Empire—
They have taken the city, they have taken it, they have
taken Salonica,
it was Thessalonica, and Thessalonica alone, that was
referred to. If it was intelligible at the time—and we
must surely assume that it was—the word " city " must
have struck the ear without conveying the suggestion
that it was Constantinople whose capture was being
sung.1 None the less there are few derivations of place
names so certain as that which derives Stamboul, the
Turks' name for Constantinople, from the quickly-
uttered " stempol " ! which they heard the Greeks saying
when they were going " to the city." Stamboul is not
only an example of an expression of position losing its
force, just as the old locatives Athenai and Thebai
became the nominatives that survive in our plural
1 Passow, T.R. cxciv-cxcvi. Thessalonica, whose Cathedral was
called St. Sophia as well as that of Constantinople (Bury, L.R.E.
vol. ii. p. 52), was taken in 1430. It is possible that some of
the lines which arc usually printed as part of the same poem
were written about the taking of Constantinople itself twenty-
four years later, but Professor J. B. Bury assures me that I am
right in referring the line to Thessalonica only.
'ft Tijv ttuKiv.