The daily morning journal and courier., 1901-08-24
EIAN GENERATION.
Further Details of the Interesting Dis c0yeries Made in the Excavations nt Phnestos and Takro.

Phnestos nnd Hakro.
 In an article in the London Times o August 10, Mir io G. Hogarth gives al } out-line of the recent remarkable dis fcoveries in Crete, some of which arr
 due to the perseverance of an American woman, Miss Harriet Boyd. MT. Ho garth says that the crown of the grea ! Cretan civilization was in Mndar
 knossos. No other site in the island has furnished, or is likely to furnish
 evidences of so high artistic achieve
 ment, but there is at least one notable
 site better preserved. He adds:
 The ordinary visitor, not specialist
 will, therefore, prefer the ruin at Phaes-
 tos on the south of the island, the full
 revelation of which has certainly been
 the sensation of the past spring. When
 Professor Halbherr announced in 1900
 that he had begun upon a lesser
 Knossos, no one expected that he and
 his Italian colleagues, were to find in
 the event a palace more uniform, com
 plete, and imposing. What they have
 now laid bare stands alone in Crete as
 a spectacle. Even those fresh from
 Aureus, or even from Egypt and Syria,
 the Mycenae walls and the treasury of
 must admire the broad staircases and
 majestic courts of Phaestos, all on so
 intelligible a plan and preserved to a
 point which excites without overtaXing
 imagination The ruin covers g pro-
 montory of rock, Far below the great
 est of Cretan plains stretches to Mount
 Dicte in the blue distance. Ida hangs
 right over the site and through a gap
 in the screen to west show the snows of
 Sphallia, all three high masses of the Cretan relief being visible from this
 one point.
 This palace of Phaestos is contained
 in a vast rectangle, obvious at first
 sight. There has been an earlier struc
 ture, but the building now revealed is
 of one character and period-that of the ,. acme of Mycenaean Age in Crete. The
 visitor, approaching from the north
 sees, from terrace, the ruin below
 distinguished into three main quarters. On his left broad stairway descends
 to spacious paved court, containing
 an altar and tiers of stone seats built
 up against the rock, evidently to hold
 an assembly. Thanking this on the east and raised high above it Is the main l building, entered by truly majestic
 flight of steps, extending the full width
 of the fine pillared hall at their head, But the entrance from without is from
 the opposite side, where a second and
 larger paved court stretches to the
 brink of the precipice. Thence is ad-
 mittance, not only to the pllared ves- | l. l@,,t Ia | rank of galleries, and a maze of small chambers to southward, which forms the third quarter. This great court, round which the walls and doors are admirably preserved vies with the re- zion on the west, where the two main stairways meet, as the best point of view on the site To one standing in it, the uses of the various blocks about 1t are manifest. Here were the living and sleeping rooms of men; there of wo- men. Their common hall of assembly occupies half another side; the store galleries for the produce of the plain fill the other half. In the chambers to south they bathed. worshipped and lodged their retainers and their beasts.
 All this Is constructed of an excel lent limestone which has retained it's sharp and square outlines, while the Knossian gypsums have crumbled and collapsed. The general impression, therefore is the more convincing. But in details the inferiority of Phaestos is unduestionable. The elaborate frescoes, the sculptured friezes, and the delicate plaster relief of Knessos were never here. Phaestos was provincial It could command good stone and good masons, but not the materials or the men for the more subtle crafts. The noble shell was decorated only in the rudest manner, and it's ruin is not com parable to that of Knossos as a mu- scum of art. On its plastered walls ap- pear none but conventional patterns of a primitive sort; the only seulptured thing of any note yet found is frag- ment of shell; the clay vases are in- teresting, but of common ware and fine vases have not come to light at all; trnkets in the precious metals of stone have not been found, and two small tables make poor show beside l the immense clay library of Knossos.
 Certain problems raised by these mid | Cretan excavations it was hoped would | be resolved by exploration in the east | of the island, the reputed home of the | Eeteocretan aborigines. There a non | Greek tongue long survived, and at | Praesos a short inscription, couched in | this language, but in Greek script had | actually been found. The further ex- ploration of that site by the British School of Athens has, indeed, resulted | In a second inscription, broken and inn perfect, but containing more words. But no writing in the primitive scripts 1as come to light there, nor indeed any, where else in East Crete, but at Zakro. Nor has Praesos, while yielding to MT. 3osanquet several nota ble objects, been fruitful of anything else having much bearing on the prehistoric prob- ems. It's remains seem to be the leav- ngs of earlier plunderers on the site of ! comparatively wealthy community of he Hellenic and Hellenistc ages.
 What the Eteocretan capital, how yer, has failed to produce has come in abundance from two unknown sites. lakro and Gorynia. These, to compare mall to great, stand to one another as 'haestos to knossos. Gorynia is the nore complete and comprehensible. h. Iced, it is the most perfect example -et discovered of a small "Mycenaean" own, uncontaminated with later re- mains, and at this moment after the 1, wo great palaces, it is the sight" best Y, worth visiting in Crete. It lies on the z