ng three ladies adorned with accordion-pleated skirts,
shows that heels of a fair height were sometimes worn on the shoes.
Necklaces, bracelets, and other articles of adornment were in general
use, and the workmanship of some of the surviving specimens is
astonishingly fine (Plate XXXII.). Altogether, so far as can be
estimated from the representations which have come down to us,
the appearance of a Minoan assembly would, to a modern eye, seem
curiously mixed. The men would fit in with our ideas of their period,
but the women would remind us more of a European gathering of the
mid-nineteenth century.

The houses which were occupied by these modern-looking ladies and
their mates were unexpectedly unlike anything in the house-building
of the Classical period. There is little of the uniformity of style
and arrangement which characterizes the ordinary Greek house. The
Minoan burgher built his home as the requirements of his site and
of his household suggested, and was not the slave of any fixed
convention in the matter of plan. The houses at Gournia, Palaikastro,
and Zakro, which may be taken as typical specimens of ordinary
Minoan domestic architecture, must have been much more like modern
houses than anything that we know of in Greek towns of the Classical
period; and the elevations of Minoan villas preserved in the faience
plaques from the chest at Knossos suggest the frontages of a suburban
avenue. Some of the Knossian plaques show houses of three and four
storeys, with windows filled in with a red material which, as Dr.
Evans suggests, may have been oiled and tinted parchment. In such
houses, as distinguished from the palaces, there was no separation
between the apartments of men and women. The fabric of the houses
was generally of sun-dried brick, reared upon lower walls of stone;
some of the Knossian villas, however, were plastered and timbered,
the round beam-ends showing in the frontage. Oblong windows took
the place of the light-wells which give indirect illumination to
the palace rooms. The accommodation must have been fairly extensive.
The smaller houses have six to eight rooms, the larger ones twice
that number; while one of the houses in Palaikastro has no fewer
than twenty-three rooms.

Within doors the walls were finished with smooth plaster, and probably
decorated with painting, though, of course, on a humbler scale than
in the palaces. The floors were of flagstones and cement, even
in the upper storeys,