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)

M. M. Ill: THE DOMESTIC QUARTER 337

linked by a spiral band, belonged to this Upper Hall of the Double
Axes.1

The private staircase leading up from the Queen's Megaron, lighted gtPP^r
on the first landing by a window of which the sides and the dowel-holes System:
of the woodwork below were preserved, overlooking its E. light-well, gave rooms
access to an Upper Story system on that side similar in its general arrange- and bath_
ment to that below. The bath-room and the two Western sections of the
Hall seem to have been repeated, but it ended East in this case in a columnar
parapet overlooking the light-area. What we may suppose to have been
a bedroom with a window looking on the S. light-well and perhaps a little
bath-room attached, opened beyond. At the West end of this Southern
light-area the double window of another bedroom has been restored in the
Plan, Fig. 240. Immediately West of this on the other side of an upper
passage was a dark chamber, entered by a single doorway and answering to
that jocosely called ' the Lair ' below. It was from this room, as we shall see,
that the scattered Deposit of Ivories and other relics evidently belonging to
a shrine had been precipitated, and heaps of more or less fragmentary seal Treasury
impressions had also fallen from it into the underlying area. It may there-
fore best be described as the ' Treasury of a Shrine '. Like the ' Lair' below
it forms a kind of nodal point of this whole region.

The gypsum door-jambs and threshold slabs of the adjoining Corridor
leading to the 'Service Stairs' and the 'Upper Hall of the Colonnades'
were mostly preserved, and substantial remains were also tound of the
pavement of the Middle E.-W. Corridor with its columnar parapet, over-
looking the light-well of the Hall of the Colonnades (see Fig. 238).

It is clear that throughout a large part of the area ot the Domestic Second
Quarter there had been also at least a third story. Stories of

The main approach to the Domestic Quarter, like that of the ' Royal Domestic
Villa ' to be described in a later Section, was from above, by means of an
entrance from the Central Court, which would have abutted on a landing
of the Grand Staircase. The siaircase itself must be regarded as the most Grand
daring exhibition of Minoan architectural enterprise. Of this magnificent
work three flights and part of a fourth were found still in position, while the
landing-blocks of the fourth and fifth, fallen below, have been replaced. The Flights of
two lower flights of the staircase, backed by the massive double wall that ^"case
here encased the face of the clay cutting, were laid themselves on solid main-

° tained in

1 Near the base of the N. wall of the Upper remains of a fresco showing the foot of a bull position.
Hall of the Double Axes, close to the entrance and belonging to the L. M. II remodelling
on that side, were actually found adhering of this section.
I Z