Evans, Arthur J.: The Palace of Minos: a comparative account of the successive stages of the early Cretan civilization as illustred by the discoveries at Knossos (Band 1): The Neolithic and Early and Middle Minoan Ages (London, 1921)

THE PALACE OF MINOS, ETC.

Disk
Motives
of Struc-
tural
Origin.

Ceiling

Pattern

with

Lotus

Designs.

Corre-
spond-
ence of
Loom-

On the other hand, the zones of disks such as are seen on the fellow
vessel, Fig. 191 (in this case creamy white with crimson eyes), which appear
on the dark ground, have in their origin an actual structural significance. The
disks in fact are derived from those that in the painted stucco facades of the
Minoan buildings represent in a decorative fashion round beam ends which
rest upon the architrave in the underlying wooden framework. An inter-
mediate link was moreover afforded for the vase painter by the existence of
coloured terra-cotta models, like the Miniature Shrine found in this area, in
which the rows of disks are seen on a reduced scale in their true architectonic
relation, as they also appear on the later wall-paintings of the miniature
class. They recur again on the contemporary faience plaques, described
below, representing house fronts. These bands of disks, which so appro-
priately mark the effect of Palatial models on the mature M. M. II 6, ceramic
style, and are indeed one of its special cachets, play, as will be seen, an
important part in the decoration of the Abydos vase described below,1
which has for us such a high chronological importance.

The fine contemporary jar, Fig. 192, b, from Phaestos,2 belonging to an
advanced stage of M. M. II, shows a further variation of the lunate pattern
of a combined with an elaborate decorative design consisting of linked spirals,
between the divergent scrolls of which are floral excrescences with pointed
petals. These flowers are themselves derivatives of the Egyptian lotus,
and the spiraliform combination in which they are here seen represents
the adaptation of a class of ceiling pattern well known in Twelfth Dynasty
Egypt. Something has already been said of the assimilation of such
ceiling-types in the Minoan Palaces, and examples derived from the later
Palace at Knossos illustrate spiraliform combinations both with lotus and
papyrus. A more individual feature in the Phaestos design, of great beauty,
is to be seen in the sprays of stellate flowers thrown across the spaces
between the divergent bands of the spirals.

Other specimens of vases, of contemporary fabric, from Phaestos are
given in Fig. 192, on one of which, e, we may trace the effect of whorl-
shell models—in this case perhaps the Dolium or Triton—in the evolution
of certain spiraliform patterns.

The correspondence presented by the ceramic remains of a series
of stratified deposits with those which at Knossos have been best preserved
in the Loom-Weight Basements is one of the many evidences of a parallel
catastrophe that befell both Palaces at the close of the present Period.

1 See p. 267.

2 Pernier, Mon. Ant., xiv, p. 457. From a test-pit in Area 5.