Among the other treasures recovered by this season's work was a
quantity of fine painted pottery which had fallen from the upper
rooms into the basement when the palace floors collapsed. Some of
the fragments were of that early polychrome style known as 'Kamares
ware,' from the cave on the southern slope of Mount Ida, where it
was first discovered by Mr. J. L. Myres. Its designs are purely
conventional and largely geometric--zigzags, crosses, spirals, and
concentric semicircles--and are executed in beautiful tints of
brown, red, yellow, black, and white, the design being sometimes
in dark on a light ground, and sometimes in light upon dark. The
extraordinary thinness of the walls of these polychrome vessels,
and the fineness of the clay from which they are fabricated, show to
what a pitch the potter's craft had reached at the early period to
which they belong. Of the later pottery of Knossos, which substituted
naturalistic motives, executed in monochrome, for the conventional
polychrome designs of the Kamares period, many specimens were also
found during the excavations of this season.
The frescoes of the previous year were supplemented by the discovery
of a number of others, representing zones of human figures, about
one-third of life-size, set out on blue and yellow fields with
triple borders of black, red, and white bands. One well-preserved
figure is that of a girl with very large eyes, lips of brilliant
red, and curling black hair. Her high-bodied dress is looped up
at the shoulder with a bunch of blue, with red and black stripes,
and fringed ends. A border of the same robe, adorned with smaller
loops, crosses the bosom, and between its blue and red bands the
white tint of the skin displays itself, showing that the material
of the robe was diaphanous. Relief work in stucco was represented
by fragments of a life-sized figure, since pieced together by M.
Gillieron, which must have been that of some Minoan King. The head
wears a fleur-de-lys crown and peacock plumes, and round the neck
of the finely modelled torso there runs a collar of fleur-de-lys
ornament.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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