Basilica at Knossos, as they stood to lighten the
last night of the doomed Minoans. Of course there are no records,
and if there were we could not read them; but it is easy to imagine
the disastrous sea-fight off the mouth of the Kairatos River, or
elsewhere along the coast, the wrecks of the once invincible Minoan
fleet driven ashore in hopeless ruin in the shallow bay, like the
Athenian fleet at Syracuse, the swift march of the mainland conquerors
up the valley, the brief, desperate resistance of the palace guards,
and then the horrors of the sack, and the long column of flushed
victors winding down to their ships, laden with booty, and driving
with them crowds of captive women. Similar scenes must have been
enacted at Phaestos and Hagia Triada, either by other forces of
invaders, or by the same host sweeping round the island.

From this overwhelming disaster the Minoan Empire never recovered.
The palace at Knossos was never reoccupied as a palace, at least on
anything like the scale of its former magnificence. The invaders
possibly departed as swiftly as they had come, or if, as seems
more probable, they eventually established themselves as a ruling
caste among the subject Minoans, they chose for their dwellings
other sites than those of the old palaces. The broken fragments of
the Minoan race crept back after the sack to the blackened ruins
of their holy and beautiful house, not to rebuild it, but to divide
its stately rooms and those of its dependencies by rude walls into
poor dwelling-houses, where they lived on--a very different life
from that of the golden days before the sack.

[Illustration XXIII: GREAT JAR WITH PAPYRUS RELIEFS (_p_. 206)]

In their own way they strove to continue, possibly under the modifying
influence of the art tradition of their conquerors, the great story
of the art of Knossos. There is no abrupt break in the style of the
pottery and other articles belonging to the latest Minoan period, as
compared with that of the days before the catastrophe. Technical skill
is almost as great as ever; it is degeneration in the inspiration of
the art that has begun. The spirit of the nation has been broken,
and its art is no longer living. Though the old models are followed,
it is with less complete understanding, with a perpetually increasing
interval, and with less and less fidelity. 'With the inability to
create new ideas of art and life,' says Dr. Mackenzie, 'is coupled
the slavish adherence to in