Page 294 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

But Knossos as a merchant power was broken. The great
warehouses were empty, the war fleet was gone, and with it
such merchantmen as had been in harbor. The capital to rebuild

a trading empire had disappeared, but, more important, the
confidence on which alone trade could be carried on had been
destroyed in the flames. During the next month or so many a

small boat slipped away from the obscurer beaches of Crete,
loaded with the surviving representatives and the surviving as­
sets of the great merchant houses of Knossos.
They went where they had assets abroad. Many went to

Cyprus, or the southern coastal towns of Asia Minor. Many more
made for the delta towns of Egypt. But by far the greatest num­
ber set course for the coast of Lebanon and Palestine. There they

had branches and partners, there they had ships that it was vital
to intercept before they sailed, with full cargoes, straight into
the hands of the new masters at Knossos.
And in the following years the refugees built a new life at

the foot of the Lebanese mountains, sending out their ships from
Byblos and Tyre and Sidon as they formerly had sent them
out from Knossos, rebuilding their shattered fortunes, and at

the same time laying the foundations of a new period of mer­
cantile prosperity for the Levant.
They met with competition. Even before the destruction of
Knossos, the merchantmen of the Aegean ports had begun to be

serious rivals to the ships of Crete. And there had never been
any doubt in the minds of the refugee traders that the treacher­
ous attack on Knossos had been as much motivated by a desire

to remove a trade rival as by a hunger for plunder or a feeling
of resistance to political dominance. Now everywhere in the
Mediterranean from Spain to Cyprus ships from Mycenae and
other Achaean ports, and among them ships from the new,

Achaean-dominated Knossos, were trading the olive oil and wine
and manufactured goods of mainland Greece to the markets
which formerly had been the monopoly of the Cretans. And al­

ready they were looking beyond the Mediterranean, to the trade
of the Black Sea and the Atlantic and northern Europe.
Between these usurpers of the trade routes and the refugee

Cretans scattered over the eastern Mediterranean seaboard the