CRETAN AND AGEAN

And winter warmth. Interior wall-face are dignified with dadoes of stone slabs, and the plaster above
enriched with frescoes, whose brilliant and naturalistic designs are occasionally and rather unexpectedly
varied by a reproduction in paint of the hall-timber structure beneath. Columns are of painted wood,
usually tapering downwards (a device more often associated in our own minds with furniture), and their
capitals are composed of square and cushion-shaped elements which foreshadow the abacus and
echinus forms of classical times. In the outer facades of these buldings (as in those of minor dwellings of
which small models have survived), square or rectangular windows are conspicuous and other forms of
ornament once more emphasise the structural pattern.

Tombs in crete, like those in Egypt, make little contribution to the repertory of architectural practices.
But circular tholos burials with rectangular antechambers, like much earlier examples which we have
noticed in Mesopotamia, anticipate imminent developments on the Greek mainland.

None of the Cretan palaces or the towns surrounding the showed any traces of military defences, nor is
there much evidence to suggest that the Minoans were a warlike race. Nevertheless, they were
undoubtedly a maritime people with far-reaching trade connections. Whether by peaceful association or
by actual conquest, during the fifteenth century B.C. their culture dominated almost the whole Aegean
area. Mycenae, due west of Athens in the Peloponnese, was already at this time the seat of an
important mainland principality, and the contents of the famous “shaft-grave” burials discovered there
by Schliemann in 1876, though architecturally irrelevant, reveal the richness of Minoan art in the
provincial centres of the period. But a date usually estimated at about 1400 B.C., some great migratory
upheaval seems to have transformed the ethnic composition of a Aegean peoples and to have ended
the hegemony of the Cretan nation. When a clear picture once more emerges, it shows the Minoan
palaces in ruins and the islands, in common with the whole Aegean area, dominated by a people whose
written language is now tentatively identified as Greek. Related by speech and heredity, they are not so
much a nation as a federation of maritime principalities and their regional seats of government are in
cities such as Mycenae, Tiryns and Pylos on the Greek mainland. Their kings or princes, afterwards to
become the heroes of Homeric legend and classical myth, built themselves palaces which bore little
resemblance to the Minoan labyrinths of the preceding age.

Mycenaean palace plans are well illustrated for instance by that discovered at Pylos. The central unit is a
megaron, of which the hall has become a squarish compartment with a central hearth, twelve feet in
diameter, and four columns, probably to allow clerestory lighting or outlets for smoke. It is separated by
an inner vestibule from the usual columned porch. In a a similar building at Tiryns the subsidiary
chambers on either side include a smaller megaroni,and in both examples the central unit is a it were
partially insulated from these by a surrounding corridor. It faces a courtyard, colonnaded ad Tiryns, and
entered by a gateway with columned porches inside and out.
 GREEK AND HELLENISTIC

Every one of these features has a precedent a thousand years earlier in Anatolia, and the only
resemblance to Cretan palaces lies in the familiar half-timber construction and the frescoes which
ornament the plaster-faces. Later in the fourteenth century B.C these palaces seem to have been
converted into military strongholds by the addition of powerful fortress-walss, often built of huge rough
stones, which the Greek of later days termed “cyclopean”, nevertheless , before the end of the
thirteenth century B.C they were all destroyed by fire and never rebuilt.

One opening in the outer fortification at Mycenae is know as the “lion gate”. Two hugs blocks of stone
form the doors-jambs and another the lintel, which is relieved of the weight above it by a system of
corbelling. The triangular opening thus left is filled by a sculptured slab, on which two rampant lions
support a cult pillar of the short often represented on Cretan seals. A more pretentious architectural
treatment distinguishes the tholos tombs in which the princes of this age were buried. Of these the so-
called “Treasury of Atreus” is the most striking example. It is a beehive-shaped affair with a round
interior, forty-four feet in diameter and forty feet high, partly submerged in the side of a hill, with a low
circular retaining wall supporting the earth above. The corbelled vault was built of carefully dressed and
jointed masonry, ornamented here and there with bronze rosettes. The tomb itself is approached by a
rectangular dromos, and the doorway between the two makes a striking architectural composition,
flanked by elaborately carved half-columns in green stone. Above the lintel once more there is a weight-
relieving triangular opening; but this was afterwards masked by a panel of spiral and other ornament in
stone of various colours, framed on either side by downward-tapering pilasters.

Little more is known of mycenaean architecture. These few surviving remains suggest minoan stylistic
influence on basically Anatolian forms and the occasional introduction of Egyptian motifs. Its parental
relationship to that of classical Greece is by no means conspicuous.

GREEK AND HELLENISTIC

With the end of the bronze age in sight, we are approaching one of greatest turning-points in
architectural history. In about 1100 B.C., worlds event of which we have little understanding brought
mycenaean civilization to an abrupt end, and for the moment there was nothing to replace it.
Historically there ensued a curious interlude of retrogression; a period of four centuries during which
the aegean peoples relapsed into a state of poverty and impotence almost comparable to that from
which they had emerged during the third millennium B.C.

It is towards the end of the eighth century B.C. that the first symptoms are to be seen of a new and
distinctive civilization materialising from this periodof gestation. Mycenaean citadels, in an age when
temples were practically unknown, had usually been crowned by the palace of a ruling prince. Now
there were no princes, and the most prominent building housed the statue of a god. Furthermore, since
Greek religion now combined the worship of ancient heroes with that of personified natural
phenomena.