had been merely
the basement of the palace, and had been surmounted by another
storey or storeys, of which nothing was left except fragments of
the painted plaster which had once decorated the walls.

To the rooms composing the block of building between the Long Gallery
and the Central Court, access had been given from the latter area;
and it was in these rooms that, as the excavations progressed, some
of the most remarkable features of the palace began to disclose
themselves. About halfway along the court were found two small
rooms, connected with one another, in the centre of each of which
stood a single column composed of four gypsum blocks, each block
marked with the sign of the Double Axe; and these pillars suggested
a connection with ancient traditions about Minos and his works
(Plate XI.). They were apparently sacred emblems connected with
the worship of a divinity, and the Double Axe markings pointed
to the divinity in question. For the special emblem of the Cretan
Zeus (and also apparently of the female divinity of whom Zeus was
the successor) was the Double Axe, a weapon of which numerous votive
specimens in bronze have been found in the cave-sanctuary of Dicte,
the fabled birthplace of the god. And the name of the Double Axe
is Labrys--a word found also in the title of the Carian Zeus, Zeus
of Labraunda. But tradition linked the names of Minos and Knossos
with a great and wonderful structure of Daedalus which went by the
name of the Labyrinth; and the coincidence between that name and
the Labrys marks on the sacred pillars and on many of the blocks
in the palace at once suggested that here was the source of the
old tradition, and here the actual building, the Labyrinth, which
Daedalus reared for his great master. 'There can be little remaining
doubt,' says Dr. Evans, 'that this vast edifice, which in a broad
historic sense we are justified in calling the "Palace of Minos,"
is one and the same as the traditional "Labyrinth." A great part
of the ground-plan itself, with its long corridors and repeated
successions of blind galleries, its tortuous passages and spacious
underground conduit, its bewildering system of small chambers,
does, in fact, present many of the characteristics of a maze.'[*]
The connection thus suggested even by the first year's excavations
has grown more and more probable with the work of each successive
season.

[Footnote *: Monthly Review, March, 1901, p. 131.]

Passing farther north