the town of Zakro, in
Eastern Crete, and it is not unlikely that they belonged to the
same race as the Zakkaru of the time of Ramses III.

Thereafter the Egyptian records are silent as to the scattered
tribes of Crete, just as they had been silent since the rise of
the Nineteenth Dynasty as to the organized Empire of the Keftians.
The eleven shiploads of Zakru sea-robbers are the last degenerate
representatives of the great marine which, under the Kings of the
House of Minos, had once held the undisputed Empire of the AEgean.
The ring of Minos was destined to lie for long ages beneath the
waves before the descendants of Theseus brought it up again.

CHAPTER IX

THE PERIODS OF MINOAN CULTURE

We must now endeavour to form some idea of the various periods
into which the long enduring culture of the Minoan Empire more
or less naturally falls, and to note some of the characteristic
features of each period. The chief aid in the formation of such
an idea is given by the remains of the pottery which have survived
from each period, and it is largely from the classification of
the pottery at Knossos and other sites that the scheme adopted
by Dr. Evans and other workers has been derived. The deposit left
by Neolithic man on the hill of Kephala averages about 6 metres
in thickness below the later deposit which marks the occupation
of the site by the post-Neolithic culture. We are thus led to an
almost fabulous antiquity for the first occupation of the site.
In the earliest beginnings of human development, progress, with
its consequent accumulation, is slow, and if we allow a rate of
3 feet of deposit for each thousand years, we shall probably not
be very far wrong. Such an allowance brings us to about 10,000
B.C. as the time when Neolithic man began his first settlement on
the hill of Knossos.

_Neolithic Age_.--The remains found in the deposit of this period
are naturally of a very simple and primitive character. They consist
of pottery, handmade without any use of the wheel, and hand-burnished,
black in colour, and, in the latest specimens, adorned with incised
ornament, which is sometimes filled in with a white chalky substance.
While this description is characteristic of the deposit generally, a
gradual progress in the potter's art is traceable from the virgin soil
upwards. In the earliest stratum, immediately above the depositless
virgin soil, the pottery, for the depth of the first metre, was entirely
plain, u