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The Knossos Tablets: A Complete View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Sinclair Hood
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Extract

I do not see that Professor Palmer has any adequate grounds for his refusal to accept the definitive opinion of Evans and Mackenzie that the Linear B tablets found at Knossos were all of them—or the great bulk of them—from the ruins of the Palace and other buildings destroyed at the end of the Late Minoan II period about 1400 B.C.

This opinion was based, not upon a few isolated ‘facts’ of the kind which Professor Palmer has, with commendable diligence, mustered against it, but upon their observation of the ruins of the ‘Last Palace’ (as they called it) as a whole. In these ruins they found, on the one hand Linear B tablets, on the other remains of vases decorated in the ‘Palace Style’ of Late Minoan II, which falls in time between what Evans called Late Minoan I (c, 1550–1450 B.C.) and Late Minoan III (c. 1400 B.C. and later). It is to the end of the Late Minoan III period, about 1200 B.C. or later, that Professor Palmer wishes to transfer the tablets.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 36 , Issue 141 , March 1962 , pp. 38 - 40
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1962

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References

1 Professor Palmer in his Addendum (ANTIQUITY, 1961, 311) has drawn attention to Mackenzie’s Pottery Notebooks in the Excavation House at Knossos. These Notebooks contain many drawings of fragments of ‘Palace Style’ vases, whose importance Mackenzie had realized. See his article ‘The Pottery of Knossos’, J.H.S., xxiii, 1903, 191 f.

2 Evans does, however, record tablets which had fallen into pithoi in the West Magazines. There were remains of ‘Palace Style’ vases, also clearly fallen from an upper storey, in these same Magazines. See the Preliminary Report for the second season of work at Knossos, B.S.A., vii, 1900-1901, 38, 39 n. 1 and 40.

3 My colleague, Mr M. Popham, has kindly shown me the draft of a report of his study of the ‘Palace Style’ pottery in the stratigraphic Museum at Knossos. His observations confirm and amplify the claim made by Evans and Mackenzie that the ‘Palace Style’ was characteristic of the ‘Last Palace’.

4 British School at Athens, Excavations at Phylakopi in Melos, 1904, 271. Mackenzie is equally outspoken in J.H.S., xxiii, 1903, 191 : ‘Thus the pottery found on the floors in the more central regions of the Palace all belongs to the mature Knossian period. In this deposit “Mycenaean” pottery in a fully developed Palace style native to Knossos’ (i.e. Late Minoan 11) ‘occurs in one general context with the magnificent series of stone vases, with the frescoes of the great period, and with the written records of the Palace’ (i.e. the Linear B tablets) ‘that now adorn the museum at Candia’ (modern Herakleion).

5 ANTIQUITY, 1961, 139.

6 ANTIQUITY, 1961, 140.

7 B.S.A., viii, 1901-1902, 94-95). The date is reconsidered in Scripta Minoa, I, 1909, 55.

8 ANTIQUITY, 1961, 310.

9 In his recently published book, Mycenaeans and Minoans, Professor Palmer has begun to face the problem of the sealings. ‘In general we may conclude that all the sealings associated with Linear B tablets belong to the period Late Minoan III’ (ibid., p. 225). His discussion of one sealing (from the Armoury, with water fowl) (ibid., p. 200. Cf. B.S.A., x, 1903-1904, 57 and fig. 19) seems to imply that he regards some at any rate of the seals which made the sealings as being of the same period, and not merely older seals continued in use. The ‘Palace Style’ of vase decoration is left undisturbed in Late Minoan 11. But the great bull relief from the North Entrance, assigned by Evans to the end of the Middle Minoan period (e. 1600 B.C.), is spirited by Professor Palmer some four centuries down the corridors of time (ib., 224). The elaborately decorated bronze vases from the north-west Treasure House are similarly torn from their stylistic roots and transplanted into the 12th century B.C. (ibid., p. 216 f.).

10 I must apologize to Professor Palmer for overlooking his claim to have anticipated Professor Blegen in the revival of this opinion (ANTIQUITY, 1961, 141). The Minutes of the London Seminar, to which Professor Palmer there refers, I would not myself regard as publication, although it is to be regretted that these Minutes are not published, containing as they do an admirably clear and detailed exposé by Miss Dorothea Gray of the arguments brought forward by Professor Palmer at the time.

11 For ‘Palace Style’ vases found during the first season of the excavation, see B.S.A., vi, 1899-1900, 25, and Mackenzie’s remarks in J.H.S., xxiii, 1903, 191.

12 This is clear from his remarks at the end of the First Preliminary Report (B.S.A., vi, 1899-1900, 65-66).

13 The ‘Palace Style’ is first defined in the Second Preliminary Report (B.S.A., vii, 1900-1901, 5, 12-13, 3St 38, 51 f.). For the earlier dating (but now somewhat too early ) of the destruction of the Palace, see ibid., 82 (top) and 92.