INDUSTRY

Certain occupations, in particular those of a rural character, were as yet hardly specialized at aU. Among the stockbreeders the Cretan seals show us a potter, a wood-cutter, and a carpenter. Specialists are to be found, however-for instance a potter who is nothing but a potter.1 It was certainly a carpenter who lived in such-and-such a house, or was buried in such-and-such a tomb with his familiar implements. At Enkomi in Cyprus, a foundry contains, besides lumps of unwrought metal, an assortment of shovels, hammers, and pincers. In Crete, bronze-workers' shops can be recognized

by moulds for casting nails, weapons, and tools. Only an engraver can have used the mould, found at Phaistos, for casting gravers, small hammers, and burins. In front of the potter's ovens, .especially when they turned out jars taller than human beings, we must picture professional workers, and we can actually see, from one of the oldest signets in our possession, that some of them were women. l A characteristic fact shows us how far labour was divided in painting. The smooth surfaces on which the stucco reliefs were modelled, and the borders of the panels for frescoes were painted in a flat colour before the stucco was adorned with the various colours or the fresco was executed with the swift sureness that such a process demands. In this we cannot fail to recognize the work of two different hands-the common artisan succeeded by the true artist. 2 Another fact to be noted is the appearance of advertisement, the child of competition and professional self-esteem. From the XIXth century onwards certain potters marked their vases with their name,3 and one faience factory has a trade-mark known from Knossos to Mycence. 4

While the other sites show us isolated workshops, a prehistoric Pompeii offers us the spectacle of what an industrial town could be between the XVIth and XIVth centuries. This town is Gournia. We have already seen it (Fig. 24), with its little houses huddled together along winding alleys, or surrounding a spacious court which served as a market-place. Among the ruins of this" mechanical" town an oil-press, a joiner'S workshop and a forge can still be recognized. "At the sight of these stone and clay receptacles, stands of all kinds, tripods, jars and basins for oil, ovens, lamps, tables, weights, hammers, polishers and sharpeners, upper and lower quern-stones, mortars, metal saws, knives, axes, scrapers, pins, hooks, fish-hooks, swords and daggers, in addition to an abundant collection of pottery, both painted and unadorned, one is amazed at the familiar air of all this gear, at the discovery, at a distance of so many centuries, of all kinds of accustomed objects which have survived to our own times, and are

There, all the companies of the various trades were installed right inside the palace. Humble workers were housed in mean quarters with a cupboard in the wall, and a supply of coarse pottery. But there was a select body of craftsmen and artists who rose above the common herd; they signed their works, and had a widespread reputation. The patriarchal industries supplied the means of support for the artistic industries. The women took the corn from the pithoi and ground it in the mortars. They also plied the distaff and shuttle under the supervision of the queen. An oil-press had vast storerooms attached. With such resources the palace possessed a royal faience factory 2 which turned out quantities of decorative articles and statuettes of inestimable worth (Fig. 62, PI. III, 2). It also contained a sculptor's studio; its occupant had just finished an amphora in veined limestone. truly fit for a king, and was beginning to rough out another, when the irruption of the enemy caused the chisel to fall from his hmds. In another part we are confronted by a stone coffer with an ordered array of materials for encrusting; steatite lentils lie about unfinished; objects of marble, bone, stone, and jasper look like pieces of marquetery which were bei.ng collected together to be made into a gameboard. This is the workshop of the lapidary. The king's palace, therefore, held an important place in the economic life of the country and in the artistic life of the whole world, in that it grouped together luxury industries and supplied them with models.