_Late Minoan II_.--To Late Minoan II. belong the great glories of the second palace at Knossos, which arrived at its greatest splendour just before the time at which it was to be destroyed. Now were built the Throne Room and its antechamber, and the Royal Villa with its dais and throne and columned hall, while the walls of the completed palace were covered with the splendid frescoes of whose beauties the Cup-Bearer and the spectators watching the games give us evidence. The reliefs in hard plaster, such as the bull's head and the King with the peacock plumes, show the style of decoration which gave variety on the walls to the paintings on the flat. In pottery the change of style and decoration is gradual, but quite pronounced. The chief characteristic of the time is the fabrication of large decorated vases and _pithoi_, such as the beautiful papyrus relief vase of the Royal Villa, nearly 4 feet in height (Plate XXIII.; see also Plate XXX.). Naturalism still survives in occasional designs, but the bulk of the design is conventional, and the composition of the various elements is often extremely skilful. A typical form of vessel of this period is the long narrow strainer, which is borne by the Cup-Bearer in the palace fresco, and of which various specimens have been found. In many cases these strainers were made of variegated marble, though pottery was also used for them. The bronze vessels from the north-west house at Knossos, and the swords from the earlier Zafer Papoura graves, testify to the skill with which metal was wrought. One of these swords from the chieftain's grave, the short weapon which the noble of Late Minoan II. carried along with his long rapier, perhaps for parrying thrusts, as the gallants of Queen Elizabeth's time used their daggers, has a pommel of translucent agate, and a gold-plated hilt engraved with a design of a lion chasing and capturing a wild-goat. Great bronze vessels were wrought with splendid conventional designs, and some of the stone vases of the period are amazing in the skill with which they were worked and decorated. 'How the hard material was worked with precision in the _inside_ of vessels which have only the narrowest of neck orifices, and that in an age of soft bronze tools, is as great a mystery as the mode of working diorite and granite in prehistoric Egypt.'[*] Perhaps the most splendid specimen is the great amphora, 2 feet high by 6 feet in circumference, with its two magnificent spiral bands, which was found in the so-called Sculptor's Workshop at Knossos, beside the smaller vessel which had only been roughed out when the catastrophe of the palace came. [Footnote *: D. G. Hogarth, _Cornhill Magazine_, March, 1903, p. 329.] The linear script, Class B, now supersedes the earlier type, Class A.