ABSTRACT
We last took leave of the Minoans (p. 241) when their Middle Minoan civilization had established contacts with Egypt and Syria, attested there in exports of its Kamares pottery such as have been found in Egyptian Middle-Kingdom associations of between 1900 and 1800 B.C. at Harageh, Kahun, and Abydos, and at Ras Shamra in Syria in the same period, while not long afterwards the inland-Syrian painted ware of Tell Atchana bears further witness in its direct Middle Minoan inspiration. By this time, about 1700, however, the disturbance of the Near East by invasion of Mesopotamia from the east
and north, and the expansion into Syria of the Hittite power from Anatolia, had penetrated to Egypt, where Asiatic intrusions broke up the Middle Kingdom, and after an interval of discord led to the alien rule of the Hyksos, the so-called Shepherd Kings. In this period before the restoration of native power in the years before and after 1600, which with the Eighteenth Dynasty created what is called the New Kingdom, it was probably this upsetting of Egypt that turned Minoan activity more definitely towards the north, not only now to the islands of the Aegean but to mainland Greece. Already before the disaster (p. 241)— probably one of internal warfare within the island-which overwhelmed Knossos and the central Cretan palaces at the end of Middle Minoan II about 1700, Minoan ascendancy in the Cyclades was making contact with the mainland attested in the association of Kamares pottery with the mainland Minyan (p. 239); this phenomenon at Phylakopi in Melos is followed by the more widespread appearance of imitated Kamares ware, which occurs with the genuine product just off the mainland coast at Aegina, and Cretan influence coming this way from Melos and Thera, and more directly to the Laconian coast of the Peloponnese, led towards the end of the brilliant century of Middle Minoan III culture to a sudden and dynamic transference of Minoan brilliance to mainland seats of power. And soon the coming of the New Kingdom restored the prospects of Cretan trade with Egypt: when, at the same time about or just after 1600, the Middle Minoan III centres suffered the consequences of an earthquake, the Temple Repositories of Knossos included among their minor contents a variety of our segmented faience bead-type, and in the Late Minoan civilization which followed, one of the leading products of Egyptian importation and inspiration was a great wealth of faience objects, among which the type has now been found, as well as the spherical or nearspherical and other forms of bead represented equally in Crete, in tombs upon the mainland.
