fresco-paintings; but allowance must, of course, be made
for the artistic convention which tended to accentuate slenderness
of figure, and therefore to increase apparent height.

Judging from the surviving pictures, the Minoan men were bronzed,
with dark hair and beardless faces; their figures were slender,
and their slenderness was made all the more conspicuous by the
fashion which prevailed of drawing in the waist by a tightly fastened
belt, which seems, in some cases at least, to have had metal edges;
but muscularly they were well developed, and the pictures suggest
litheness and agility in a high degree. 'One would say a small-boned
race, relying more on quickness of limb and brain than on weight
and size.' The hair of the men was worn in a somewhat elaborate
fashion, being done up in three coils on the top of the head, while
the ends of it fell in three long curls upon the shoulders. On the
other hand, their dress was extremely simple, consisting normally
of nothing but a loin-cloth, girt by the broad belt already mentioned,
the material of which the loincloth was made being frequently gaily
coloured or patterned, as in the case of the Cup-Bearer, whose
garment is adorned with a dainty quatre-foil design. That more
elaborate robes were worn on certain occasions of importance is
shown by the sarcophagus at Hagia Triada (Plate XXVIII.), where
the lyre player wears a long robe coming down to the ankles and
bordered with lines of colour, while the other men in the scene
wear tucked robes reaching a little below the knees (or possibly
baggy Turkish trousers); and also by the Harvester Vase, where
the chief figure in the procession is clad in a stiff garment,
which has been variously interpreted as a wadded cuirass, or as
a cope of some stiff fabric.

On their feet they wore sometimes shoes, with puttees twisted round
the lower part of the leg, and sometimes half-boots, as shown on
the Chieftain Vase and one of the Petsofa figurines. Indeed, the
footgear of the Minoans seems to have been somewhat elaborate. In
the representations of the Keftiu, on the walls of Rekh-ma-ra's
tomb, the shoes are white, and have bindings of red and blue, and
in some cases are delicately embroidered. Such examples as the shoe
on an ivory figure found at Knossos, and the terra-cotta model of
a shoe found at Sitia, show the daintiness with which the Minoans
indulged themselves in the matter of footwear. In personal adornment
the men to some