Evans, Arthur J.: Scripta minoa: the written documents of minoan Crete with special reference to the archives of Knossos (Band 1): The hieroglyphic and primitive linear classes (Oxford, 1909)

126

SCRIPTA MINOA

The

maeander
and spiral.

North
Aegean

of spiral.

the constantly recurring maeander or key pattern, we may with great probability detect
Aegean influences such as those which, at a somewhat later date, introduced the spirali-
form patterns on to Egyptian cylinders, as well as on to a series of scarab types which
first came into vogue about the beginning of the Middle Empire. Both phenomena
indeed may be regarded as due to successive waves from the same Northern source.
There can be no longer any reasonable doubt that a spiraliform system was rife
at a very early period in the lands on the European side of the Aegean. This seems
to have been already highly developed in a great Neolithic Province extending from
Thessaly' and Bosnia2 to the lands to the North of the Euxine.3 In the earliest
metal age deposits of the Cyclades, in Amorgos, Paros, Syros, and elsewhere we find
a parallel system already deeply rooted. In Crete it also makes its appearance in the
Early Minoan Age on steatite pyxides, rings, and other objects of Cycladic form. But its
occurrence there is still sporadic, and there are signs that it did not fully domesticate

itself in the island till the Middle Minoan Age, when indeed it supplies the leading

motive of some of the most brilliant designs of the wall decoration and of the vases

of the polychrome style. Thus, although the spiraliform patterns appear among

the relics found in the early Cretan ossuaries—as, for instance, on the besils of certain

steatite and ivory rings—they are by no means dominant, as in the contemporary

interments of the more Northern islands.

Trans- It seems, however, that we may trace the influence of the incoming fashion in

lation of another way. The suggestion supplied by the returning spirals of the new decorative

maeanders. system is harmonized here with dominant habit of rectilinear design, and, as has so often

happened in the history of spiraliform ornament, it is angularized and translated into

1 The Neolithic painted pottery from the Thessalian sta-
tions of Sesklo and Dimini has now been published by

Dr. Tsountas, Ai npo«rrppi<ot aKpoirdXnt di/iip'iVv *ai Scintkov.

Thanks to the courtesy of the explorers, I had been able
previously to examine the material.

! Notably the Neolithic Station of Butmir (W. Radim-

sky, Die neolilhische Station von Butmir (I), fortgesetzt
von F. Fiala und M. Hoernes (II).

3 E. von Stem, Die prSmykenische Kultar in Sud-Russ-
land (Moscow, 1906), where a good deal of the material
relating to Southern Russia, Poland, and the Danubian
Provinces is summarized.