Minoan Crete [antikvár]

FOREWORD The world as we know it is a man-made world. Hardly any part of the habitable globe is unaffected by man's activity; even some of the parts which are uninhabitable were made so by man. And man himself is very largely a man-made creature: his habits, his thoughts, his memory, his aspirations are the modified sum of his ancestors' experiences. All men are brothers, say the missionary and the idealist. True, but there is more to it than that: all men, living and dead since the beginning of time, are our brothers; and all history is family history. The Magdalenian artist of 17,000 years ago who decorated the caves of Lascaux with bulls and horses, the Cretan who applauded the bull-leapers, the Egyptian who drew funny hippopotamuses on pieces of stone, the boy Inca who triumphed in the initiation tests, the Etruscans who delighted so frankly in wine, women and song—these are as real to us, as near to us and as sustaining to us as, at any rate, some of those who live in our own street, village, town. Or they can be. Aristotle said that the object of poetry was pleasure. And when he used these words, he doubtless used them in the widest possible sense: poetry, to include the full range of man's creative imagination; pleasure, to encompass everything from the baby's first chuckle to the philosopher's cry of delight at apprehending a new facet of truth. Education and the pursuit of knowledge have two objectives: pleasure and power. And of these the greater is pleasure: power is transitory, pleasure is permanent. If these books enable anyone to pass an examination, to secure a job or to dominate a competitor or friend, they will have served a purpose of a sort. Their main objective, however, is to increase the sum of human pleasure, to enlarge the circle of friendship, love and knowledge, and to present a picture of life. Life in ancient Crete has a special fascination. Though one of the greatest and most distinct of ancient civilizations, practically nothing was known of it —even that it had existed — until the present century. It is, in a sense, the complete creation of the archaeologist's spade and the scholar's detective imagination. It has no literature; until a few years ago, its written records were undecipherable. Even now, when thanks to the brilliant work of Ventris and Chadwick those records are transcribed, they turn out to be little more than duty-rosters and the lists of quarter-masters and tax-collectors. And yet, the brilliance, the luxury, the oddity and gaiety of Minoan Crete are now manifest like that phrase of Sterne's "the world of fashion running at the ring of pleasure". Sterne was writing of Paris; and it was not by accident that Sir Arthur Evans called one of the fresco portraits of girls he found at Knossos La Belle Parisienne. Life at Knossos was lively, sophisticated, modish —a good thousand years before Pericles. 7