The following is an excerpt (pages 72-78) from Ancient and Medieval History (1946) by Francis S. Betten, S.J. Although some information may be outdated, the Catholic historical perspective it provides remains pertinent. Use the link at the bottom of post to read the previous/following pages. Use the Search box above to find specific topics or browse using the Resources tab above.

CHAPTER IX

THE EARLIER AGES

DISCOVERIES

76. About sixty years ago the students in our schools were told that Greek history begins with some degree of certainty about 600 B.C. The students indeed read the famous great epics — Iliad and Odyssey — of the blind poet Homer. The Iliad describes in admirable form a ten years’ war of the Greeks against Troy (Ilium), a city in the northwest corner of Asia Minor. The Odyssey relates the wonderful exploits and adventures of Odysseus, one of the prominent leaders in the Trojan war. Since no traces of these and similar events and movements were known, many learned men considered these poems as mere fiction, though very charming. It is now granted that these works of poetry are at least based on real existing conditions. Even though the siege of Troy may not be a genuine fact, there can be no doubt that the customs and usages so admirably depicted, the life so graphically described, the weapons used in fighting, the furniture adorning the homes, the utensils and tools employed in kitchen and dining room must have at one time existed. We have now a pretty exact idea of a certain kind of civilization that once extended over the Greek lands. This change of view was brought about by excavations and the most unexpected discoveries. The man who inaugurated this movement was Dr. Heinrich Schliemann.

77. Heinrich Schliemann was born in 1822, the child of a German village pastor. He always liked fairy stories and tales of treasures hidden in places near his home. Once his father showed him a fanciful picture of the huge walls of Troy. The boy was deeply interested, and when told that nobody knew exactly where Troy had stood, he indignantly insisted that such walls must have left traces which one could find by digging in the ground. The father playfully agreed that sometime Heinrich was to find them. This really became the boy’s ambition. But he needed money. So he entered upon a business career, working up from the position of a grocer’s boy to that of a trusted employee of great corporations. While giving all his leisure to the study of ancient and modern languages, he nevertheless, through hardship and adventure (shipwreck in one instance), succeeded in amassing a considerable fortune. He began his life work in 1870, and continued it until his death in 1890.

78. Results of Excavations. Troy. — Dr. Schliemann started his excavation at a small village in “Troyland,” where tradition placed the old city of Troy (Ilium). He dug into a hill of ruins, about fifty feet high, until he reached the virgin soil below. He was able to distinguish nine different cities,” one below another. The lowest settlement had been of a rather primitive character. The second city from the bottom had strong walls and had been destroyed by fire. It yielded many articles of bronze and gold. Schliemann thought this was the Troy of the Iliad. Later on, further investigations showed that the sixth city from below, a much larger and finer one, which must have perished by fire some twelve hundred years B.C., corresponded much more exactly to the descriptions of the Iliad. Present-day scholars feel sure that this was Homeric Troy.

79. Mycenae and Crete. — At Mycenae, according to Homer the residence of Agamemnon, the chief leader of the Greeks in the Trojan war, Schliemann discovered the remains of an ancient city with extensive palaces, which showed the gorgeous ornamentation described by Homer. In royal tombs the bodies lay in the splendor of their golden crowns and breastplates, their faces covered with golden masks. In one tomb there was a downfall of golden leaves and flowers.

The most wonderful discoveries were those made in ‘Crete. At Knossos (Gnossos, Cnossos) a palace of “King Minos” was unearthed covering more than four acres, with splendid throne rooms, halls, corridors, living and store rooms. The sculptures on the walls, paintings on vases, swordblades inlaid with gold designs, and other things bear witness to the brilliancy of this long forgotten civilization.

These discoveries have enabled historians to learn much about the earliest times of Greece, and to push the beginnings of available history deep into the past.

THE CRETAN CIVILIZATION

80. Earliest Stage of Culture. — As early as 3000 B.C there lived a rather highly civilized race on both sides of the Aegean Sea, and on the clustering islands. Our sole source for this knowledge is derived from relics. Nobody has as yet been able to decipher the numerous pieces of writing that have been discovered. However, the many pictorial representations of human life, the very condition of the ruins of palaces and other buildings, the causes of their destruction, and the evident attempts, successful or unsuccessful, at rebuilding them, furnish a surprising amount of information.

The lowest six cities of Schliemann, of which the Troy of Homer is the sixth (counting from below), belong to this period. Even the very oldest settlers were by no means without refinement, though they knew only stone implements. The ornamentation of their handmade pottery shows skill and love of beauty. There must have been a considerable trade, too. The best sort of the stone knives and arrowheads appears to have been made of a peculiar dark and hard stone, which is found in considerable quantity only in the island of Melos. So it must have come by trade to other points of the Aegean world, and this trade is not likely to have been confined to stone, or stone weapons and tools. Schliemann’s second city from below contained bronze relics. This material and the art of working it probably came through intercourse with the Phoenicians and Egyptians, who at this period carried on a lively commerce with these places. Phoenician and Egyptian relics are discovered in large numbers in Greek ruins.

81. Cretan Civilization at its Best. — At all events, by 2500 Cretan civilization had advanced very far, and for the next thousand years it was quite equal to that of contemporary Egypt. The old handmade pottery gave way to admirable work on the potter’s wheel. The vase paintings, of birds and beasts and plant and sea life, are vastly more lifelike and graceful than any the Egyptian art can show. The walls of houses were decorated with a delicate “egg-shell” porcelain in artistic designs. Gold inlay work had reached great perfection.

The palace at Knossos in Crete was built about 2200 B.C., and rebuilt and improved about 1800 B.C. Its monarch must have ruled all the island, and probably (as the Greek legends taught) ever wide regions of the sea. The city had no walls to shut out an enemy: Crete relied upon her sea power to ward off invaders. We may think of the Cretan lawgiver, Minos, seated on his throne at Knossos, ruling over the surrounding seas, at about the time Abraham left Ur to found the Hebrew race (§ 56), or a little before Hammurabi established the Old Babylonian Empire, or as a contemporary of some of the beneficent pharaohs of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt.

82. The life at court is portrayed to us in the frescoes of the palace walls. We see the dependents of the prince march into the royal castle in stately procession to offer their gifts and, perhaps, pay tribute to their master; or the court is filled with gayly dressed courtiers. The women were not banished from society life as in later Greece. These lords and ladies appear sitting, standing, gesticulating in animated conversation. Occasionally the court is represented as watching intently some game or performance, perhaps a bullfight. The bull was a favorite subject of Cretan art.

The chief article of the men’s dress was a linen cloth hanging from the waist or fashioned into short trousers, like the dress of the men seen on the Egyptian monuments. To this the nobles sometimes, when not in war or hunting, added a short sleeveless mantle, fastened over one shoulder with a jeweled pin; their belts, drawn tight about the waist, always carried a dagger, inlaid with gold figures. The women’s dress was very elaborate, with fine sewing and exquisite embroidery. It resembled much more the female dress of modern days than did that of the women of later Greece and Rome. The skirts were bell-shaped, like the fashion of some fifty years ago, and flounced with ruffles. Each home wove its own cloth, and had its stone mortars for grinding the daily supply of meal. Most cooking was done over an open fire of sticks — though sometimes there was a sort of recess in a hearth, over which a kettle stood.

When the destroying foe came upon Knossos, one carpenter left his kit of tools hidden under a stone slab; among these we find “saws, hammers, adze, chisels heavy and light, awls, nails, files, and axes.” They are of bronze, of course, but in shape they are also so like our own that it seems probable that this handicraft passed down its skill without a break from the earliest European civilization to the present. The dark side of this wonderful culture was the fact that all the kings ruled with perfect absolutism, like the great Oriental monarchs, and only the nobles found life easy and pleasant. The masses were far more abject and helpless than in later Greek history.

83. The period of Cretan culture came to an end by a series of hostile invasions, and the consequent occupation of the land by a people which, though not uncultured, brought with it a much lower degree of civilization. The best stages of art, however, had already passed away. Happily, the most important features of the older culture were gradually adopted by the invaders and preserved for times to come.