Horses were apparently used both for war and for hunting, although we have no pictures of them being ridden. The available evidence shows them only in the shafts of two-wheeled chariots. This accords well with Professor Sir William Ridgeway’s observation (made far back in the ’eighties of last century) that in Homer the horse was driven only, and was no bigger than our donkey. There is reason for thinking that the horses were imported, and imaginative people have recognized evidence of this in the fact that a seal stone has been found which shows a horse on board ship. Whether intentionally or merely from crudity of draughtsmanship, one is left in little doubt as to what mostly occupied the artist’s mind when he fashioned this stone, for the horse covers three-quarters of the ship’s length, and towers high above it, while the crew stand as high as the horse’s knees. On the fascinating subject of the history of the horse, the reader should consult Sir W. Ridgeway’s _Origin of the Thoroughbred Horse_ (Cambridge University Press, 1905). The women are readily distinguishable from the men in Cretan pictures by reason of their white skin, suggestive of a more secluded indoor life. They wore large shady hats, close-fitting, puffed-sleeved blouses, cut very low in front, and projecting upwards into a sort of peak at the back of the neck. They wore wide-flounced, richly-embroidered skirts like crinolines, and had belts like the men’s. It was on first seeing some of the pictures of them that a French scholar compared the women of Knossos with those of Paris. Minoan women enjoyed a far more “advanced” status than did other primitive women. In the art of their day they are represented as appearing in public and unveiled; they took part in the bull-fighting at Knossos, and their apartments in the palace were marked out by their special luxury. The greatest glory for an Athenian woman of a later age was to be “as little mentioned as possible among men.” Not so for the women of Crete. There may be some special significance in the fact that the Lycians of Asia Minor, who were colonists from Crete, made a practice of calling children by the mother’s, not the father’s, name (Herodotus, i. 73). If this was the case also in Minoan Crete itself, it may afford a possible explanation of the freedom enjoyed by Cretan women, for the practice of naming children after their mother instead of after their father is connected with states of society which have not yet evolved any definite ideas of marriage, and in which, as Herbert Spencer says, “The connection between mother and child is always certain, whereas the connection between father and child would sometimes be only inferable.” Chapter 12: _From Prehistoric Crete to Classical Greece_