The Palace of Knossos : provisional report for the year 1903 / [Arthur J. Evans]. [With] Excavations at Palaikastro. II / [R.C. Bosanquet and others].

  • Arthur Evans
Date:
1903?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The Palace of Knossos : provisional report for the year 1903 / [Arthur J. Evans]. [With] Excavations at Palaikastro. II / [R.C. Bosanquet and others]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    pottery in the advanced Palace style, show that they were in use during the latest Period of the building. In the Eighth Magazine alone even the uppermost of the two receptacles was entirely closed in by a pavement which showed no superficial cists. The closed lower section of several of these receptacles contained in certain cases pottery with white spiraliform designs on a dark ground, of a type which we now know to be characteristic of the close of the first period of the Later Palace. A broken fragment of masonry found with pottery of this character in the lower part of a cist in the Fourth Magazine was incised with a Double Axe sign 1 of the same calibre as those seen on various blocks of this and other Palace regions ; an indication that the masonry thus marked also belongs to the First Period of the Later Palace. This latter piece of evidence has a special value in relation to a discovery of the present season. In Magazines Nos. 7 and 9, projecting respectively from their North and South walls, are two square buttresses constructed of rather small blocks of good limestone masonry. It was now made clear that both of these buttress-like blocks of masonry, which seem to have been made in order to support the pillars of an upper hall, were additions to the original plan of this part of the building, dating from a comparatively late period in its history. Both of these piers were built into and over Kaselles belonging to the original structure, the lower part of which had been filled in with compact masses of foundation blocks. In Magazine 7, above these foundations, in the earth-filling between the walls of one of these cists and the lower part of the pier, was found part of a vase in the late ‘ Palace Style.’ The pier of Magazine 9 showed on one of its blocks a small and finely cut asterisk or eight-rayed star sign, of a character strongly contrasting with the larger and more deeply incised signs of the earlier period, such as the Double Axe mentioned above. We have here another interesting indication of the chronological value of the different classes of signs found on the Knossian Palace blocks.2 As doubtless is the case with most of these signs, the asterisk was not intended to be visible, for there were traces of painted stucco adhering to the surface of the stone pier. The contents of the closed lower section of several Kaselles in the Western Magazines opened this season supplemented the evidence already obtained from the same source. Here, together with the usual filling 1 See Report, &c., 1901, p. 47. - 2 See above, p. 13.
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