Page 81 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

AlRluii, ui iu ujpn ----------—----——-—
life but not without reward, both material and spiritual. By fa­
vor’of the mother goddess—and they look toward the squat stone
figurine in the niche in the wall—they have, until now, been
regarded as citizens of some eminence, with their small but well-

built houses and their family burial chambers outside the town.
Now things are changing, and they do not like the change.

Farther up the hill behind the town a palace is rising, swarming
over the slope in an ostentatious complex of roofs and colon­
nades and broad staircases. We do not know, at our distance of

four thousand years, why, just at this period of Crete’s history,
the old, apparently egalitarian, pattern of small uniform houses

gives place to towns dominated by these extravagant palaces.
Simultaneously at three places they rise, at Knossos and at

Phaistos and at Mallia, and they must betoken the rise to power
of individual ruling princes. There is no break in the archaeol­
ogical record that would suggest foreign domination. On the

contrary, the continuity with what went before is obvious.
Not that the rise of princes need surprise us, though it prob­

ably surprised the members of the craftsmen’s guilds. Any system
of private trading bears within itself the seed of oligarchy. Under

such a system only crushing taxation can prevent the rich from
getting ever richer—and taxation on such a scale was then un­
known. It is probable that it was the millionaires of Crete who

now bought themselves into power and erected the palaces. Cer­
tainly the palaces appear in plan to be more factories than for­

tresses. They are centers of mass production of consumer goods,
warehouses and counting houses, and at the same time luxurious

dwelling places. No defenses were built, either to the palaces or to
the cities they dominate, and in that we can see an indication

both that the succession to power was peaceful and that the ships
of the strongest maritime power in the world were defense
enough for the land of Crete.

The ships of Crete that sailed out to the far western lands
found there a world completely unlike the one they had left. They

were part traders and part prospectors, these wide-ranging sea
captains. But though they scarcely realized it, they were most to
make their mark as missionaries. By their works we know them,