Even at this exceedingly early stage of human progress, the various branches of industry had become fairly separated and specialized, more so, perhaps, than in the Homeric period, and a considerable variety of tools was employed in the various crafts. The carpenter was evidently a highly skilled craftsman, and the tools which have survived show the variety of work which he undertook. At Knossos a carefully hewn tomb held, along with the body of the dead artificer, specimens of the tools of his trade--a bronze saw, adze, and chisel. 'A whole carpenter's kit lay concealed in a cranny of a Gournia house, left behind in the owner's hurried flight when the town was attacked and burned. He used saws long and short, heavy chisels for stone and light for wood, awls, nails, files, and axes much battered by use; and, what is very important to note, they resemble in shape the tools of to-day so closely that they furnish one of the strongest links between the first great civilization of Europe and our own.'[*] Such tools were, of course, of bronze. Probably the chief industry of the island was the manufacture and export of olive oil. The palace at Knossos has its Room of the Olive Press, and its conduit for conveying the product of the press to the place where it was to be stored for use; and probably many of the great jars now in the magazines were used for the storage of this indispensable article. As we have seen, Dr. Evans conjectures that it was the decay of the trade in oil during the troubled days after the sack of the palaces that drove the Minoans abroad from their island home to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Besides the trade in oil, it would seem that there must have been a trade in the purple of the murex, and no doubt the Keftiu mariners found a ready market for this much-prized product long before the Phoenicians dreamed of Tyrian purple. Minoan pottery was manifestly also an article of export--a fragile cargo for those days. The fact that two of the Keftiu envoys in the Rekh-ma-ra frescoes carry ingots of copper of the same shape as those found by Dr. Halbherr at Hagia Triada suggests that Crete may have exported copper to Egypt in the time of Tahutmes III. as Cyprus exported it in large quantities in that of Amenhotep III. [Footnote *: C. H. and H. Hawes, 'Crete the Forerunner of Greece,' p. 37.]